Slashdot Mirror
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
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
These folks have millions of compute nodes. And very little resources, which is why they set up this network in the first place. You really think they have time to go chasing after silly little bits of data that matter only to you? Next you'll be wondering why GW Bush never returns your calls.
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/
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!
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.
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 |
The biggest benefit would be #3, ponies or no.
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 guess it depends on what you really care about. Personally, knowing that there are intelligent beings out there would affect me a whole lot more than a cure for cancer. It changes the way I think about myself and my place in the universe. Think about all the crazy things that will happen with the world's religions. That alone would be worth it to me. Of course, right now, I don't have cancer nor anyone close to me. Like anything else, I reserve the right to change my mind.
I agree with you about Prime95 though.
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?
Suggestion: Try out the SETI@home help forum. If that doesn't work, email Eric Korpela, the SETI@home Project Scientist. I won't put his email address here, but a google search will reveal it. He's had the same email address for a very long time. He'll probably be able to give you a hand once you get past his challenge/response spam filter.
Support SETI@home
No... but losing all that computer time was a tad upsetting.
I am over it now. Gone past the heavy drinking... the denial... all 12 or so steps.
I wish SETI the best, honestly I do, but without me this time.
(Oh I can hear the 'you are but a tiny spec in the cosmos' line now...)
"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
...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!
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
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
So stop reading /. :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Come on, cut the guy some slack. Watching a number increment isn't all there is to it. There's a lot involved in trying to increment that little number. I can tell from your remarks that you've never done it. It takes a lot of commitment, time, or money to really hammer down some big numbers on a project like this. It can involve system administration, overvlocking, social engineering... Seriously, if you get 10 or 50 CPU's all doing something, and keep doing it, for a couple of months solid, it can be time consuming. And if one of those machines winks out, you need to fix it, or in a year you'll be down to half your original horsepower. And then you need to monitor them somehow, to make sure they're all still running. It's a fun thing to try to do, to set your sites on overtaking a friend that's got better numbers than you. You could do far worse for a hobby.
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.
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.
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)
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
"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 -->
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!
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_
I'll say, here in the windows world I have to download it, then install it, then tell it the website of the project, then I have to hit OK. Man I sure wish I had a second degree for that! My brain hurts!
Suck it up sally.
I Like Pie...
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
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.
Er...unless you have some brilliant piece of logic up your sleeve that proves that extraterrestrial life is impossible, despite the obvious counter-example of life having evolved spontaneously at least once that we know of, you've got it backward. There clearly is a chance of success.
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.
Oh come on. You think all those fancy-pants science boys forgot about the inverse-square law? That they didn't, for example, sit down with an envelope and work out whether they could at least detect alien I Love Lucy reruns if they were emanating from Alpha Centauri? Geez, friend, that's a little arrogant. To assume everyone except you is a complete blithering idiot about the nature of radio...
The best argument against SETI is Fermi's, to wit, given that the Universe is so large and so old, it is overwhelmingly probable that if life has evolved more than once, the ETs are all way older and more advanced than we are, and therefore if it is possible to communicate over interstellar distances they should be doing it already with us. They're not. Why not? SETI has no good answer for that, and that's their main problem.
I've never had any problems with BOINC crashing. Maybe you're running it on dodgy hardware?
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