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SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

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Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#171

Post by eloff »

aeternum wrote: post #102
cletus wrote: post #80

Not to sound like a broken record (I and others have said this or similar on these kinds of threads) but... I, personally, have become convinced that looking for signals this way is actually pointless. The argument is basically this: 1. Within 1000 years (and maybe a lot less) we will have the engineering capability to build space habitats, powered by solar power. This last part is important because this thought expe…

We may have the technology to create massive habitats in the near future, but what if we do not have the need. Population is projected to plateau in the near future. What if those habitats exist but just are not observable since they are quite small compared to their stars / planets?

Isaac Arthur deals with this at length in his videos. Those projections are unlikely to hold for long. Cultures that don't expand will quickly be replaced by those who do and the process continues. Population expansion is limited only really by resources.

You see this in all other species, but we somehow think it's different for us. That remains to be seen.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#172

Post by andai »

viraptor wrote: post #145
dylan604 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>3. Space habitats are more convenient and cheaper to move between than leaving or even entering a gravity well like Earth's. I have always thought that this would be a much more efficient way of living off Earth. Sci-fi wants us to believe that we can teraform planets. All they ever talk about are the atmosphere generators. However, they never address the reason the planet didn't have an atmosphere to begin with. To…

Why magnetic shields? If the planet is large enough, you get gravity for free. If not, a magnetic field wouldn't help with atmosphere. (Or am I missing something?)

I think it's for solar and cosmic radiation.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#173

Post by ngcc_hk »

dylan604 wrote: post #92
Ice_cream_suit wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pencil trick: "Unlocking the Duron and Athlon Using [a] Pencil Hold your CPU in your left hand and look very closely at the CPU, so as to clearly see the L1 bridges. Use a business card to separate the bridges so that you do not connect the L1 bridges to each other. Work your way across the bridges from left to right (using a business card as a separation tool) and connect the bridges by rubbing the pencil back a…

I had never heard of this trick. I love it though. Reminds me of using a hole punch to make a double sided floppy disk from a cheaper priced single sided floppy.[0] Of course there was the AMD multi-core CPUs that had some of the cores disabled via software and sold at cheaper prices. Of course there were software hacks available to re-enable those cores. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-sided_disk

Wow! Old man and the puncher ... those were the days.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#174

Post by lokedhs »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #138

I ran it on the weekend once on the queue at Disney animation, maybe a hundred CPUs on SGI Origins. Went from zero to top ten-ish percentile in a half hour or so. Good times until I got a stern talking to by some systems guy.

Back in the day when I was working at Sun, a script was set up that people were running on their workstations all over the world. It set up the Seti at Home client and link it to a single account. It was very popular, and some people were running it on the most powerful lab servers they had. Sun was trading places with SGI for the number one spot for a while.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#175

Post by andai »

wongarsu wrote: post #71
thaumasiotes wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Folding@Home trying to run an asymmetrical computation, though? The broad strokes as I understand them are that you have a sequence of amines, you arrange them into a three-dimensional protein (the hard part) by whatever method, and then you evaluate the energy bound within your structure (the easier part?). Lower energy is better. The obvious problem is that there's no judgment of "correct" or "incorrect". Ana…

Protein folding might work as a proof-of-work algorithm. One big problem is of course that it's useful work that could conceivably be monetized. Proof-of-work works because a theoretical attacker would have to invest huge resources into an attack. For bitcoin it's trivial to say "for attack scenario X an attack has to spend at least Y", and as long as the expected reward is lower than Y the network is safe (that's fo…

Isn't "maybe I can monetize this protein" less of a sure bet than "I can rewrite these transactions" ?

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#176

Post by cletus »

crazygringo wrote: post #93
cletus wrote: post #80

Not to sound like a broken record (I and others have said this or similar on these kinds of threads) but... I, personally, have become convinced that looking for signals this way is actually pointless. The argument is basically this: 1. Within 1000 years (and maybe a lot less) we will have the engineering capability to build space habitats, powered by solar power. This last part is important because this thought expe…

That's a fascinating comment, thank you. I personally suspect the engineering challenges might pale next to the challenges of political organization. Quite simply, the continued human expertise and organization necessary to manage and sustain such a system is far, far beyond anything we have today. We can't even manage to globally reduce CO2, and the recent government responses to coronavirus have led a lot to be des…

> Quite simply, the continued human expertise and organization necessary to manage and sustain such a system is far, far beyond anything we have today.

I get your concern but the differences are significant.

1. Habitats are mobile. If you don't like the neighbours you can up and move, something not possible with geography on Earth;

2. Land area is essentially infinite, not so on Earth.

> We can't even manage to globally reduce CO2

On the contrary, excessive CO2 is, at least in some context, a remarkably simple problem. We can extract CO2 from the atmosphere and make fuel. It just doesn't make any sense to do it because we need to burn fossil fuels to power the process.

So all we really need is a power source that's cheaper than fossil fuels. There are two obvious contenders for this:

1. Solar power. Estimates I've seen are that an orbital collector can be about 7 times as efficient as current Earth-based solar collectors.

2. Fusion power. Personally I'm not yet convinced if hydrogen fusion is viable. There are of course other proposals. We shall see.

You'll note that I don't include fission. It's an unpopular opinion on HN but until we have a good story for fuel and waste processing then this is a nonstarter.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#177

Post by apatters »

eloff wrote: post #171
aeternum wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We may have the technology to create massive habitats in the near future, but what if we do not have the need. Population is projected to plateau in the near future. What if those habitats exist but just are not observable since they are quite small compared to their stars / planets?

Isaac Arthur deals with this at length in his videos. Those projections are unlikely to hold for long. Cultures that don't expand will quickly be replaced by those who do and the process continues. Population expansion is limited only really by resources. You see this in all other species, but we somehow think it's different for us. That remains to be seen.

We think it's different for us because the reversal in population growth is correlated with education and development levels. These are factors which aren't present in animal populations.

If we lived in a world where every culture had achieved a certain level of education and development (and most all of them do want to get there), it's likely they would all have flat or declining populations. They might have to heavily subsidize reproduction just to sustain themselves and all this talk about building space habitats would be even more abstract than it is today.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#178

Post by suby »

dylan604 wrote: post #169
Beldin wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sci-fi wants us to believe that we can teraform planets. Given or current sample size of 1, clearly we can. It's the part where the teraforming produces a more habitable planet that we haven't gotten down yet. But hey, this is only or first attempt!

I'm sorry, what? Are you claiming we have created a livable atmosphere on another planet? Where? Which one? Are you talking about Earth? Humans did not create the Earth's atmosphere. We can barely "fix" the damage we do to it. "Fixing" is not creating.

He is saying that we are currently transformong the earth's atmosphere into a less hospitable one through a process of pollution / emitting greenhouse gases.

In my view, given that we can do this, it is not unreasonble to assume that one day we will know enough to be able to tweak a planet's habitability in the opposite direction, or in other words, make an inhabitable planet habitable.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#179

Post by cletus »

solstice wrote: post #103
cletus wrote: post #80

Not to sound like a broken record (I and others have said this or similar on these kinds of threads) but... I, personally, have become convinced that looking for signals this way is actually pointless. The argument is basically this: 1. Within 1000 years (and maybe a lot less) we will have the engineering capability to build space habitats, powered by solar power. This last part is important because this thought expe…

Interesting. If I understand you correctly, you are saying that it makes more sense to look for large IR sources (without accompanying visible light), instead of looking for radio signals. Correct?

Correct. The signature of a large Dyson Swarm would be hard to mistake, particularly for anything natural, at least anything we've seen thus far.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#180

Post by redis_mlc »

6nf wrote: post #105
redis_mlc wrote: post #62

I always told people to do mersenne prime search instead of s@h. https://www.mersenne.org/

Why is this better than SETI? What's the purpose of finding mersenne primes

> Why is this better than SETI? What's the purpose of finding mersenne primes

I hope you're kidding ...

We will probably never find or communicate with ET, so the effort is a waste of time and resources. Space is just too big.

But interesting numbers are already known to be valuable in group theory, encryption, and other areas. Golomb numbers are used today, for example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golomb_ruler

And my standard disclaimer for technological illiterates: "It's not all about you."

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