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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."
"we ain't found shit!"
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.
I for one welcome our new Gaussian overlords!
Those bastards I'm competing against have accumulated thousands of years of credits.
This has been an interesting effort that I have supported since it first started. I have over 16780 units completed to date (35.011 years effort in processing time) and hope that it leads to something. Once you get started though its like a drug ... gotta finish more units!
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?
I ran SETI@home for months but I got bored when I didn't find any aliens. What's the point of the game?
... here
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
In related news, ET turns 22 today
Must-not-watch TV!
I bet the aliens have better computers. When we find them, they'll be able to simulate all that protein folding in SECONDS.
True... and I could give my money to one charity vs another which you or others might think is a better cause... regardless of merit, I spend my dollars and CPU cycles where I choose.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
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.
Maybe we need to redirect SETI. We should spend all computing cycles finding intelegent life in Washington.
Evolution or ID?
The status and update page sat nearly a year without any change until May 17th when they posted an update explaining why they haven't released any results from last year's Arecibo run. I realize it takes time to collate data. And given the very high and unpredictable latency of the their distributed processing system, I understand why it might take a long time to push data out and get results back. Still, since the project was originally slated to run two years, then extended to five, yet why have we (the public) seen so few results from this program? Even negative results would be of interest. Maybe I'm missing something here, since I don't pay very close attention to the project, but I sure would like to see more published details including core data and methodology instead of a pretty web site and irregular status updates. JMO. --M
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?|
Yeah, like where the hell do my socks keep disappearing to?
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?
Problem was that something went slightly wrong with the Solaris server resulting in a crash of the server. This was probably unrelated to my setiathome processes (?), but one of the memory dump files had my user ID on them. Nearly lost my privileges - luckily the university IT folks were kind enough to let me off with just a warning.
It's called BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing), and it's still in beta, but progressing. I have it on one of my systems, but it's only working on one project right now. Aside from the occasional software update, I've not touched it in a month or two, so I'm not sure if they've implemented any more projects.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
If aliens are found, they'd be so distant contacting them would be useless. And by the time technology to communicate with them quickly was created, probably the technology to find them would also be significantly advanced. SETI just seems like a project that should be put off until another day when technology has improved significantly (this kinda reminds me of the Slashdot discussion on manned Mars missions and arguments as to why it'd be a waste of resources at the present time).
"No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here." - TaleSpinner
IIRC, there's a new version of SETI coming out where you can delegate percentage of the CPU to the various tasks. For example, 20% to aliens, 80% to cancer research and 20% to medically related researc.
Anybody have any more info on this project?
Hell yeah, I'd install that in a heartbeat. Any software capable of using 120% of my CPU should be respected.
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.
readining this reminds me of my best joke on a work mate ever.
He was always forever installing bloody seti on every machine server in the building..
So i played a joke, installed a app on his machine which at random points (i controlled) ping up and say it had found a singnal etc etc etc.. i used the seti gfx etc etc.
He got really excited, so of course we went one stage further.. The seti app told him that the signals were getting sent off for analysis, and someone would contact him shortly.
We then (other had now joined in) continued to make him jump out of his seat and explain "its happened again." while the rest of tried to stop laughing.
So an spoofed email address was setup and we emailed him from seti.. told him they were getting looked at etc..
Over the period of a couple of weeks we got the noise off the film contact, and mixed it with white noies.. luckly he had not seen contact. it started off really quite quiet in the background, and each email it got better and more and more clearer.
It was genuis.. we couldn't stop laughing.. he was telling his friend family etc etc etc that hed discovered possible alien life contact..
Of course.. we then relised we had gone slighly too far and had to tell him..
he was not a happy bunny..
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).
I've always marvelled at the concept of connecting our planetary network to a big open port aimed at space, hoping some packets of alien email might arrive.
Let's hope we get a chance to think before someone opens the attachment.
... and 0 aliens ;)
I fuse with Mercer every single day...
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)
...refusing to produce their proof of extraterrestrial inteligence untill the universe allows them to examine every electromagnetic quanta. Microsoft is likely funding them (via a skunk-works shop in Area-51) to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt about us being the center of the universe.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
> Does anyone know anything more about "possible radio transmissions from a distant planet"?
All they got so far was this:
"Dear sentient:
Having consulted with my colleagues and based on the information gathered from the Altair IV Chambers Of Commerce And Industry, I have the privilege to request for your assistance to transfer the sum of 47,500,000.00 (forty seven million, five hundred thousand Rigellian quatloos) into your accounts [...]"
Every experiment needs a control. As a control, they should send out a small probe and look backwards at earth on the same frequency(s) and see if the SETI clients consistently discover transmissions from earth... this would at least go a long way to prove if the tests are even valid. (or just point an antenna at chicago, or up in the mountains looking down on san francisco.
meh
I know the parent will be modded "troll" or something, but AC has a point, and it has been mentioned several times here today: The Seti web site sure is pretty, but where's the beef? As anyone who has been to grad school knows, science is nice, but the real focus is writing grants and getting funding for that new cluster or big flat-screens for displying (they say) pretty pictures (God knows you can't do that on a conventional 17 - 21 inch CRT...). Conceptually, Seti@Home has been good for science and advanced the idea of distributed computing. But maybe it's time to wrap it up and solve real-world issues with the same technology...
SETI@home has been getting dissed a lot lately. "Why are you wasting your cycles on this useless project?" some geeks ask. "Why aren't you spending them predicting climate change, fighting AIDS or curing Alzheimer's? You could be saving people from anthrax, smallpox, Ebola, or SARS."
These are all noble goals, worth pursuing. But SETI has a noble goal that doesn't get talked about very much.
Most SETI research so far has been focused on the so-called "Water Hole", the quietest part of the radio spectrum which happens to fall between the radio spikes of hydrogen and hydroxyl, around 1.4 gigahertz. If there's another water-based civilization out there, it's easy to see that this is a logical place to broadcast or listen. (Projects like Danny Hillis' Clock of the Long Now enable me to imagine a future in which we broadcast a message of our own, someday.)
"So what happens if you listen and you don't hear anything?" you ask. Well, even if we drain the Water Hole and find nothing, we'll still have learned a great deal from the process. We'll know there likely aren't any civilizations remotely like us in our galaxy. We'll know that previous civilizations, if there were any, were not able to sustain themselves. We'll know that intelligent life is fleeting and precious in the universe. And this should make us think hard about our own civilization.
If we're ever forced to acknowledge that there are no intelligent radio signals in the universe, then we must also acknowledge that the odds of our own survival just became much bleaker. Knowing that space is quiet means it's more important for us to be careful than we thought. The longer we search without finding any intelligent signals, the more likely it becomes that intelligent civilization isn't some pretty 4th of July sparkler; it's nitroglycerin, waiting to explode. This is incredibly valuable knowledge, life or death knowledge that's worth going after.
The biggest reason to look for a signal in the first place isn't to commune with E.T., but out of pure self-interest. Any number of systems failures could wipe us out as a species, from a single well-designed terrorist plague to GMOs with unforeseen environmental consequences. How do we as a society learn to play nice with technology? Has anyone else in the universe done it? If we found evidence that someone out there had, it would stand as a beacon, showing that we can probably do it, too. And if we don't find a signal, it means a bell is probably tolling our end somewhere, and we'd better think long and hard how to change that.
So feel good about SETI. It's not just about searching for aliens, it's about searching for a cure for extinction.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
Does anyone know anything more about "possible radio transmissions from a distant planet"? TIA
I didn't find a real answer to this in a quick scan of the replies, so I figure I'll give it a shot...
I assume you know that SETI@home is parsing a vast collection of radio transmissions and hoping to find one from off-planet. When you download it and run it, you get a batch of transmissions and your computer will try to find a specific pattern in the mess. It is looking a single signal that initially has a steep decline in frequency. Then it levels out at one frequency. Then it goes into another steep decline. Why?
If a signal is broadcast from Earth, it stays at about the same frequency all the time. If it is brodcast from, say, Uranus, the spin of the Earth will cause a doppler effect. Start with your antenna being on the 'dark side' of the Earth. That is the side opposite the transmission. As it spins around and starts to pick up the transmission, it will be travelling very fast into the signal - causing the frequency to be increased. The relative speed going into the frequency will decrease as the Earth continues to spin. When you start heading back to the dark side, you will move away from the signal, causing the frequency to drop.
So, all SETI@home is really doing is looking for a doppler effect that matches the speed of the spin of the Earth. Such signals have been found. When they are found, the SETI people hunt down the source. Sometimes it is domestic (a weird situation where a signal bounces just right off a mountain or two). Sometimes it is one of our distant space explorers. Sometimes it is a star. So far, none have been from possible intelligent life - especially those domestic ones.
The previous comment is purposely vague and generalized, but all of the facts are completely true.
Why are you posting on slashdot rather than doing something to help humanity? Why play a video game when you can do something else that will actually help humanity? Why go to a movie when you can be doing something to help humanity? Why waste your time having fun, making love, playing games, exercising, writing poetry, painting, arguing - anything at all that's not helping the human race?
This isn't a zero-sum game. People get into seti@home because it's intriguing - there is zero chance that if you could wish seti@home into the cornfield, those 5 million people would sign up for folding@home.
Not only that, but I don't feel like there's an ethical lapse in donating spare cycles to a longshot like seti@home. I can do plenty of socially useful things while my work computer is churning away on seti data.
BTW, I tried to do folding@home (I have a biochem background and find that really intriguing), but have had nothing but problems with the Mac client. There's another folding project, whose name I can't remember, that was also impractical on my Mac. I'll keep going back. But my point is that nobody can make everything they do socially significant - so I have a problem with your implied (false) dichotomy of "Do something else/Completely wasting your time."
"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time." - Bertrand Russell
"we ain't found shit!"
.sah data files and it has a cool auto Doppler drift algorithm, nice displays, ...
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
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.]