SETI@home having Problems

Foxman writes "Due to failures in coping with the overwhelming response from volunteers, the SETI@home project has been erroneously sending the same packets of radio data to its 500,000 participants." The scariest comment is the estimate that SETI@Home is using 8 tons of fossil fuel per hour.

Comments

Re:"3l1t3 HaX0r D00d2" exploiting bugs is worse

[alhaz]

Worthy science? You're kidding.

This is a guy, with no ties to SETI, with a prerecorded chunk of data, that most astronomers believe is of dubious value. It comes from a very slim section of the radio spectrum. just a handfull of Khz wide, if i remember right.

You're not searching for a needle in a haystack. You're searching for a quark in a haystack.

Furthermore, recent advances in RF technology have made it clear that it's positively idiotic to believe that alien life forms would be using the same modes of radio transmission we do.

Take for instance ultra-wide-band transmissions. They broadcast across the entire spectrum with exceptionally high power, but they do so in picosecond pulses, and the FCC says they can't discern them from background radiation. They don't know how to classify UWB because, while it does interfere with important things like air traffic controll, you never know you're being interefered with.

So lets say aliens use ultra wide band transmissions. is the granularity of SETI data finer than picosecond? Doubtful.

As humans we seem to have an understanding of amplitude modulation, frequency modulation, and phase modulation. phase modulation is still experimental and of questionable value. We're just starting to understand pulse modulation. How many more kinds of modulation are there?

The man who discovered frequency modulation was branded a mad scientist and fired from RCA for wasting precious corporate resources on his hair brained ideas. How many people are quietly researching modes of transmission that don't currently fall into recognizable catagories of reasonable physics?

We're not going to pick up interstellar cell phone calls and listen in on greys discussing family matters. At best we're likely to hear the RFI generated by their equipment. And that's assuming their technologies are vaguely similar to ours. An optical processor doesn't emit RFI. Maybe they use an energy form that doesn't fit into our concept of physical law.

The neat thing about history is, we build upon the past. Having started from an entirely different point, why would a completely foreign culture do things anything like we do?

Re:FUD, FUD, and more FUD

[alhaz]

My assertian is not that they would obviously be more advanced.

My assertion is that technology builds upon itself.

Having started from a different point, how can you assume that another culture would reach the same conclusions?

Leaps in technological complexity occur when a culture learns to do something it previously didn't know it was ignorant of.

Human science has suffered various huge setbacks.

Hydrolic technology was cut off at the knees when it was decided that it was far better to employ hundreds of manual laborers to open the temple doors than to build an experimental device using sand.

The library at Alexandria was burned. We don't know what we lost.

It took spanish missionaries 14 years to destroy all the collected writings of the maya. We don't know what we lost. Their religion, their science, their literature, their poetry. All gone. Just because they weren't christians. (OK, they say they were performing human sacrifice too, but that's still no reason to erase their history)

Alchemists were so feared and loathed that they obscured their writings so much we're not sure what most of them were doing. A lot of them thought they could spontaniously generate mice by leaving a box with a sweatty shirt and some wheat in a field, but they can't all be wrong.

Millions of people in third world countries die of gastric disorders because they still believe the popular teachings of an early medic who said the best way to deal with a leaky bottom is to avoid liquids.

Furthermore, many of the important technological advancements of the last few hundreds of years have been purely accidental.

If you don't believe me, research the history of polymer plastics. Read about how the search for artificial crop fertilization revolutionized explosives. Read about the discovery of the diode.

A lot of important things came to be because of someone who was looking for one thing and stumbled on another.

A few years ago a japanese college student who was bad at math used 1000 times as much catalyst as he was supposed to and stumbled upon a polymer that conducts electricity and can hold a charge. How often does this kind of thing happen?

Who would have figured that an inordinately difficult method of printing (lithography) would allow the miniturization of transistors?

Why would you assume that a completely foreign history would advance the same technologies?

Maybe when they find us, they'll be utterly enthralled by jello.

Given the fact that human technology has advanced more in the last 100 years than all previous recorded history, it's assumed mathematically that an alien culture is more likely to be well ahead or well behind of us. We spent thousands of years dicking around and then lept into this era with a vengance.

What if Babbages machine was built and functioned within his lifetime? the british government poured millions of pounds into trying to build it, but the metalurgical technology wasn't up to it. We might have entered the information age much earlier.

How can you assume that human understanding of physics encompasses all of reality? We don't make the rules you know, we just try to understand them.

I'm not calling possible alien technology obviously more advanced. I'm saying it's most likely, well, alien.

It's a pretty safe bet that your Powerbook won't be able to uplink with the mothership.

Somehow I knew you'd say that

[Myxx]

In all things there are complainers and there are doers. Here we have a project that is grand in scale. Just because someone else is doing this kind of distributed networking more efficiently has NOTHING to do with SETI's efforts. That's like saying that because the Commodore 64 was so wildly successful and efficient that all computers ought to be. Well, I would assume that all C-64's would be that efficient, but not something that does something totally different. Sure, computer hardware is essentially the same, but the way it is implimented is not.

And to say that "I will not waste computer cycles on this buggy program" is almost as laughable as the people who have gotten offended at the Unix/Linux slur. Am I not mistaken that the Linux/Unix version came out first? I don't see these folks being anti-Linux with this sort of evidence. And just what were you wasting your computer cycles on before SETI? This is like saying "I wasted my Saturday helping to search for a lost child and then I find out the parents hadn't looked hard enough for the child yet." Sure, it can be frustrating, but you volunteered, didn't you? No one meant to take advantage of you. You joined SETI because it was cool, not because you wanted reward.

I guess that some people just cannot mess up.

And about the hacking...if the hacking took place and it was verified to have been done by LINUX/UNIX then their statements are justified. Perhaps not the hacking statement, but the dig against the platform is justified. If he had said that "Widnows users seem to be the cuplprits, but that is probably because of the MS mentality" then we would have all cheered. But I guess the double-standard is ok?

In essence, I volunteered because I thought it would be the coolest thing since sliced bread. It has been. I like the screen saver. My computer is on anyway. Nothing is lost by me in any way shape or form. That I have been chewing on a duplicate packet is unfortunate, but they will fix the issue. Anyone invlolved with SETI knows that Congress has gleefully been chopping away at its budget for years and calling it a victory while they continue to pour funds into more "dubious" research. If I can help them out I will.

::sigh::