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SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

bleepingcomputer.com

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Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#201

Post by kolinko »

patrickyeon wrote: post #139
schoen wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

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…

I may be wrong but back in 90s an idle processor used up just as much electricity as an actively computing one.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#202

Post by gambiting »

shartshooter wrote: post #7

I can remember my high school science teacher sometime between 2001-2002 telling us about this project and you'd see this running on his computer any time he wasn't using it. I always wondered what came out of it and how cool it felt to feel like you could, as an individual, help support something massive by doing something so small.

>>I always wondered what came out of it and how cool it felt to feel like you could, as an individual, help support something massive by doing something so small.

You can still participate in Folding@Home, which in my opinion is a far more worthy pursuit - actual medical science came out of it and more is still being produced.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#203

Post by fergie »

I remember everybody at my work (Software Engineering) setting this up in 2002. The idea was kind of obvious, but at the same time so far ahead of its time.

It would be great if a similar project was set up to provide everyday, real world services like, say, internet search, or a distributed S3 clone.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#204

Post by zelphirkalt »

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…

I find this comment actually more insightful than the GP.

How often have I talked with people and mentioned, that in terms of social behavior, we make such slow progress, if any. If we could end human greed and other bad things, how easy it woule be for us to go to space. If money did not count and all would work for a great goal of advancing into space, we would be there already.

What many call "human nature" (which I do not believe) is what holds us back.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#205

Post by PappaPatat »

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.

18 years ago I ran it for months in the off hours on all the companies servers in one datacenter (about 500 which was quite a lot at that time). Fun times.

Impressive that they survived for so long!

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#206

Post by 6510 »

ravenstine wrote: post #8

In case anyone reads the headline and thinks that the SETI research center itself is shutting down, or that the project failed in some way: > "It's a lot of work for us to manage the distributed processing of data. We need to focus on completing the back-end analysis of the results we already have, and writing this up in a scientific journal paper," their news announcement stated. Maybe it's PR speak, but it does mak…

Bonic is not shutting down either.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#207

Post by Certhas »

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…

The question is, why do you assume that advanced civilization would maintain 10^18 animal bodies to carry around brains? That's ridiculously inefficient. It's also unclear why you would expect an advanced civilization to be built on a large number of individuals either. That, too is derived from an animal impulse to procreate and maybe a reaction to mortality. Say that in the next thousand years we manage to move consciousness off body, and the experiences enabled by this make the greatest drug trips obsolete by comparison. Why would we choose to build space habitats for bodies when we could build space ships that use a fraction of the energy but allow us to explore the galaxy by slowing down the rate of experience.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#208

Post by mnsc »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #190
mdorazio wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a bit too broad of a statement to be plausible. It's likely there are no aliens near us in time, space, technology, and desire to communicate to make such a search fruitful right now. There could very well be aliens on the other side of the galaxy that we can't see. There could have been aliens nearby a million years ago that are now extinct or elsewhere. There could be aliens right now that are pre-industrial…

Okay, let me qualify: there are no aliens in the visible universe. Of course what exists or doesn't exist in the universe that's not visible is pure unscientific speculation; might as well be made of blue cheese as far as science is concerned. > Space is ridiculously big. The universe is ridiculously old. This isn't true. Mathematical concepts of infinities and limits are "ridiculously big". Space is finite and thus…

> Yes, I know I'm treading on some dearly-held religious beliefs ....

> what exists or doesn't exist in the universe that's not visible is pure unscientific speculation

I don't see anyone saying that the existence of aliens aren't speculation or that "aliens exists" (or your: "aliens don't exist") isn't just a personal belief as stupid to argue about as religion. But as countless wars have shown, people (like you) will try to create conflict from differing personal beliefs. Just because you drop "Occam's razor" doesn't make your belief the correct one.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#210

Post by speedplane »

fareesh wrote: post #209

I am sure there will be no conspiracy theories from this news

> I am sure there will be no conspiracy theories from this news

Well, yeah, because the government and military industrial complex censored all of it. But don't worry, Q Anon will figure it out for us.

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