SETI@home Turns Five Today

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."

Comments

Just not on company PC's

[mainfr4me]

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.

19638 Units and running strong

[DrWily]

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.

i hate to say it...

[nappingcracker]

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)

Re:i hate to say it...

[Dracolytch]

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

Well I've found plenty of things

[Sigfried_Blip]

"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.]