Is Distributed Computing Being Distributed Badly?

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Distributed computing could help researchers studying climate change or Alzheimer's, but SETI@home's search for extra-terrestrial intelligence continues to dominate. Wall Street Journal columnist Lee Gomes says that's a big waste, especially because SETI doesn't seem likely to yield results: 'This continued fascination with living-room SETI comes as professional setiologists concede that early assumptions about the search for intelligent life -- notably those popularized by astronomer Carl Sagan -- have proven naively optimistic. For instance, it's now conceded there is little chance of detecting the "leaking" transmissions of another planet -- its version of "I Love Lucy" broadcasts. Those signals are too weak to stand out from the universe's background noise.' Gomes also traces the origins of SETI@home to Berkeley computer scientist David P. Anderson, and explains that users stuck with the ET search rather than medical investigations in part because of nationalistic competition. Yet Anderson no longer runs SETI@home. 'Instead, he donates his spare computer power to a global warming project. But he doesn't presume to tell others what they ought to be doing with their CPU cycles.'"

Comments

Just like donations to charities

[Chrisq]

I don't like the way that some animal charities get more money than children's charities. Obviously the people making donations disagree. The point is the donor decides, if someone is giving something away then they decide.

Re:Just like donations to charities

[Trailwalker]

"If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man."
-- Mark Twain

Still true today.

Reasons to be cheerful...

[Anonymous Coward]

Number 1 - The Seti Experiment was not a waste. We now know that there are no signals of the kind we were hoping for in the areas we looked at. This is a finding. It is not a failure. Do not underestimate the importance of negative results in science.

Number 2 - Seti was the seed-corn for the whole concept of doing scientific computing as a distributed calculation. It was directly responsible for the development of BOINC, which is a very valuable tool for all the scientific community.

Inaccurate

[FreeUser]

If we as a race are any indication, and we're all we have to go by, it's safe to assume the opposite. The more advanced we've become, the less valuable human life has become.

As others have said, Bullshit with a capital "B".

• War - While wars go on today, they are less acceptable to most. 100 years ago war was considered an integral part of diplomacy. Today it is consider a failure of diplomacy
• Human Rights - 100 years ago it was an alien concept. Even with the Bill of Rights in the US, and the Magna Carta in the UK, there was always the presumption that "others" (be they of a different religion, ethnicity, or nationality) had less rights than "us." A universal set of rights that applied to everyone was not a mainstream idea.
• Slavery As others have said, it isn't legal in too many places these days (is it anywhere), and its practice is fringe and utterly unacceptable. 300 years ago the opposite was true, and 600 years ago it was nearly ubiquitious
• Women's Rights Women were property a century ago, with no right to vote in most places, and no right to choose. Instead they were property of their husbands (and unable to own property of their own in many places), and their bodies became chattal of the state and church for nine months the moment they got pregnant. While there are those that seek to revert to such a state, even in right-leaning America 70% of the population opposes such a move, and in more enlightened countries the notion is even less acceptable.

I could go on (the acceptability of massive civilian casualties during the first two wars, up to and including the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, vs. the unacceptability of even modest collatoral damage today, etc. etc.), but you get the idea. Human life has seldom if ever been prized so highly as it is today.

For the love of God, the level of surveillance that the anglosphere tolerates is unfathomable by the standards of 1,000 years ago.

Hardly. The surveillance was done by a different entity 1000 years ago, namely the Catholic church. Its mechanism was low-tech...guilt and mentally batter your subjects into such a perpetual state of guilt and then encourage them to go the "confession" and receive absolution. Everyone reported their sins to the local priest, and often discussed their "concerns" with said priests likewise. Even kings had their confessors...which gave the church an immense level of day-to-day surveillance of an entire continent during the middle ages that is still unrivaled even today.

Even 50, 20, 10 years ago (hell, today for that matter), if you think government serveillance of your life in the big city is bad (and it is IMHO very bad, and very dangerous), it is nothing to what your family and neighbors make a point of knowing about you when you live in a small community. Talk about "Big Brother", try adding "Big Aunt", "Big Sister", "Big Cousin", "Big Mother", "Big Father, "Big Neighbor", "Big Gossip Down the Street", etc. to that.

So your arguments are false on their face, and as for reasons not to venture into space, spurious and irrelevant at best. Space brings with it problems and solutions, just as the discovery of America did, and every other migration and advance of the species has over the millennia. If and when we do meet another sentient species, that too will bring with it challenges ... and the stimulus for growth that will push our species into addressing and developing further refinements in ethics, diplomacy, and the wisdom to use military force (or not) as needed. As with any challenge, we will either rise to the occasion or fail.

However, if we cower in our little corner and forsake progress because we fear it, then failure (as in the end of the species in the nearer term) is no longer merely a possibility...it becomes a certainty, and along with it our certain extinction, the next time the planet experiences one of its many recurring major disas