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500-fold Increase in Data Flow from SETI Telescope
coondoggie brings us an article from Networkworld about a flood of new data for the SETI@home project. We discussed something similar a few months ago when a new telescope array went live. The vast amount of processing power required to handle the new data is prompting the SETI@home team to make a plea for more volunteers. Quoting the press release:
"What triggered the new flow of data was the addition of seven new receivers at Arecibo, which now let the telescope record radio signals from seven regions of the sky simultaneously instead of just one. With greater sensitivity and the ability to detect the polarization of the radio signals, plus 40 times more frequency coverage, Arecibo is set to survey the sky for new radio sources."
Sounds like a good time to re-install BOINC and start up SETI.
Protein Folding should take precedence over pointless searches for noise-in-patterns.
If they want more people then they should get rid of that silly bonic thing. I never liked it.
Although you're probably going to get marked troll you're right.
The cancer and other medical projects your can donate your processing power to are far more important then a fruitless search for aliens.
All my spare cycles are working on Yeti@Home
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
A long time ago, on an ISP that went belly up...
Oh well, I can't write a good intro. But the point is, at one point I had thousands of units. My ISP went belly up with my registered address. There was no way for me to move my units to a new e-mail. In fact, e-mails to the SETI team probably went in to a black hole.
Regardless, they didn't help me keep the 'work' that I did... I don't see helping them again. Sorry.
"If you are on fire you can just stop, drop, and roll. If you fall into Lava you are just dead." - my 5yr old daughter
I thought they were going to shut down Arecibo or move to an array of smaller antenna's or something? Did the plan change or am I making this up?
Six hours nineteen minutes right ascension, fourteen degrees twenty-two minutes declination ... no sighting. ... no sighting. ... no sighting.
Six hours nineteen minutes right ascension, fourteen degrees twenty-three minutes declination
Six hours nineteen minutes right ascension, fourteen degrees twenty-three minutes declination
etc. ad infinitum
Now that i've just bought my first dual core....
:-)
and apparentlly linux is happy with 10% of one core...
i guess i'll see about letting seti use some of my new chip.
mabye? the cpu fan will finally turn on when i'm not gaming
bored? try this http://jadmadi.net/blog/2005/01/27/linux-wine-how-to-running-windows-viruses-with-wine/
Was watching a number increment your sole reason for contributing to SETI@Home? Might I suggest http://www.progressquest.com/ as an alternative? I think you'll be much happier with it.
There is no life in outer space. It's the biggest fuckin' waste of all time to spend money on this shit.
i was kinda interested in this at one point then when I installed SETI@home i realized that it made my proc max out 24x7 and shoot up to it's load temps (obviously) and of course use more electricity. i decided that I wasn't willing to stress my equipment or pay for the electricity to run this type of software ( I do of course realize you can set the amount of cpu it uses.. but still) I think that all these distributed projects kinda try to gloss over the fact that it isn't free to participate ... and given the $100+ a barrel oil at the moment people that chose to participate should probably be made more aware of what the costs and wear and tear impacts really are.
actually I am happy to see you, however that is in fact a banana in my pocket.
I'm just curious how much energy the SETI project has used with zero results thus far. Is the amount of resources and time they are contributing to this cause really worth the incalculable chance they get a signal from an alien civilization? Having millions of PC's running at 100% doing pattern searching seems like a huge waste of energy. I'll run distributed clients myself like folding@home that actually have research results. Usually, only during the winter though (since electric heat is my only option anyway).
Just because you think you know what people should do, doesn't mean you do.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Arecibo? I thought they were closing it? At least they recently lost around 75% of their fundings.
Holy cats, can you also tell me who'll win the US Presidential election in 2008? I'd like to get a few bets down on tradesports.com...with my chutzpah and your omniscience, we can't lose!
Sorry to sound like a troll, but what do we stand to gain from analyzing all this data? How does making contact with aliens address any of the domestic problems we have? Wouldn't a more efficient use of resources be to support the Folding@home which will actually yield useful information about protein structure? And yes, I have the same criticism about Prime95 as well.
Which option benefits mankind:
1. Understanding how proteins work, which leads to medical advancements.
2. Yay! A new prime number! Let's call it OMGPONIES.
3. OMG Aliens! PONIES!
There's a logic error here, I think. By this logic, we should do nothing except the very highest priority thing in our life, and society should pour all of its resources into the very most important priority. For example, we should all live in a thatched hut, eat weeds and grubs, wear the untanned raw skins of animals (or just go naked), and slave 18 hours a day so all our labor and energy can go into....whatever the single highest social priority is...curing cancer, fighting war 'n' injustice, whatever.
Which is silly. The goal of life is maximize overall satisfaction, not accomplish one single highest goal. It's important to rank your priorities, of course, both as an individual and as a society. But the notion that because A is "more important" than B implies ipso facto that A should get all the resources and B should get none is maximally silly.
Indeed, it's kind of OCD obsessive to always be focussed on pursuing the Top Goal, the kind of thing that when we see people doing it in practise -- giving up everything, including enough sleep and good nutrition, to, say, play World of Warcraft and become the biggest baddest player -- we conclude they need to do some growing up.
Fine, I'm burning cycles running a project that may (heck, when it comes to SETI, probably) won't see any tangible results.
But how is contributing to a project that was the basis for mainstreamed distributed computing any more wasteful than blowing 9 hours a night on WoW? I'd love to see a breakdown of the increased energy usage from a high-end CPU and a good video card vs. a PC that's on anyway and running BOINC when it's idle.
Screaming "carbon footprint!!" about something as trivial as BOINC is the real waste. Here, I've swapped 80% of the lights in my house for CFL's, and I burned 10 bucks worth of electricity last month (with an electric heater and 4x computers in the house no less!) does make me green enough to spare some processor cycles now?
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
I remember when we run SETI since late 90s, where are the results - did they ever publish anything
worth while or they still get noise from outerspace.
Did I say that people's spare CPU cycles should be mandated to SETI? As if that were feasible or even possible?
When I say that Protein Folding *should* take precedence over SETI, I'm simply making an appeal to people's personal priorities--and mine favor understanding and curing diseases over inconclusive alien signal-hunting every day of the week.
Yes, you're free to choose for yourself what cause you want to help out. As you should be. And I'm free to try to persuade others to help a very worthwhile cause:
http://folding.stanford.edu/"Oh, but it uses my precioussss energy!"
Of all the things in the world that monumental amounts of energy are 'wasted' on each day (powering bin Ladens dialysis machine,lighting the creationism museum,all the power used by all the dictators and oppressors of the world who shouldn't be allowed to LIVE let alone use resources), 'wasting' a few of them LOOKING FOR FUCKING EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE doesn't even come CLOSE to being classified as a 'waste'. FUCK! Am I at the wrong site?!!
Distributed programs like this aren't a waste of energy when you're trying to heat your home. Electric heat costs just as much when you get it from a computer as when you get it through a base-board. From a pure heating standpoint, useful computer calculations are pure byproduct. 200W of heat from a processor costs the same as 200W of heat from the heater. Funny how this should come out in the middle of winter (for most of the 'net connected population).
it's only pointless until ... do-do-do-do-doooo! (close encounters theme)
With the odds of finding a signal so low as it is, maybe the signal we find will already be the encoded protein folding solutions.
stuff |
I couldn't keep up with the processing power they required after the second version was released. The wherecasking for too much and I had to bail.
I have always wondered how much more energy you consume. I agree it's probably less than what CPU/hardware "power-saving" features suggest. Especially when you are using your PC for office/browsing activity, most of the CPU(s) time is wasted. The big question though is how effective is a project. It's not only about the "most important to humanity". One project might sound less important but it might require much less computation than a project that sounds more important. Just look at ClimatePrediction.com, it takes months to compute a single unit, whereas you can complete several Seti@home or IBM's World Community Grid units in a single day. In a sense, the winner is the project that provides the more benefit to society per CPU cycle spent. My only worry is that the benefit might still be so low that you do more harm than good by using a little extra energy on it... Boinc is a nice manager software to share your cycles among several projects and even use each CPU core you have. Why doesn't folding@home have a Boinc link? Is it just competition/jealousy between Stanford and Berkeley?
Your argument is based on the presupposition that the SETI@Home project actually has any chance at all of success.
However, good logic - hell, good science - completely demolishes that presupposition.
Unless an alien transmitter is broadcasting at the correct frquency and in the right direction as it passes near or through our solar system, we will not detect or receive its signals.
SETI is a nice dream, but it's still just a dream. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_propagation
...some joker inserted a bunch of calls to rand()? Hey, it's periodic too!
The other posters are right; the halt instruction is executed by all modern browsers and OSs, and dramatically decreases CPU power use (as well as A/C required to move the heat out, much of the time).
Also, by the way, cycles (Hz) are never base 2 units, they're always base 10, so 2GHz is 2000000000Hz.
My first thought was that some aliens discovered spam...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
There are 10 planets we have explored. 1 has species.
That planet ( Earth ) has millions of species. Only 1 has figured out how to use radio. The others aren't even close at all.
Of the billions of individuals of that species over the course of history. Only 1 discovered radio.
Good luck guys. But you are not going to find what you are looking for.
Chances are that if there are Aliens out there they would consider the Earth as insignificant or unimportant. And then destroy it to build an interstellar bypass.
I almost never see anyone take note of what I deem to be the only to-date achievement of SETI -- defining a larger and larger region of space where it is known that there are no radio signals indicating intelligent life. Everyone seems to be focused on the expectation -- seemingly bordering on the religious -- that ET life will be found because it just HAS to be there.
I would note that there is no fundamental reason for this axiomatic proposition, and it makes much more sense simply go with the data rather than stubbornly cling to a belief for which there is so far not a shred of evidence -- much as the creationists do with regard to geology and archaelogy, I would note.
Maybe sometimes some evidence will appear for ET life. That will be interesting, if so. In the meantime, we have a rapidly growing contrarian body of evidence, so we should accept as our tentative conclusion that we are, in fact, the only life in the universe.
I had to pull out the hip waders for this thread.
Folding vs SETI isn't about weighing the importance of curing cancer versus finding aliens. It's an argument about using resources for a useful research tool versus using resources on a horribly inefficiently process which may not even be capable of finding what it's looking for.
You could use the investing money versus playing the lottery analogy, but it's really like comparing investing money versus digging through people's trash looking for a winning lottery ticket.
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
seventeenorbust.com
try this to burn some cycles and test your system out
there is help in the forums to setup on multiple cores
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
I would happily split my PS3 processing power between SETI and Folding - but the only client offered (that I can find) is Folding. I've always wondered why there is no SETI client as well, does anyone know the story there?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Nice Simpsons reference.
I'll say it again. Boinc is real dogshit. Why do I need a PhD to run this thing without crashing? It looks like a program a kid put together in basic, then realized he had to get it to run on real computers/OS's later.
Anyone pause to think about why the system is getting an upgrade? Modern economic theory says to ignore sunk costs so if anything they should be scraping the program. The fact that they've decided to put more recievers and increase the amount of data they're collecting could be an indication that there is something of interest going on that the public isn't aware of.
They started and demonstrated that distributed computing was a viable way to solve huge problems. SOmetimes basic research doesn't have an immediately applicable product - but sometimes the groundwork they lay provides for fruitful endeavors - e.g. Apollo program. No one thought electricity would be terribly important when it was first discovered, or the phone either. Give it a chance - maybe finding aliens might make us put aside our petty differences as countries.
..........FULL STOP.
both cores are working. i actully have jobs openmosix (MR. moshie bar FTW!!) there way to my gaming rig from my server ( like compressing tape backups ) :-D works nice!!!
seventeenorbust..... work safe ? haha i dunno by that title !
bored? try this http://jadmadi.net/blog/2005/01/27/linux-wine-how-to-running-windows-viruses-with-wine/
2. I've seen one too many "it's a waste of time" posts. I suppose all you pinheads out there never take a chance on ANYthing, ever, your whole life? Bullshit, of course you do. If nobody ever took a chance on something that some people said was "pointless" then we WOULD still be living in caves, wearing untanned animal skins, etcetera. In any event, not your business to be telling others what they should and should not be doing with their time/energy/money.
3. If you're one of the Anonymous Coward naysayers: DO NOT WANT, kthnxbye. :p
In the last couple months (Nov~Dec 2007) the SETI/BOINC development team has changed its Linux policy. Formerly, they developed a GUI client suitable for all major distributions (and of course some minor ones), but this took a large amount of time and effort. Some distros, notably Debian and Ubuntu, packaged BOINC so it was available from the repositories. All distros have always been welcome to package BOINC in this way for the convenience of their users. With the change in policy, the universal BOINC client for Linux is CLI-only, while the Linux GUI-client is developed for Ubuntu only. Since it's GPL, any distro / package maintainer is still welcome to adapt the GUI client. Someone bothered to package it for Ubuntu, but nobody has bothered for Fedora. If you had to choose between getting for your science the resources of Fedora's user base, the resources of Ubuntu's user base, or getting even less than the smaller of those (*hint*) because you supported both instead of your own project's needs, which should you choose? f the installation was as simple as 'yum install bonic' plus a simple Python configure script to set the project URL, then RedHat could/would probably add it to Fedora. It has been that way on Ubuntu for a while now, and it remains so. SETI@home is not a Redhat advocacy group, nor even a Linux advocacy group; it is a scientific group with scientific goals that stretch its meager resources quite thinly already. They adopted their present policy (it's in the BOINC forums; have a look) because it would support users of the most widely-used (and consumer-oriented) distro and still let every Linux player play, all with minimal programmer time spent on the task.
Asking the BOINC team to do the work is unreasonable, especially when essentially no other Linux software gets that treatment even if it is much more important than some volunteer hobbyist program written by understaffed scientists! They're more interested in the BOINC project than a sect within a sect of computer users; it's enough they're willing to maintain *a* Windows client and *a* Mac client and *a* Linux client, without having to maintain Ubuntu/Fedora/RHEL/Debian/Gentoo/SLES/openSuse/Mandriva/Slackware clients too.
I've run both BOINC and Fedora for a long time now; it just isn't that hard. Check out BAM! or GridRepublic, and it BOINC is easier still (that functionality should have been built-in from the start). Now that the GUI manager is brittle or broken outside Ubuntu, you may even see packages spring up for other distros. It was easy enough to shirk up until recently because the BOINC team had already done the hard part and the manager worked well enough, but that's changed so there's now an incentive to actually have a package for your distro.
As for your comments on credits: I agree. It's a race to-- who cares IT'S A RACE I'M GONNA GET THE MOEST CREDITS!!1. Like it or not, more people seem to respond well to the "credit" system, so they stick with it. In the end, the science still gets done, so just don't let it get to you.
So stop reading /. :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Pointless? Shouldn't we at least look before we decide that there is nothing to see?
Personal Probability Paradox says that there is no one out there, anywhere.
99.9999999999% sure of it.
IF, there were other intelligent existences out there, then, I would have been there. The larger the population and age of other existences, then the more probable I would have wound up there. This is especially so, should there be places to have been that are especially old and/or long living.
So, since, I'm here, on Earth, then self-aware consciousness, must just be here. I'm almost absolutely sure of it.
It's either that, or I'm one of the very few most unlucky entities to ever be self-aware in all universes combined.
I must admit that SETI this is likely to not find anything since the obvious answer to the Fermi Paradox is that that there are no (other) advanced civilizations within the Galaxy. (Further reasoning is that although life appeared on Earth almost as soon is it was possible to be here, yet humans required over 4000 million years of evolution to appear, which is 25% of the age of the Universe.)
However it is interesting to speculate and look since if we did find something it would be an event of outstanding significance. Normally when looking for rare events without success, a scientist places an upper limit of how unlikely that event is.
So, could SETI discover an Earth-style civilization if it existed around another star?
If so what distance away from Earth is excluded from containing an Earth-style civilization by SETI's current non-observation?
A little precaution and some good judgement and you are fine. I personally think we should work on the stuff you can't help getting infected with.
Think about people other than yourself. How does a baby choose to be born to an AIDS-infected mother? How does the nurse or police officer choose to get pricked by an AIDS-tainted syringe? I really hope that you and your loved ones are never sexually assaulted and especially not victimized by someone infected with AIDS. And I really hope that science finds a cure for AIDS because it's a horrible disease that no one deserves to suffer, no matter if their behavior was responsible for their contraction.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I dont know, who wants to bet Seti finds an alien race with obviously advanced technology that will cure cancer faster than we can find the cure?
wow, really seems like 50/50 to me...
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
who really benefits from the folding@home project? do we get to reap these benefits... or does some larger company get this new discovery that we have to pay to receive?
maybe it's just me (and most of my computer-savvy friends), but i would rather strive for the possible discovery of something that will change humanity forever.
i'm sure seti@home is a waste... now, but remember when everyone thought the earth was flat?
remember the wright brothers?
Seti's current data explosion is just a small step, once the Paul Allen (Co Founder Microsoft) new array of telescopes and research centres comes online, the data requiring processing will go up by several magnitudes (dont know how they are going to solve that one, maybe ask Larry Page and Sergey Brin if they could "borrow" the spare clock cycles from all the googleplex data centres), unless Paul has also provided a few millions for their own setiplex.
We Live in Interesting times.
Darren Stephens
Adelaide, South Australia
welcome our ham radio enthusiast from outer space overlords....
Making babies is bad for the environment.
They invest a lot in a new array of telescopes and have not enough computational power to process the new data...
Shouldn't they invest some of the money in a data center to be able to process it? Or at least an advertisement campaign to recruit more volunteers?
Been there. The dept bought a top-notch, highest quality computer to run the best FEM software with huge projects, and after the purchase they found out they don't have enough to purchase the actual software.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
The PS3 client mostly works but it has a very nasty habit of dropping work units if it can't instantaneously connect with wherever they're supposed to be sent to. My PS3 must have processed 50 of them by now, but my readout still says 22. In other words Seti@Home have lost 28 good sets of results because the client running on my PS3 tried to connect to their server, failed and then automatically gave up entirely and started from scratch all over again.
they could have that radio signals captured and analyzed much easier ... just explain to the NSA that some of the extraterrestrials might be evil terrorists.
I tried to install BOINC and could not find a way to hide the tray icon. It seems to be not running unless it displays the said icon. When I tried to install it as a service, I could not figure what username and password to supply so it doesn't fail to initialize the service (yup, I'm not a geek).
Come on, I want to install the client, configure the SETI task and settings ONCE, then forget about it completely and forever, let it run in background without reminding me of its existence, ever, period. I do NOT want my desktop cluttered by an extra tray icon. I've ditched it.
The old SETI screensaver did not display anything on the desktop while not running.
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
Even brief information could still be useful. Information theory is tricky. I think it was Victor Hugo who had a conversation with his publisher regarding the sales of Les Miserables. He sent a "?" and got a "!" back. I guess that was a bit like sending a pointer to something else. If a civilization 10000 ly away sent: "May You be touched by his Noodly Appendage." That might change a lot. Or maybe they send 100 lines of insanely clever self modifying code which can form the foundation of a good AI which then can become a technological singularity. Or maybe some constants, science formulas... or maybe schematics for a Warp/FTL drive if there is such a thing.
The Chair Corp. comic(*00-12)
However, more and more I'm getting the feeling that they're listening/searching in the wrong place. It is admittedly a feeling, but I think very advanced civilizations might be communication via other channels. I'm still very much intrigued by the work of Maxwell and especially Tesla.
Tesla did very interesting things with 'radiant energy' and according to the various stories he was also experimenting with real-time communications via the aether. (sort of a subspace communication?)
Modern EE only learn a simplified version of the original work by Maxwell. If I recall it correctly, it was Heaviside who turned Maxwell's 20 equations with 20 unknowns into a more 'workable version'... but it is not the same thing anymore.
Sadly, I suck at math, so I'm unable to do anything with it beyond the basics. I do however believe that the whole aether-theory chapter has been closed far far to fast. It might even be interesting to hold this thing to the light once more in combination with the whole dark energy problem, but I digress..
IF you rock at math and or EE, please take a look at the original(!) work of Maxwell and Tesla; they're absolute geniuses! Mr. Bearden has written up nice papers about this whole subject. The following links do not really do justice to their accomplishments. Please look further!
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/tesla/esp_tesla_14.htm
http://gravity-control.blogspot.com/2006/04/electrogravitic-communications-means.html
http://www.mountainman.com.au/aether_1.html
If they like the taste of human flesh.
Or the sound it makes when you smash it with your silicone-based tentacles.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
...are none of your business. I have zero interest in hearing, reading or knowing what you think I should do with my CPU cycles (or anything else, for that matter). So STFU.
"Hmm", I thought. I used to run seti@home, but forgot about it a long time ago. "This seems like a good opportunity to try it out again, I'll download it!"
1. What the !@*& is BOINC? Why do I have to read about a generic distributed computing tool? Why not provide a "one-click" SETI@HOME client for those who don't give a damn about BOINC? (If that one-click package happens to use BOINC, fine.) If I later decide to learn about the wonders of BOINC, then fabulous. I'll go to the boinc web page.
2. yum search boinc --> nada. (Fedora 8 user here). That's a disappointment.
3. Download and install their little shell script / linux installer.
4. It's not a tarball? It's a shell script that uncompresses some binary blob and runs it. That's not very friendly. I find myself checking back to see if there's an md5sum or something. Nope.
5. Okay, what the hell, I run it. It does something, but there's no obvious indication of what I'm supposed to do next.
6. After poking at it for about 3 minutes, I can find no discernible way to make boinc do anything aside from sit and wait for something to do. It seems there's a "manager" that I need (in order to pick what projects I want to contribute to), but it's apparently not in the thing I downloaded. My guess is that the manager is supposed to be in there-- I can't find anything else to download. Either I've screwed up or they have.
7. rm -rf boinc*. Back to work.
I'm not trying to be a dick-- I think there are a lot of users who have a transient interest in Seti@Home. I think my willingness to try to troubleshoot this probably puts me in a minority. If you're looking for a 5 fold increase in userbase, perhaps your efforts would be well-spent streamlining the installation process. Making it so people with only a fleeting moment of interest can click *once*, and have something neat happen.
It just occurs to me that SETI by using telescopes looking for radio data is a dead end because doesn't it assume that the alien will use some form of radio based technology for communication? However, if it's an intelligence we're interested in (ie. one capable of interstellar FTL travel), it probably would not use sub-light tech like radio. Radio might have been a transition tech for a phase of the civilization. So, we're assuming, in SETI, that we're looking into a period of time in that uses that transition tech. Isn't that even more unlikely to succeed than initially thought?
"We don't talk to nematodes and they don't talk to us."
-- Robert J. Bradbury
Any advanced extraterrestrial civilization (those with sufficient spare energy resources and technology to communicate with non-local civilizations) will have the material and energy resources to build billions of lunar diameter telescopes which can be arranged in interferometric arrays to observe in great detail planets such as ours. They will understand at our current level of development we have nothing to offer them and so communication is a waste of time and energy.
Only when humans make the transition to a KT-II civilization might we become interesting from a communications standpoint and even that is open to significant debate. What does one talk about with civilizations millions or even billions of years younger than ones own?
Dedicate your CPU cycles to something which will clearly advance the state of our science as we know it (e.g. Folding@Home or one of the other biological distributed computing projects) -- not some wild goose chase based on 45+ year old concepts (classical SETI) which have not been properly reexamined.
I would gladly donate my spare CPU cycles to a any group that intends on finding some /terrestrial/ intelligence.
Flame bait. Parent is pure and utter flame bait.
Despite all the interest we've seen over the last 30 - 50 years in cancer research )and health care improvements in general), the only time we've seen any consistent progress in this area is when someone has found a way to make a profit from other people's illnesses. There is something fundamentally wrong with the health care professions. And that fundamental problem is easily identified: health care research is primarily, and overwhelmingly, driven by profit motive. The potential for profit shapes the direction of research more than any other factor. That is just sick.
"Protein Folding" is another feel-good charity that will allow you to donate some of your spare change to an industry that has yearly profits measured in billions of dollars. Any positive results of "Protein Folding" would not make it to your neighborhood pharmacy's shelves without first being wrapped up in patented processes by some multinational, multibilliondollar pharmaceutical house. They would charge whatever they thought the market would bear, with gross profits of 1,000% or more, and justify it because, you see, it is so very risky to invest money in their kind of research.
Hmmfph.
<!-- end back flame -->
Well, conventional people believe in god planning everything beforehand and doing miracles, nerds believe in aliens. Wading through all that data is really one of the most useless ways to waste the electric energy. And the likelihood of being effective just marginally higher than turning prayer drums every few minutes.
SETI is attempting to find patterns suggesting intelligence in electro-magnetic signals received from outer space.
Intelligent Design theorists are also attempting to find patterns suggesting intelligence in the molecular structures of living things.
But apparently (according to many on Slashdot), ID is in reality a secret creationist scheme to create a world theocracy.
So, why isn't SETI also a secret creationist scheme? Their methods are identical.
Evolution is a fact. Darwinism is a joke.
We just have to find him.
I hope that people realise that by covering 7 regions of the sky instead of one, and 40 times as much spectrum bandwidth as before, assuming that aliens are as likely to emit on any of these frequencies (which after all is not such a bad assumption considered we don't know a thing about them), statistically that will make us discover alien signals 280 times faster than before.
Very basically, that means that if we were say 1,000 years from finding an alien signal with the previous setup (which you can't say sounded so unlikely, I mean we barely listened for 40 years, and not always with the means we have now), we are now 3 years and a half away from that instead.
You just got troll'd!
What am I missing here?
I was really sucked in by that "manganese nodules exploration" story put out by Howard Hughes' Glomar Explorer. I even babbled excitedly about it at a U.N. meeting to a law of the sea guy who happened to know it was a CIA op to recover a Soviet sub from the abyssal plain. He avoided me like plague until we all went away. Us naive nerds are such lusers.
So now we're supposed to believe in SETI? Gimme a break. No one gets that seriously funded to chase fairies at the bottom of the garden without an ulterior motive. Would aliens really be heavily invested in the electromagnetic spectrum? Nope, I think they handed FDR a tin can about 64 years ago, and every once in a while, they twang our string to see if we're still listening. String? Just a theory.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
If there was intelligent life out "there", why havent they contacted us?
1) They have, and determined there is nothing here for them, and moved on.
2) Theres not intelligent life out "there".
I personally dont see an issue with searching for ET, but any life form more advanced then us, would have already scanned us, any life form less advanced we wont detect. So basically SETI is a search for a lifeform that has technically developed along the same time line as us. i.e. they communicate using similar technology as we do. Do the math...its not good.
#include bier;
This structural biologist offers the following insight. I looked
over the papers published by the FOLDING@Home guys and I didn't
see a lot of medically important results. Actually it looks like
the computational equivalent of naval gazing. I wonder why
the authors don't just get dirty and use crystallography
and/or NMR to solve their structural questions. I looked at their
recent paper trail, no (ok 1) Science/Nature papers...
I guarantee that if SETI@home finds a signal in the static the
authors will get the cover of science/nature (and a trip to Sweden).
Maybe beyond:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118884/
Save my job -- don't do FOLDING@Home
---537
Everyone thinks it's cool to look for extraterrestrial life... Until one day you find it and have an Imperial Storm trooper prodding you with a laser blaster.
So the SETI researchers purposely set out to essentially bog themselves down in data? Isn't this like purposely inviting all of /. to your blog in a vain attempt at hosing your hosting company's servers?
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
SETI is a great project for a number of reasons, but I haven't heard anyone explain what will happen if SETI actually finds something.
Visiting the source of the signal seems unlikely in our lifetime (or our kids lifetime), and transmitting radio signals back to the source will take a REALLY long time.
So if we find little green men (or women) what do we do about it?
-ted
Without SETI at home, the SETI project would have very little or no computational power available to it. Without Folding at home, Stanford, as well as cancer research at large, still has enormous computational power available to it.
Though I can find no definitive number it seems like ten of billions of dollars are being spent on cancer research every year. I don't think there's any shortage of resources being given to cancer research.
Try the wikipedia link first then
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventeenorbust
Seventeen or Bust is a distributed computing project to solve the last seventeen cases in the Sierpinski problem.
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant