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Is SETI@home Where Your Cycles Belong?
SETI@home is probably the best-known distributed computing project in the world. Several readers questioned not just the efficiency of spending computer cycles sifting for alien communications with SETI@home, but whether this search is based on a sensible idea in the first place. Reader TheSync, pointing to a Princeton research paper, offered an interesting case for another approach to seeking alien intelligence:
"Radio SETI is really a waste of time. Optical SETI is the logical choice because
- Visible light-emitting devices are smaller and lighter than microwave or radio-emitting devices.
- Visible light-emitting devices produce higher bandwidths and can consequently send information much faster.
- Interference from natural sources of microwaves is more common than from visible sources.
- Naturally occurring nanosecond pulses of light are mostly likely nonexistent, although there are all kinds of radio signals that could be similar to intentional SETI transmissions. Thus Optical SETI does not require grid computing to find signals.
- Exact frequencies of light are not required, as nanosecond unfiltered light pulses would still outshine the planet's star by over 30 times.
Optical SETI detection out to 100 light-years is doable today, with a bit more work optical SETI out to 1,000 light-years is possible."
More generally, reader theCat says he gave up on SETI@home "at the exact moment when I recognized that radio broadcast, even assuming other life forms discover it, is just a quick stepping stone toward more efficient/direct means of distribution, like wires or fiber. Or drums. Or pheremones. Or telepathy. ... SETI has always barked up the wrong tree. Not because there are no intelligent races out there — and I really do suspect there are — but because if they are intelligent in a way that we would even recognize then they've moved on to other forms of communication, or settled into a fine state of just dealing with every day as it comes and not worring about events in their version of Iraq."
Whether or not their approaches are optimal, reader exp(pi*sqrt(163)) defended the more esoteric distributed computing projects like SETI on a pessimistic ground, writing that after two years in computational chemistry for what is now GlaxoSmithKline, "I became strongly convinced that computers do not find cures for diseases - or even give you much understanding of illnesses. Molecular modeling is so far from being able to model in vivo molecules that it's practically worthless. ... [W]e already know that trials at this stage are poorly correlated with actual drug usefulness, simulations are just as much a waste of resources as SETI. ... It seems to me that molecular modeling is actually one of those hard 'macho' (but ultimately pointless) projects that gets funding because to criticize it makes you seem anti-drug, anti-therapy and anti-human-progress. (I'm not saying people shouldn't try to model molecules. This is a great blue-sky goal. But people who are trying to find drugs or therapies shouldn't be wasting their time with such techniques.)"
A persistent suggestion that SETI@home and similar projects were wasteful for failing to deliver enough tangible benefits to present-day society provoked several readers to defend the importance of voluntary participation; Chrisq compared the cycles spent on distributed science to donations to charities, writing "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."
One reader suggested sarcastically "You know what's a waste of time? Gardening. You spend all this time and energy just to raise a few tomatoes that could have been bought at the store for cheap. ... People should stop gardening and focus their time and energy on solving global warming, but I don't presume to tell anyone what they should be doing with their time."
Another offered a tongue-in-cheek response providing a few facetious parallels: "It's a waste that people use their cars to go see a movie when they could be delivering food to the homeless shelter. It's a waste that people are storing ice cream in the fridge when they could be storing donated blood plasma."
Many readers, though, provided examples of projects that they consider worthy their computing efforts, either instead of or in addition to SETI.
"Personally, I always felt SETI was not very philanthropic — more like an amusing experiment in grid computing," says tedgyz, and suggests that grid.org to users who would like to spend some cycles on medical research. "They provide great features for managing all your computers that run the grid projects. You can even choose which research to participate in. And, to satiate a geek's lust for power, they have rankings for your aggregate compute time."
Perhaps the WSJ article draws a false dichotomy, however: one reader asked "Does Carl realize that it's possible to crunch more than one project at a time with BOINC? Right now I'm attached SETI, Einstein, Rosetta & LHC. It works on one for a bit and then will switch to another for a bit. And so what if SETI@home will never find anything, it's a cool looking screen saver!"
(Another reader reported dissatisfaction with BOINC: "I upgraded from the old SETI@Home client to BOINC when it became available - but the BOINC client required too much effort on my part and was getting in my way. ... I'm donating my CPU cycles to some altruistic cause, I don't want to have to RTFM. I just want to install and forget. For this reason I miss the old SETI client, and have, as a result, now stopped contributing.")
Eventual benefits aside, some readers doubt that the medical research projects' goals parallel their own: one reader writes "... I won't do the ones for the drug companies. My grandfather was denied a chance at surviving cancer in the 60's, but the big drug companies went to the FDA against the doctor who had a good success rate for curing colon/stomach cancer because one of the chemicals used was not FDA approved. The big drug companies are not looking for cures, they are looking for drugs to sell."
In response to fears that medical-research undertakings would exploit their volunteers' contributions to the data crunching, Lars Westergren several times pointed out that the Stanford-based Folding@home protein-folding project, at least, has committed itself to sharing the data generated by its volunteers, citing the project's promise (found in its FAQ) that
"We will not sell the data or make any money off of it. ... Moreover, we will make the data available for others to use. In particular, the results from Folding@home will be made available on several levels. Most importantly, analysis of the simulations will be submitted to scientific journals for publication, and these journal articles will be posted on the web page after publication. Next, after publication of these scientific articles which analyze the data, the raw data of the folding runs will be available for everyone, including other researchers, here on this web site."
In another comment, Westergren argued that "[e]ven if this worst-case scenario did happen [of donated cycles being turned into secret-formula drugs], the cycles donated would not be wasted. You would have helped advance human scientific research, and the medicines created would still be saving peoples' lives."
Along similar lines, as reader lhbtubajon puts it, "[i]f a company starts manufacturing a product so expensive that they cannot make a profit on it, they will soon cease to exist, as will the beneficial product they hoped to give to the world."
Whatever the ends to which the data is eventually put, many readers raised another objection: power consumption. Shisha outlines the inherent uncertainty of whether cycle-donation makes sense:
"All those free computer cycles are not that free. Modern CPUs consume more electricity to do more work and someone has to pay the electricity bills. Busy CPUs need more cooling and fans that run at full throttle for a year do wear out and fail (and you risk burning some important component, even if the PC is designed to shut down when it detects overheating). That's simply because desktop PCs are desktop PCs and not workstations and the assumption is that the fans will have to run at full throttle for maybe half an hour at a time. The real costs are not easy to work out, but it might, just might be more efficient to donate the money to charity."
(This analysis, according to another reader, "[underestimates] the quality of a desktop PC. I ran SETI and climateprediction.net for about 4 years straight on a dual G4 PowerMac. Ran like a champ. 100% CPU for months straight. Never had a problem. They can take abuse.")
Placing the WSJ article into context, FlynnMP3 pointed out that author Gomes isn't trying to force anyone to change their computing behavior, and suggested an argument that SETI@home might specifically hold greater worth than can be divined from its success rate so far:
This is merely an opinion piece. It's easy to take the pragmatic road and donate personal computing cycles to cancer research or something as equally earth based, citing return-of-results arguments.
I postulate that the returns for finding out if there is intelligent life in outer space has greater implications for the world's population. Not immediate concerns mind you (unless something extraordinary happens), but the practical usage will eventually seep out of the acedemic and scientific circles and benefit the population in ways that we cannot possibly imagine."
More succintly, another reader's understatement may explain just why so many people are happy to donate a few watts in the quest for E.T. life: "Odd, I can think of few things that would change life on earth more than a verifiable intelligent signal from outer space. This story reminds me to go download SETI@home again."
Thanks to the readers whose comments helped inform this discussion, especially those quoted above:
So it's "aitch tee tee pee colon slash slash back slash dot slash dot dot org" now.
I used to be a part of SETI@Home, but I've since decided to donate my cycles to something more pressing like AIDS and climate prediction.
Bring on the asteroid
http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/
After if aliens where found, they'd may be already have a cure for cancer, global warming, etc.
They're already here I tell ya! I have a sore ass to prove it.
http://religiousfreaks.com/I like this Backslash—the comment quality is what separates slashdot from digg. On slashdot, there is are a lot of crap comments, but there are often some gems mixed in too.
As far as SETI goes, I suppose what I'm most interested in is the leak comment in the main story. Is there really only a few hundred year window to find advanced technological socieities from their radio waves? Does everybody really switch to cable TV instead of broadcast?
I have a physicist friend who is enamoured of the rare Earth hypothesis—that the universe is mostly inhospitable to life and that we're it.
Of course it looks like a waste, so do any of the other things you can contribute to... until they hit their mark. Now while I'll agree that protein folding has more immediate advantages to cures, etc. , SETI discovering a real intelligent alien signal would generate a flurry of spending that would likely yield many more inventions, something like what the first space race did for technology.
stuff |
"It's a waste that people use their cars to go see a movie when you could just download it and spare the pollution."
I REALLY don't like this Backslash idea. I think the Slashback features are good enough. There's a reason the moderation system is in place, and that is to highlight the good comments. It seems that the admins feel that they do a better job moderating the comments than we do.
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
You know, if we submit a story to Slashdot about Slashdot's new Backslash, we can Slashdot Backslash on Slashdot and then Backslash the Slashdot post about Backslash on Slashdot.
And then we'll simply implode!
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
According to http://www.alienvideo.net/seti-makes-contact.php, SETI has made contact, they are just not publishing it yet. This was on digg earlier, but it has since been removed so take with appropriate lump of salt.
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
Considering we live in a world of trite devices like the Clapper, pop music, and a population that is overweight. Our entire economy is becoming one based upon ease of living, not social responsibility. I would put SETI pretty low on my list of priorities to goto war over about what we spend our time/money supporting. Sure the overall goal of SETI may seem farfetched, but then again I know people that think NASA is a huge waist of money when there are starving and homeless. Yet they don't realize the accidental achievements we've made because NASA exists.
No sig for you!!
Personally, I've been submitting my space cycles to Folding@home for about five years now. Since I'm a gamer and don't want to risk my cycles being used during gameplay, I use the screen saver version, which comes with the added advantage of having pretty cool visuals of the folding process that always prompt questions from my friends.
-Grym
Once we find aliens, they will either solve all of our problems for us . . . or make it so those problems aren't are problem anymore. And the whole point of searcing for radio waves is that not only is it assumed to be a sign of technological advancement, it is one that is non-direct and can bleed into the universe so that we can sense them with out being targeted by them.
I really wish some of these projects would do a better job of compiling for different architectures. My friends and I would love to be able to help some of the more interesting projects with the extra cycles on our servers but very few of the projects are compiled for Alpha and fewer still will let us do the compiling. We have quite a bit of CPU power to give but the only projects we can find to support us are SETI and Distributed.net, neither of which rank very high in what we consider useful. Does anyone know of some other projects we can run on our EV67s?
I mean, we'd write something cool ourselves, but what do we look like, guys who aren't lazy?
You gotta find first gear in your giant robot car
The universe is so big that even if we find life somewhere, we won't be able to reach them with our currently technology. Why not spend the CPU time on something more meaningful like medical research to make people more resistant to disease. As well as making travelling to Mars a reality first?
I remember seeing the movie "Contact" and I was totally disgusted by the concept. It's really a few people's dreaming building on everyone else's money. I'm not saying that we should totally stop it. But it's getting out of hand that people forget about our priorities.
Screw you, they're my "wasted" cpu cycles, I'll do what ever I damn well please with them. Altruistic bastards. Go practice what you preach!
No matter where you go... there you are.
Both the WSJ article and the slashdot discussion which followed failed to mention that with BOINC one can quite easily donate cycles to other efforts besides searching for ET, such as Einstein@Home: http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/
"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." -- William Butler Yeats
This article goes into all the choices for donating--and even getting paid for--your spare cycles--Volunteer Computer GridsBeyond SETI@home
and use pretty much the same justification for both - that it makes me happy to simply think about possible success, no matter what the odds.
Although on new machines, I've switched over to the einstein@home gravity wave thingamajig, because it's awesome.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
SETI@home essentially invented donated distributed over the internet, over a dozen other projects are benefiting from it in the form of BOINC and the WSJ is upset because people don't donate cycles with presumed morally superior choices the WJS sees. I have noticed an up-tic recently in attempts to kill SETI research of any kind. The reason is always "it's a waste of time." In other words the opponents of SETI always know better that it is a fruitless search than the proponents, but they have no scientific basis for making that assertion other than that's the way it feels to them. Granted pro-SETI people similarly have little evidence that ET will be found soon -- but there are no wasted inquiries in science. If you search and fail to find something, you have still learned something, you now have a number and you can put some bound on a phenomenon. No one tells physicists to give up searching because they haven't found the Higgs Boson yet, or at the lower energies they initially predicted.
Most likely a signal won't be found in the next decade or two, but I still donate my free cycles to SETI@home. I believe that while in the short run the odds are not high, there are few other discoveries that could be so transformative as this -- and although they won't say it, this is why the opponents of SETI are so rabid to shut it down. SETI is the ugly step child of science, it will never get the support other branches will. This is why a volunteer effort is so important. Of course if a signal is ever found, well then step back and watch all the money and resources that will get thrown at it, then your cycles won't be needed. Also be prepared to hear all about how many politicians where a friend of SET way back when.
WSJ suggests inertia to explain why we give cycles to search for SETI, that and the pride of placing high in the SETI work units competition. WSJ suggests that competition is the main reason for SETI@home's success, and had another project come along first to set up as competition for bragging rights about how many work units accomplished all the cycles would be goin to that project instead. Rubbish. The same people that download OSS apps and care about matters scientific are the very people that care about SETI. I donate my cycles because I care about SETI, which has I have already mentioned is an unpopular science with the general public. It is seen as an underdog by the hacker community, it appeals to their sense of adventure and wonder.
Ironically I had just posted on this subject in a new blog project Brink with the entry SETI: First Detection
Letter To Iran
I mean, if Seti was costing American taxpayers billions a year on R&D and technology to process those signals, then I would agree that Seti is a waste of time and money.
So, what Seti did was brilliant in devising a program that would let anybody that believes in little green men, or at least the search for them, to donate some CPU cycles to the endeavour. It has allowed Seti to work on a shoestring budget and get processing that is equivalent to the world's super computers.
I think it is a little ridiculous for someone to complain that Seti@home is robbing more meaningful scientific endeavours of much needed processing time. Look at it this way, how many millions and billions are invested in cancer research?
The problem with cancer research, unlike Seti@home, is that it isn't a singular focus. Thousands of research centers are are set up and working largely independently of each other. Part of the problem is that lots of independent medial research companies want to say they found a cure for cancer, and patent it, and make a mint of of saving peoples lives. The only directly common problem is the whole protein folding or other DNA/medical projects that use distributed processing to get the much needed data processing accomplished. If all those independent research centers got together and combined THEIR collective accumulation of processing power, then I am sure they would get a lot more results then expecting the general public to do it for them.
But the simple point of this kind of public domain computing is that it gives even the seemingly meaningless projects a chance to exist. While I am sure that Seti@home is more well known then other more "meaningful" projects, anyone that knows and has contributed to Seti@home probably is also just as aware and contributes to other distributed computing projects.
And you can't deny that it was Seti@home was the first to really pioneer this kind of public computing project. It was the first time I ever heard that my computer can be used for scientific processing. Folding@home, and the slew of other public computing projects all owe their existence to how Seti@home and Berkeley developed the concept. In fact, it was because of Seti@home that the application BOINC was introduced, that gave other public computing projects more exposure, allowing those involved with Seti@home to also recognize and contribute to more then one project.
So, give em a break. It's one of those things where half the population wants to believe we are not alone in the universe, and the other half is too frightened to accept that as a possibility. Those that are too frightened to accept that possibility expect the other half to stop what they are doing and put our heads in the sand.
Relax, there are lots of computers out there, and enough CPU power for everybody. But most "meaningul" projects already have a lot of money invested in them and really shouldn't have to rely on public domain processing in order to find the solutions they are being paid to find. Its the attitude that people don't want to give Seti@home any money that prompted them to use this solution in the first place.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
I can say I don't do much Seti work because my computer is in the room I sleep in (dorm). Why should I leave it on? So I can watch a number count up?
If someone made a plugin to some starmap software (like that one FOSS program) where, after a packet was completed, I could check out which part of the sky this packet referred to...then I could go "hey, my computer just determined that for the last year, there have been no signs of life in that solar system." Something to personalize it, make it more real, and make it worthwhile to listen to the fans running inside my computer.
...a inter stellar space faring civilization that would be able to visit us would not use lasers or radio waves to communicate. In order to travel that far of time and space they will need to find some sort of other method like worm holes or something else that gets around E=MC^2 limitations.
Otherwise we'd be able to get a signal, but by the time we send a message back the other civilization could be dead and gone as well as us.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
That's a very insightful critique. It was even better when I said it several hours earlier.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
... and the signal says, "Eat at Earth!"
I am sure that their nutrition guide recommends only eat one or at most two Americans per month.... but that you can have as many of the lean Chinese peasants you want!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
One big problem with SETI work is that it's looking for obsolete forms of radio. SETI@Home's algorithms should be able to detect an AM or FM signal. Maybe TDMA. CDMA, no way. OBIC, probably not. Digital HDTV, probably not. So we're looking for an advanced civilization that uses 1940s radio technology.
Older radio technologies (AM audio, FM audio, analog TV (which is AM video, FM audio)) had a strong "carrier", a big sine wave component. Most of the RF power wasn't really carrying any information. But it was easy to detect the signal. Newer technologies look like noise unless you know what to look for. It's like listening to telephone modems; the data from modern modems just sounds like a hiss. It has the statistics of pure noise unless you know what to look for. Early, low-speed, modems sounded like beeps and warbles, and were easy to identify as modem signals.
Remember, SETI@Home is looking for signals against a very noisy background. You could pick out an AM or FM carrier easily, because you can see it over a large number of cycles. There's a dumb, obvious redundancy in the carrier. But a modern noise-like RF signal against a noisy background is really hard to detect unless you know what you're looking for. If there's redundancy to get through the noise, it's probably more subtle, like data for forward error correction. To even detect that is tough.
I would gladly donate my spare cycles to finding a cure for the crop of goddamned craptastic games that have plagued the world for the past few years - either that or spare cycles to get goddamned Duke Nukem Never goddamned finished because I'm goddamned tired of hearing about it.
The fold@home project is a thousand times more useful to society. Don't look for little green men until the native men, women, and children of this planet are leading healthy, decent lives.
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
The frequency SETI listens on wouldn't be used for broadcasts (unless you were broadcasting to other stars far away). We'll only find something if someone is talking to us. I'm not sure if that's a plus or minus for SETI, but the frequencies that travel far (there's a lot of dust in the galaxy) are pretty specific.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I didn't respond on the original /. articel about it, because I thought: "Ah, what the heck, I'm not going to point out the obvious." But here it comes again, with all the same crap.
In the original article, at the very beginning, it says:
"Yes, it's true that even without the Seti@Home crowd bigfooting the world of distributed computing, we probably still would have incurable diseases and dangerous climate change. But we'd be a lot closer to solutions than we are now, don't you think?"
Well, no, I do not think that.
One might argue quite the oposite, in fact: if seti@home wouldn't have existed and captived the eager attentions of millions, we would probably be a lot further from incurable diseases and dangerous climate changes - as far as it actually helps 'a lot', which isn't proven neither.
The fact is, it was DUE to seti@home and it's popularity, that this kind of mass-distributed-computing took off, and that it has become more then an academic curiousity in the IT-universities. It is DUE to the fact it has become so high-profile, that all those other research have even noted the potential of this kind of program.
So don't give me that totally absurd, unsubstantiated and nonsensical claim that those other research-topics would be far further thanks to this cycle-crunching system, when in reality chances are high they wouldn't even have know it existed, otherwise.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
The CPU chip is the main draw of power now, and to help this they've worked hard to make the chip draw less power when its idling. It's not just wear and tear on the fan. In places with expensive electrictiy, like California, the power bill for a machine can be the most expensive component. The most extreme chips draw as much as 70w on full, I think, which is 600 kwh a year, at the incremental 19 cent cost in California that's over $100 per year.
There is a terrible irony in the idea of people burning vast amounts of electricity like this in the effort to deal with global warming.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
"You know what's a waste of time? Gardening. You spend all this time and energy just to raise a few tomatoes that could have been bought at the store for cheap. ... People should stop gardening and focus their time and energy on solving global warming, but I don't presume to tell anyone what they should be doing with their time."
Now this cat's a brain surgeon... Instead of growing your own food using plant material, water, and sunlight, we should buy them at the grocery store? Doesn't this dood realize that one cause of global working is the processing of food that we could otherwise (and did for thousands of years) grow ourselves? Dumbass.
It has been pointed out in the past that we need the importance of SETI to find out other civilizations out there. With a vast amount of galaxies and stars/galaxy and the fact that SETI has only explored a small part of our local space (in radio, not optical SETI yet), it would be foolish to say that radio SETI is a dud.
This also reflects other problems such as prioritizing, we prioritize 1 trillion (1000 billion, or 1 million million) per year for the military, a small fraction of that (10 billion) spent on an Manhattan styled program in nanotech and 1 billion in biotech (to reverse aging, see the mprize.org).
With these levels of funding, we could have working nano assemblers that could build/recycle any device you want, we could bring open source to designing and making most anything yourself (you would not have to buy most anything ever again) and bio/nano would enable people to reverse their aging permanently, if you were old, you would get repaired and get younger, if you were young, you would have to get no older than 20 to 25 years.
With advanced nano, we could build computers billions of times faster that today that you could hold in your hand, so SETI computations would be no problem.
Sometimes the world needs somethings to occupy and unite the populations, great thinkers and also sci-fi have shown us the dangers of populations too inwardly focused, just look at all the strife of religious based terrorism. Intellectuals for-casted the problem of terrorism from religious origins during the cold war, but the population was busy with the cold war, another situation of the planet not growing up yet.
As a species, we need to be able to confirm the existence of other civilizations (so we can see an example of survival), it will give us a goal instead of all these conflicts, we need to develop advanced tech to replace the less-advanced, polluting tech we all ready use.
I stopped participating in Seti@home a few months after they switched to BOINC. I found that BOINC kept hanging my Windoze box and had to turn it off. Since most of the other distributed projects are also using BOINC, they don't get my cycles, either.
Give me an interesting project and some software that doesn't crash my machine and I'll throw in a few cycles.
No sig? Sigh...
Does anyone know how to disable the user-quoting bullshit at the beginning of stories like this? It's really fucking annoying to have 4 pages of badly-quoted and out of context comment before I even get to the meat of the discussion. REALLY ANNOYING!
I think we should all donate our spare computer cycles to the Dharma Initiative. I'm sure they'll do something cool with them. Namasate.
There is no realistic way to estimate the chances and possible benefits of SETI. Theoretically they could discover a datastream where aliens transmit incredibly valuable scientific information. The cost to return ration in that case would be astronomical. I personally don't believe in that happening at all. However that belief is nothing but a wild guess which I can't base on any data. Since we never found ET, we have no means to estimate the chances of finding them with a specific method.
Which came first, SETI@Home or distributed.net?
I know dnetc's been running on at least one of my machines since 1997 or thereabouts.
"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - Major Mike Shearer, UK
It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's irony flying right over your head!
Last time we had this article I noticed many post strongly defensive for the use of SETI. However it could EASILY be argued that it's a complete waste of time. I'm not going to say "No intelligent person runs SETI" ;-) But I will say this again... it got me marked Troll before, but maybe kinder eyes will see it this time.
Imagine instead of the article complained that most distributed computing computations were devoted to a wasted cause... SFAW. (Search For Angel Whispers) Now is it a little more understandable how those who don't share the same set of faith might feel SETI use is a huge loss of resources?
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
I use Boinc, which lets me divide my time between a bunch of projects. I give about 99% of the time to medical research and 1% to SETI. I think of SETI as the lottery: it's fun to play, inspiring and would change my life if I won, but it's not worth spending a lot of time on. I spend just enough to be in the game.
-Grey
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
I'll have you know, I happen to have ET and wouldn't mind a cure for it.
Something tells me that this summer isn't quite the time to be visiting Maryland.
I like the attitude here. Your computing cycles are really your own -- you've paid for the electricity, it's not like you're siphoning it for free. I kind of just like to save on money cuz my computer is a power hog, but I'm also a biologist, and I think Folding@home is a cool way to support biomedical research (especially since at work, our computers are always on, and 80% idle). SETI@home, I always thought was neat, but now I think it's a fool's errand, but if you want to do it, go for it. Now, if there was a distributed computing business model in which I could be paid for contributing my computing cycles (even enough just to cover the electricity and wear-and-tear on my computer), hell, I'd "donate" to any cause.
Duh..
BOINC allows you to allocate all, some or none of your cycles to any of a number of projects. He's quite welcome NOT to contribute to seti@home if he does not want to, but to dump on other people because of THEIR beliefs don't match his beliefs is well.. goofy.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, BUT just because I can't PROVE flying pink elephants don't exist does not mean that they DO exist.
Basically you can say absolutely NOTHING about which you have no information. So far we have no data to even HINT on the probability of intelligent extraterrestrial life (UFO's are evidence, but inconclusive). We are looking for life similar to us (cause that's all we know). The relative worthiness of looking for ET or Flying pink elephants has to do if you have a theory that you might FIND them. Just because he does not agree with other's theories on ET signals does not mean YOUR theory is any less credible.
I say...if you think you might find ET and can get others to join you. GREAT! If not...oh well.
Is nobody concerned anymore that all "those" clients are binary only ... I surely won't install such a thing: taking most cpu cycles, sending back and forth over the net and I don't have the source code.
... To really defend: just distribute the same calculation to more people and take it in conideration if a certain number has the same answer ...
They defend it by saying, hacking would be too easy, but hacking is always easy
Yeah, there are voluntary evacuations as near as 5 miles from my house, but my house is pretty far above the water table. I, and more importantly my tomatoes, are safe (though one of them fell over with the rain pounding on it.) But I think the rain has drowned my watermelon.
I have an idea for a new distributed computing cause, BibleCode@Home. You can run it on your machine at home and upload your findings to the central fanatical Christian society server. Eventually, given enough computing time, they will be able to prove *anything* (no matter how ridiculous).
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
Just because of this article, I think I'm going to go run SETI@ on all my servers and home desktops now.
Thanks!
against a friend of mine, our little small 2 member group (started out as 5, had 3 of the folks drop out). I had some fun doing it, until I realized it was an obsession. I always had to have a computer running or I felt I was being out done. My friend felt the same way, and we continued to upgrade our systems progressively until we both kinda shook our heads and asked what was the real cost involved in running seti@home. In terms of environmental, real computer costs, cost of energy. I came to the conclusion that the immediate benefits were negligable to the immediate costs (coal burning, my income, my time so forth). Don't know how others feel, but projects like SETI@home mean nothing to me now, and I encourage folks to consider the big picture before they get involved in this type of project.
I think the rain has drowned my watermelon.
Are you coming on to me?
For all of those who are attracted to participating in SETI@home, there is always YETI@Home which deals with issues closer to, well, home.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
I was a few weeks shy of reaching 10,000 units for SETI@home when the bastards did the switch to the BOINC model. I will never forgive them for that. I'll show them and not name my first born Seti.
I've now decided just to power down my system and save the energy.
I choose SETI cause I feel (wich may not be true, but it's what I feel) that many of the others directly benefit greedy health corporations masked as foundations.
I'm not going to give away my CPU cicles for free if they don't agree to donate the AIDS vaccine, or whatever, to mankind when they have it. Most probably they will sell it for a fortune.
At least not for me. I used to be pretty darn high in the SETI rankings, having quite a number of machines at my disposal. But after a lot of thought, I decided to shut off all of the clients for good.
You see, consuming those extra tens of kilowatts means more pollution, and around here, more consumption of non-renewable resources. Between the low possibility of finding a remote signal, and the imminant possibility of crapping up the environment (MY environment, my local environment) long before anything could be done about the signal, I chose to try and keep this place clean.
Not only do the CPUs consume less energy without being fully loaded, with cool-n-quiet, they can consume MUCH less. And the building AC runs less to keep the place cool. Now, does this make a huge difference? I don't know. I still drive to work each day - alone in my car, as there isn't a public transit option, and I don't work the same hours as anyone else, and I still run an air conditioner all day long to keep my house cool for me, the wife, kid, and dogs.
I suppose that for a really good cause, like folding@home, I might feel alright about it. But for now, I like having the place quiet, and the electrical draw low.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Can you hear me now?
Can you hear me now?
Can you hear me now?
Can you hear me now?
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
... the sum of all these high-minded "your DC project is misdirected fluff" arguments really point to getting all those wasted cycles back to the machines' typical prime missions.
Which apparently are gaming and pr0n.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
First you want my CPU cycles, next you'll be trying to sap my precious bodily fluids!
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
I can assure you that if any meaningful result will come out from some poor soul's computer who donated the CPU cycles to some pharma company the result will be patented faster than you can think. All that the individual will get is maybe a 19-pages long lawsuit. Don't forget that the "academics" who work at the renowned universities are human too and they are very envious on the fat salaries that company bosses cut for themselves. However they are very much affraid of leaving the nice and cozy feeling the tenure gives them, but in many instances they are a lot worse than the corporate assholes. They want both the credit and the money and at the same time are always on the lookout to eliminate from the fold the actual person who made the discovery.
If you want an example from Astronomy just look at the story of Antony Hewish and Jocelyn Bell.
The whole reason a lot of Mac clients dropped out a while back is because SETI officials REFUSED to update the client to take full advantage of the PowerPC G4 and its SIMD unit(s). What's the use of running a client that doesn't efficiently run on the system. It then becomes a waste of CPU time and power.
Does anyone know if recent clients are _fully_ optimized for the PowerPC G4, PowerPC G5 (dual cpu and dual core), and Intel Macs (Universal Binary and dual core) ?
Those who laugh at you for you having a Mac.. are the people who constantly call you to fix their PC.
rosetta@home gets my cpu cycles. my mom had pre-cancerous cervical cancer and had a hysterectomy, my dad died of colon cancer in his mid-50's, my grandfather (dad's dad) died of pancreatic cancer in his mid-50's. my computer at home does nothing while i'm at work so why not contribute to something that means something to me?
Delaware isn't quite Maryland / DC, but we got a good amount of flooding as well. I took a bunch of pictures, for those interested: shameless plug.
Yes, I'm taking an offtopic post even further offtopic.
Enough people enjoy gardening that I'm hestitant to agree that it's a waste of time. It could well be a waste of money, however.
I'm ITDOOD, and I was a SETIholic. I had every server and workstation at my disposal cranking out "Work Units" a.k.a. WUs. I couldn't control myself, trying to beat my rivals like SETIking and CPUman. I would throttle my exchange and SQL servers and give real-time thread priority to the SETI process. email slowed to a halt in my vain attempt to keep up with CPUman, who obviously was running the SETI image via login scripts on some college campus network. I got help, thankfully before I was fired. Seriously though, the whole competitive thing dives some I think. It wasn't in the interest of finding aliens, though that's what originally inspired my curiosity. It was all about competing with other *obvious* sys admins. I recall seeing some folks hit 200-300 WUs per day maybe more (this was when it took a singel I86 du jour 6-8 hours per WU). I haven't even looked at it in years so I don't know present #s.
Consider that we've been putting out radio signals for almost a century now and no friendly aliens have arrived from further than we have the foggiest clue of how to travel to fix our ozone and cure our cancer. If you're running it, you're running it because you want to -- not because it's actually a sane or rational use of electricity which generates heat that your A/C also consumes electricty to remove -- both of which probably burn coal, split atoms or mulch fish and birds, contributing to the accelerated demise of our statistically anomalous little sphere.
Frankly, if I'm going to help kill the world with consuming all of the energy I can, then I want to know which genes we need to tweak in order to survive solar radiation, extreme cold, and drinking ocean water. Growing retractable claws would be kind of nifty, too. Anybody got a DNA-evolution modeling app?
Is it at all possible to block these backslash stories when logged into my account? /. story.
I get enough spam as is, I'd like to avoid seeing repeats of every 3rd
Well, in agreement with parts of the article, I have to second that some are a waste. I used to use Prime95. I even thought once I had a prime, though apprently not (I can only assume some hardware error creeped in there and it failed verification.) It always bugged me that I was decreasing the overall lifetime of my CPU just to find large prime numbers though. I suppose there may be some application for it out there, but, overall, it's just not worth much to the world when they find a new number. Eventually I decided that I'd rather my CPU would last me as long as possible. I decided a while back that with this Athlon 64 running so cool while overclocked, it would make a great server. You'd be surprised what use you can put a computer to even five or so years later. Don't underestimate the potential uses of an old system. I have an old SMP 500 MHz Pentium 3 system which is now my server. Before I dedicated it to use as a server (firewall, web server, lan file sharing, lan diagnostics, etc,) I made it easily portable, hooked up a PSX->USB gamepad converter and played a huge number of old games I missed from back when I had a Genesis, a SNES, and etc via emulation. Thanks to GeeXboX, it can even be a media player for me with about the only thing it can't do being HD H264 (then again, many modern systems can choke up on a full quality H264 video...) Heck, I even found out that an old 266MHz Pentium 2 could play most of my DivX/XviD videos even in 640x480 with the exception of one really high bitrate one where it would occasionally have to play catchup when the video did a white fade out + back in effect.
Now some projects like Folding I can agree with. And it's a good use of one's idle cycles, but, for the reason I mentioned above, I've decided I want my processor to last really long term. As in more than four years. The system I'm now using for so much dates probably to around 1999 and has been in use the whole time. Had it been folding, searching for signals, etc keeping the CPUs at 100% utilization 24/7 (excluding storms) it probably wouldn't be alive today acting in such a useful way.
Then again, for those who don't want their CPU(s) to last for an insanely long time, projects like Folding actually are very nice and might actually potentially benefit mankind some day (and before you think that future computers will do much of what takes ours years in a snap, bear in mind that the idea is to at least get a head start and have possible uses more quickly possibly saving more lives.) I might add that I don't agree with the claim that there is no value to SETI@Home. Finding alien life out there WOULD change things (well, assuming it didn't take several lifetimes to actually get a signal to/from them, which is, unfortunately, quite a possibility.)
Maybe WSJ and I are on the same wavelength.
I used to have SETI running, but eventually the project came to an end. (As far as I could tell from the So Long And Thanks For All The Fish sorta letter I got.) I've tried setting up BOINC, but it's not at all clear to me if it's set up correctly. Most of the time it doesn't even seem to be doing anything. Use of the Console is bizarre, in the sense it isn't clear if I've got it set up correctly and how to temporarily disable it if I don't want it popping up at an inopportune moment.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I've contributed a lot of computing time to Seti@home, but I'm not doing it anymore. I did some for climate prediction, but now I'm pretty much just doing protein folding. Protein folding, to me, seems to be the best use of time.
I'm more or less convinced SETI@Home will come up dry and have been so convinced since it began. That doesn't mean it's not worthy of computer cycles. It doesn't hurt to rule out possibilities. After doing some basic statistical analysis, though, it simply doesn't make sense for there to be other intelligent life in this galaxy. In others, sure, but in this one, unless they're absolutely uninterested in leaving their own planet (and this makes no sense since you kind of need to, to ensure survival of the species at some point), statistics say the first intelligent, space faring species will colonize the entire galaxy before any other species will have a chance to. So the odds say they're either everywhere in our galaxy or they're not there at all. I suspect the latter.
So at some point, I simply decided that a more practical use of my computer time would be better, so I went to protein folding. It's something we really, really need to figure out. It will be a huge contribution to medicine. So, that's where I'm putting my cycles.
I think a great idea for a project is finding intelligence in Washington DC. We would need every available computer to achieve this result so start hacking today and get the alphabet agencies involved too. Seriously though,we do need to start looking for brains in our own backyards before we find any in outer space or whoever we find there "ain't gonna come over to play anyhow", and would likely get rid of us so we don't hurt them. Or maybe we could run a search for the best person to be president without telling the computer who it is first like they do it now.
...put our spare cycles to work for some megacorp. wich will patent the results...
I think I'll just keep spending my spare cycles on the illogical search for mr. Spock.
good summary.
Well, yes and no. The environmental cost is paid by everyone. I encourage you to not waste electricity on SETI@home, as much as I'd like to talk to ET.
If it didn't appear to be a waste, we'd have already found intelligent life and therefore this entire article would be about as ridiculous as denying that evolution is a fact. A lot of research appears to be a waste until such a time as the research bears fruit. With SETI this is even more exagerated simply because a lot of people don't believe that there is alien life, etcetera, etcetera, but if we don't look for it we'll never know for a fact.
So yes, SETI is always going to be an all-or-nothing project. Either we have found intelligent life or we haven't, period. Pointing out that the program hasn't had any success since its initiation, and suggesting that's a good reason to stop, is not terribly unlike having gone back and told the Right Brothers to stop trying to build an airplane because people had been trying for ages and clearly it wasn't going to work.
So why keep doing SETI? Why not? If it succeeds it'll be one of the most important events in mankind's history, literally. If it doesn't succeed, at least we tried. Which I think is an important part of what makes humans interesting; be it sailing across endless oceans, flying out into space, or sitting hunkered down under a massive radio dish waiting for intelligent signals, we pretty much do it anyway, no matter what the cost or what the risk. All that said, the SETI program is a lot less risky than anything NASA is trying to do.
Maybe it would be good to explore other kinds of interception, SETI is SETI, regardless of what methods or technologies they're using in their search. If they had the funds to add optical SETI to their repertoire, I'm sure they'd be happy to.
I didn't know NASA kept their money in a money belt. Well, I suppose they could also use neck pouches, leg stashes, or zip-it sox...
SETI@Home is the most successful PR stunt in the history of distributed computing, perhaps in the entire history of computing. It is the grandfather of today's viral marketing phenomenon.
Consider that SETI was about to be axed when those brilliant minds developed the SETI@Home project to build awareness and grassroots support. With millions of voters using their screensaver, how could a politician dare vote to kill off SETI?
The gimmick is, of course, that SETI@Home had only an infinitesimal chance of finding anything interesting. The source feed was tapped from the main feed off that huge antenna (in Puerto Rico?). Less than 2% of the entire bandwidth received goes to the SETI program, and you can be certain that it isn't what researchers considered prime bandwidth--they fed the best stuff to their supercomputers and chucked off a bit of rind to the masses.
Nevermind today's thinking that radio signals of interest would ever reach us. Finding an alien Munsters was always impossible--SETI hoped merely to identify a constant carrier wave. By 2001 their thinking had changed to searching for signals from the centers of galaxies. Why? Because the thought was that alien societies would invent machine intelligence, and that intelligence would leave those societies to seek out high-energy sources near massive black holes. You know, because machines prefer energy to entertainment.
Now they're hoping to catch a stray coherent-light burst, used as communication. Perhaps after watching all those battles in Star Wars they realize the masses might believe that a stray burst might come our way...
SETI@Home is a tremendous success. It served to keep SETI alive and kicking. The success of SETI itself is another matter entirely.
That's why I chose to contribute to Mersenne prime number research--at least they hit a winner now and then, and they have a large monetary payoff in that lottery. Oh, and their software can run surreptitiously as a service, allowing you to install it on a lot of co-worker's computers without their knowledge...
gonna be told where to spend my computer cycles, just like i ain't gonna be told which charities I donate my time and money to.
Promote Charity on Myspace, Show Your Colours!
It seems like a number of comments in the Backslash stated that many projects are a waste and don't contributed to anything. I would have to disagree. Researchers and institutions would not put in all of the effort of setting up such a program if they didn't feel something good would come out of it. It is just that some projects do not publicize their results as much as others. Regardless, even if it did come up with nothing useful, it would at least be known that projects need to be planned better for results. This leads to further development in distributed computing.
I heard of a couple of guys, they want to build something called an "airplane." You know, you'd get people to go in it and they'd fly around like birds. It's ridiculous, right? And what about breaking the sound barrier? Or rockets to the moon? Or atomic energy? Or a mission to Mars! Science fiction, right?
Look, all I'm asking is for you to have just the tiniest bit of vision. You know, to step back for one minute and look at the big picture. To take a chance on something that just might end up being the most profoundly impactful moment for humanity, for the history of history.
Please give all your spare cycles to SETI.
-- thinkyhead software and media
Nobody seems to have looked at the basic economics of this whole thing.
SETI@home exists because no company or government would fund computing resources on that scale for that project. If everyday people don't crunch the numbers in their spare time, nobody will. Therefore, the founders of the SETI@home project found a way to harness the power of the Long Tail efficiently.
Medical research, OTOH, has a high expected payoff. If everyday people won't decidate CPU cycles to protein folding problems, drug companies will build their own clusters to handle the load.
So on the one hand, we have a project that will either be done through the efficient aggregation of support from anyone who happens to feel like chipping in a few CPU cycles, or not at all. On the other hand, we have research that attracts both private and government funding, and will be done whether the general public decides to participate or not.
Now comes Lee Gomes -- noted astrophysicist and expert on the allocation of computing resources -- to tell us that the SETI program should be abandoned. It's worthless, and anyone who supports it is wasting precious resources while people die.
The entire article, from start to finish, is hard-packed bullshit, folks. It's only a small step removed from the 'Email/The Web/[Fill In The New Technology Here] Costs Business $N Billion In Lost Productivity Per Year' crap that comes out every 18 months or so. The methodology is exactly the same: point at something people time or energy doing, declare it 'nonproductive', then write a thoroughly unrealistic screed about how great the world could be if people devoted those resources to something 'useful'.
It would take only a small extension of his reasoning to argue that all the CPU cycles 'wasted' on computer games should be devoted to 'important' medical research. One could take the same basic template and argue that Linux and F/OSS are a waste of time and effort: if all those coding resources were channeled into Microsoft's Shared Source program, they could be doing something worthwhile for the vast majority of people who use computers every day.
The fact that the article was posted to Slashdot by a WSJ employee smacks of outright click-whoring. The article itself lacks any meaningful substance. It fails to raise any issue worthy of discussion. It merely defines millions of people as stupid and wasteful because they don't happen to share Lee Gomes's personal set of priorities. It's a long-winded example of hypothesis contrary to fact, with a disingenuous and insulting "not that I'm telling anyone what they should do" coda at the end.
I run my AMD3200 at 100% CPU usage in the winter to keep my room warm, I got a fan heater but the PC doesnt make so much noise and it tends to not overheat the whole room. Run folding to get to the 100% CPU usage, whats interesting though, if its nice -n 20 the CPU runs @ 1000 MHz, I have to set the program to -1 to get 2000 MHz from powernowd,the result is the desktop is a bit sluggish sometimes..
This is my sig.
"thank you for all the fish."
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
You're mistaken if you think SETI@home was the distributed computing pioneer. The distributed.net encryption cracking project started in 1997. I ran it from '97-'99 or so through the RC5 and DES contests.
http://www.distributed.net/history.php