SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

I suspect in the very early days of cooperative computing, one could genuinely argue that there were "idle cycles" that were going to waste if a computer was powered on and not computing something. But this became more and more inaccurate throughout the 1990s as new power management technologies became a part of computer designs, and is completely wrong now. Phenomena like Bitcoin mining and feeling your laptop get warmer depending on what it's doing show that easily, as does your room-heating experience.

I'm still curious about the extent to which the claim of idle compute power going to waste was true when various projects were set up. For example, the press release about the Cooperative Computing Awards (I've forgotten whether this was 1998 or 1999) says

> However, the computer industry produces millions of new computers each year, which sit idle much of the time, running screen savers or waiting for the user to do something.

https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-offers-cooperative-co...

The main thing I can think of that would have supported the concept of idle cycles going to waste was

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HLT_(x86_instruction)

> [the CPU-idle instruction] was not specifically designed to reduce power consumption until the release of the Intel DX4 processor in 1994.

I participated in DESChall and distributed.net's RC5 challenge and I remember being told, and telling others, that we were only using resources that would otherwise have gone to waste. Were we already greatly mistaken about that in 1997?

The conflict is exactly what I'm pointing out.

It's pretty easy to imagine a minority of administrators on a space habitat decide they'll take some critical system hostage unless they get a bigger share of whatever they want because they think (perhaps legitimately) they've been the victim of some injustice... overplay their hand, critical system fails despite nobody actually intending it, millions of people in the habitat die. Or a million other ways for disaster to happen because of human reasons, not engineering ones.

Here on earth, even when societies devolve into civil war and massacre (e.g. Syria the past few years), at least they don't destroy the earth along with it. But with a space habitat, even a partial breakdown of order easily means everybody can just die.

So let me be clearer: I wouldn't just "like" to see us manage Earth better first. My point is that this may very likely actually prevent space habitats from being viable at all. "Accepting that this trend will continue" doesn't mean we'll make space habitats regardless -- it means accepting space habitats might not ever be thing (no matter how possible the engineering is), unless it ever happens that we first make enough massive progress in our forms of political organization and cooperation as well.

It's not impossible that 95% of the universe is boring.

2% of the human body is the brain, and while poetry is written about other body parts, the brain is the one doing all the writing.

Atoms are something like 0.05% electrons, but the interactions and behavior of the electrons account for almost all of the interesting parts, and with notably rare exceptions, the nuclei might as well be point charge/masses.

Just because there is a lot of dark matter and dark energy doesn't mean it will be particularly interesting in the long run.

IMO there isn't much of one, at least not enough for me to feel motivated to run Prime95 (the GIMPS client), but others may find the justifications here more convincing:

https://primes.utm.edu/notes/faq/why.html

I would think of compute resources "going to waste" in three separate groups:

- The baseline electricity the computer is using. This will get used and produce no S@H work either way (in an era where our computers didn't go to sleep)

- The added electricity to do S@H work. This certainly was not idle, but also was a relatively small amount relative to an entire household's use.

- The hardware itself.

I would say that S@H were making use of hardware that was "going to waste" (this is CAPEX the project didn't need to spend), was having volunteers donate the added electricity, and could be said to be making use of the baseline electricity inasmuch as it would be used either way, and if S@H were to set up their own compute cluster, they would also incur similar overhead.

I don't know what system efficiencies were like in the late 90's, but I would totally believe someone if they said "idle" was 40% the power consumption of "max usage". Using that number as an example, "donated electricity" gets (1/0.6=) 1.6x as much compute-per-watt as if it was donated to run an equivalent, dedicated, machine. Maybe you can convince yourself that you were using "idle cycles" and donating on top of that?