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SETI@home Turns Five Today

Posted by michael on from the knock-knock-knocking-on-heaven's-door dept.

mfh writes "Five years ago today, SETI@home launched a comprehensive program to search for Extra Terrestrial life in the universe, using millions of home computers to help compile useful data that could some day lead to the discovery of advanced extra terrestrial life. Since inception, SETI@home has found 2,568 persistent Gaussians, possible radio transmissions from a distant planet. SETI began in 1960 with the efforts of Cornell University astronomer Frank Drake, whose Project Ozma became the first modern SETI experiment in history."

11 of 275 comments (clear)

  1. Just not on company PC's by mainfr4me · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Cool stuff, until I found one of our managers had installed it on all of the computers in his department. The boss is still upset about that one, although he does do it on his home PC's.

  2. Top Secret by millahtime · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Does anyone know anything more about "possible radio transmissions from a distant planet"? TIA

    I bet if they found anything it's Top Secret and we won't hear anything about it for a long time. Either that or we just can't figure out what the transmissions are saying.

    --
    Evolution or ID?
  3. 19638 Units and running strong by DrWily · · Score: 5, Interesting

    My friend convinced me to start running SETI on any system I came in contact with to see how they benchmark against servers we buy. Right now I run four clients on my home systems and at least three clients at work. It's been fun watching the numbers crank away and comparing our newer systems to when we started some years ago.

  4. i hate to say it... by nappingcracker · · Score: 5, Interesting
    its been said before, but-

    wouldnt it be better to donate cycles to something like folding@home, parkinsons and alzheimers disease protein research?

    i dont mean to belittle seti, i think its a wonderful project, and maybe this arguement falls deaf on geek ears (aliens vs disease- woh, war of the worlds:) but id like to see more terran problems solved, no?

    ps i donate all my unused cycles to folding (over genome project, i personally feel that we're going to screw something up with the whole genetic genome geewiz junk)

    --
    |plastic....or gasoline?|
    1. Re:i hate to say it... by NanoGator · · Score: 4, Interesting

      "wouldnt it be better to donate cycles to something like folding@home, parkinsons and alzheimers disease protein research?"

      It's quite nice to hear somebody ask this question so tactfully. Every other time I've heard it, the context was what an idiot I am.

      I chose Seti over the medical research SS's. Why? Because I believe in diversity. To the best of my understanding, SETI has very little in terms of funding and man power, in stark contrast to the medical field where there are lots and lots and lots of people + money trying to cure stuff. I think my time is worth more to Seti than it is to the other projects. (Friendly rebuttals welcome, I'm open to reconsideration...)

      I don't like the idea of abandoning SETI altogether. (Note: You didn't say or imply that, but I've heard others want to take it that far...) We shouldn't totally ignore looking for intelligent life. A lot of interesting stuff happens if the "is there life out there" question turns out to be 'yes'.

      --
      "Derp de derp."
    2. Re:i hate to say it... by Dracolytch · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Having been part of seti@home for quite a while, I had thought about switching... But decided not to.

      Why does society break up into researching different things? Why shouldn't we find the #1 killer disease, focus ALL of our money at it, solve that, and move on? Sure, it's not as simple as that, but it also goes down to drive.

      We work with charities and groups that touch our lives, soul or imagination. When friends and family are stricken with a disease, we are more likely to donate to a group trying to cure that disease.

      Ultimately it comes to this: SETI is a dream that I share with the founders of the project. It's something I could see myself persuing in some other life. It's a lottery that, if you win, you don't know what the prize will be. Maybe it will re-focus our community a bit more away from commercialism, and more towards exploration and discovery. Maybe we win nothing.

      I'm in it for the journey, not the destination.

      ~D

      --
      This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
  5. Their anniversary date is wrong, slightly by PenguinOpus · · Score: 3, Interesting

    When I saw this on slashdot, I thought that I had been doing SETI@Home for much longer than that, but apparently I registered May 16th, 1999, early in the UTC. Their news release puts the anniversay as May 17th.

    Was that really their first day?

  6. Re:Defect by Paulrothrock · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Space exploration needs worldwide cooperation over a very long term. If they are a space-faring species, they would have to have been able to keep enough of their GDP available for space flight for hundreds of years. Thus, they are peaceful and hence enlightened. Second, space flight involves high technology. This means that they have to have high technology, and are more advanced.

    The signals we get from SETI, if we get any, will probably start out with dots and dashes, followed by audio and, about fifty years later, video of "Howdy Skwarklar" the puppet from Dontbotherus VII.

    --
    I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
  7. Re:Possible radio transmission? by jayhawk88 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Likely what they're talking about is strong-ish, "looks like this might be something" signals that could not be re-established later on. As I understand it, the Holy Grail in this area is not so much a signal as it is a steady, repeatable signal (think Contact).

  8. 21,496 Work Units later... by dmccarty · · Score: 4, Interesting
    SETI@home user for: 4.418 years

    I've been running SETI clients for a while now, and I suppose if someone asked my why I do it, I would say that I do it now just because I did it before.

    I don't have any illusions about actually finding intelligent, extraterrestrial communications with SETI anymore. (And if anyone does, I'm not holding out hope that it's me.) In fact, I think that we should seriously question whether the entire premise of SETI@home--that other life forms would transmit data at the radio frequency of water--is still valid. Is it reasonable to assume that two completely different creatures would logically arrive at the same conclusion for how to communicate? Considering the amount of diversity on our planet alone, maybe not.

    Could a blind man and a deaf man put together in a giant, dark auditorium find a way to communicate? That would be the easy problem; the hard one is finding a way to communicate with any intelligent life that's light years away out there.

    Assuming it's out there in the first place...

    --
    Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
  9. Well I've found plenty of things by Sigfried_Blip · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "we ain't found shit!"

    I like noise. In fact I am fascinated by it.

    My viewpoint of the seti@home project is that they are a great source of high quality Radio Telescope signals. I let their program do it's science and I get to keep the work units. Seems like a fair trade. So far I have archived 5762 work_unit.sah files (~1.5 GB). Why?

    Because I am an amateur SETI enthusiast and I wasn't satisfied with just watching the screensaver. Gaussians, spikes, triplets, phooey! I wanted to do more. So I collect every work unit and I analyze them myself with the baudline signal analyzer. It can read the .sah data files and it has a cool auto Doppler drift algorithm, nice displays, ...

    Despite the common mixing trough at 1.4200 GHz, and the stationary harmonic bleed-in interference, I have found a lot of interesting things in the data. Every now and then I run into a weak signal with a non-terrestrial Doppler drift rate. Sometimes they wiggle or pulse. Is it ET? Probably not, but it is exciting and fun. I should make a webpage of pictures.

    [Disclaimer: Yes, I am an author of baudline and this is a blatant product plug.]