why is it?
SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
191–200 of 356 posts
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 globa…
>> We can't even manage to globally reduce CO2
> On the contrary, excessive CO2 is, at least in some context, a remarkably simple problem.
I would argue that even though we have the technical skill, the fact we do not have the political capacity is a significant problem.
Given where humans came from, I’m sometimes surprised that our political thought processes functions at all on groups as large as cities, never mind nations or the plant as a whole. While I would like to hope that scaling it to the size of a Dyson swarm or larger would be fine, even at the level of one planet we do keep repeating cycles of genocides followed by people saying “never again” followed by more genocides elsewhere.
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
I once overclocked one with a pencil. Just connected the solder points between some leads on the CPU package.
Seems to have been a fairly common trick with the Durons. I sadly never experienced the rush of trying it mostly because Athlons and PIIIs were all I'd ever played with when the 1ghz chips started coming out, but this was probably what made the Durons so attractive to student hackers. https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=840954 Tangent: I love that I can pull up forum threads from two decades ago.
I remember when I got my first free 1ghz PIII machine in high school. This was like 2009. Huge difference from my 450mhz PIII machine.
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#194I remember being a younger pup and building fleets of machines (including overclocking, etc) for the sole purpose of running S@H, and all of the amazing software the spun up around it... SetiSpy, SetiDriver, SetiQ. I often wonder how machines of today would compare in work production to my old Duron 800, but alas.
> Duron Now there's a name I haven't heard in a while. Duron, the poorerer man's Celeron.
Those were the days when I could give full specs for 20 or so CPUs off top of my head.Good times.
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?)
The magnetic shield has nothing to do with trying to keep people on the surface. The Earth's magnetic Van Allen belts deflect most of the sun's nasty radiation streaming at the planet. These belts are created by the molten iron core of the planet. Mars no longer has this magnetic shield, and the sun's radiation burned off the atmosphere. If we generate new atmosphere, it will just get burned off again unless we can g…
Aren’t most terraforming estimation put the time frame of atmosphere erosion at a few 100M years?
If we you can create an atmosphere it should last for a long enough period to be worth it, heck it might outlast humanity.
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I think you are getting downvoted for your tone. I wondered the same thing as the parent post. I genuinely don’t about mersenne primes.
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#197"For those who wish to donate their CPU resources, SETI@home suggests users select another BOINC project that also supports distributed computing." https://boinc.berkeley.edu/projects.php I loved the concept of SETI@home and ran it on a bunch of computers at my university when I was a student.
I just bought a powerful mac mini, but due to other projects arising, it sits idle. I am curious if anyone has suggestions.
I looked through a dozen or so BOINC projects, but they all seem dead. The amicable pairs project had some 2020 results and activity in its forum, but I couldn’t draw a line to any practical goal.
That said, maybe the sorts of projects that have practical outcomes don’t need to rely on the computing power of strangers.
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 globa…
>>1. Habitats are mobile. If you don't like the neighbours you can up and move, something not possible with geography on Earth;
That relies on the assumption that people within a single habitat wouldn't want to separate for whatever reason. Nation within a nation. It already happens on Earth(see: Catalonia, Taiwan, Hong-Kong, Silesia).
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#199I remember being a younger pup and building fleets of machines (including overclocking, etc) for the sole purpose of running S@H, and all of the amazing software the spun up around it... SetiSpy, SetiDriver, SetiQ. I often wonder how machines of today would compare in work production to my old Duron 800, but alas.
> Duron Now there's a name I haven't heard in a while. Duron, the poorerer man's Celeron.
Which itself was the poorer man's Pentium.
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
The magnetic shield has nothing to do with trying to keep people on the surface. The Earth's magnetic Van Allen belts deflect most of the sun's nasty radiation streaming at the planet. These belts are created by the molten iron core of the planet. Mars no longer has this magnetic shield, and the sun's radiation burned off the atmosphere. If we generate new atmosphere, it will just get burned off again unless we can g…
Aren’t most terraforming estimation put the time frame of atmosphere erosion at a few 100M years? If we you can create an atmosphere it should last for a long enough period to be worth it, heck it might outlast humanity.
That still doesn't solve the radiation problem(at least on mars). What's the point of colonizing Mars if we'd all have to live underground anyway? Might as well try doing that on Earth(or the Moon) first.