Slashdot Mirror
SETI Distributed Searching
Everyone, their brother, mother and dog wrote to point us over to SETI@Home v1.0. Taking a note from the distributed playback, they are giving clients to use the spare cycles on your machine - check out more information, if you like.
Um. Have you read the background materials at http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu at all? The SETI@Home project is being carried out by a team at the same university that is doing the Serendip IV project, which is the main SETI project previously underway. They are funded, they have published (very interesting) technical details about their methodology, and they are every bit as much a 'part of' SETI as is anyone else.
Are you upset because Jodie Foster didn't use SETI@Home on her personal computer in Contact or something? Who do you imagine decides who is 'affiliated with' SETI?
According to the published papers on their site, SETI@Home will examine as many possible signals as the Serendip IV project. Yes, SETI@Home will process a smaller frequency range, but it will examine it in much greater detail, which much more expensive computational analysis thanks to your computer and mine.
Incidentally, I'd recommend taking a look at the scientific papers linked to the SETI@Home site.. what they are doing to perform reasonable data analysis on signals picked up by their piggy-back receivers while the Areceibo telescope is in use and even in motion for other projects doing direct observation for traditional radio astronomy is fascinating. No wonder it took them so much longer to get the SETI@Home client out than it took the distributed.net people to get their network running.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
No one's commented yet on SITI. So what if they succeed? So what if they don't?
It's sort of cool to realize that if von Neumann machines are possible at all, the galaxy would/should be filled with them in about 1x10**5 yrs. If we don't find them soon, it may be a strong hint that self-replicating machines aren't feasible, and e-m signals are a much better bet for finding life "out there".
We're already capable of detecting the equivalent of our own radio transmissions across the galaxy (more or less), and since radio is cheap and easy, it starts to look like we can detect anything in the galaxy that wants to be detected, and probably will within our lifetimes, if they're out there.
Now it gets into the realm of psychology. Why would intellegent creatures want to be detected after all? It gets real speculative, to say the least. It's also possible (or at least, not impossible) that we're either alone, or we're the first. After all, the assumption that there is nothing particularly special about our situation, an assumption that's served science very well for the past 400 years, is just an assumption.
The implications of both success and failure of SETI to detect extraterrestrial life are equally important.
Joe
All of the Mirrors that they list are FTP based - But the UNIX Version downloads are http based... So, I did a quick peek in the UNIX directory, and tada - the Windows client...
i athome_win_1_0.exe
:)
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/software/set
BTW - I also noticed that they finally came out with a Solaris x86 client
If you're seeing performance degradation and you're running on *nix, don't forget to run it nice--15 or above should do the trick.
I've no clue if such a feature exists on the windows/mac clients.
Does anyone know how to set up a script which will run two clients (SMP) and dial up for data return/retrieval on demand from the clients?
Actually, Seti @ Home is very much affiliated with the SETI project. I attended a lecture given by Frank Drake (President of SETI) when he was here @ Cornell a few weeks ago and he devoted a good chunk of his closing remarks to the Seti @ Home project. Obviously it has access to the radio data gathered by the Project Phoenix team, and if you check out the Seti Insitute's home page, you will see several references.
/. would be doubly critical and skeptical of it) but rather a team of researchers, engineers, and Plain Old Folks who have the technical know-how to put together something like this. The idea is a lot of hype, yes, but so is the whole idea of SETI. The field of Astronomy is one of constant disappointment and extremely infrequent tangible discovery, but just the prospect of that discovery has kept the field (and projects like SETI, which is privately funded with a budget of $4 million a year, travelling between the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico ala Golden eye from Australia with a second, verification telescope in Manchester) alive for centuries.
So essentially, it is not 'some guy' -- it isn't a big cohesive government project (if it were,
No respectable astronomer with the ambition and drive to succeed, even when confronted by the 'astronomical' improbability of doing so is ever 'just some guy.' I regret that I don't have the physics knowledge to be one of them myself.
-A