Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

bleepingcomputer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 356 posts

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#211

Post by Tostino »

cosmodisk wrote: post #194
cptskippy wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I was right along with you when I was helping my parents pick out their next PC purchase, a p3 450, and from then on just consumed every single cpu article and review I could find, so much knowledge that I picked up about the computer industry in general has helped me later in my career.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#212

Post by Razengan »

Just the other day I saw a post about the current status [0] of the Voyager probes, the farthest man-made objects that we have sent out so far. [1]

It made me wonder about the possibility of an alien species discovering them. Probably infinitesimal, barring divine intervention. I mean, what are the chances of us stumbling upon similar probes sent out by another species who had no idea we were here? Do we even have the tech to detect something so small entering our solar system, even if it were to pass close to Earth?

[0] https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_objects_lea...

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#213

Post by speedplane »

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…

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

If something can only be proven to a 99.999999% certainty, is that still "unscientific"? What if scientists predict something happening with only 0.1% chance, for example the likelihood of a particular asteroid hitting earth? Or what about 60%, like a typical weather report predicting rain.

Generally, the high, low, or intermediate likelihood of some event happening does not make it unscientific.

While it would be unscientific to simply say that aliens exist, it's plenty scientific to consider the rate of star formation and age, conditions for life around stars, and time it takes to develop intelligent life to say that there is a particular likelihood of there being alien life.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#214

Post by Random_ernest »

retrac wrote: post #164
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…

I don't think you even have to go that far. Modern encrypted spread-spectrum digital radio would have looked like random noise until quite recently. I'm not sure if you'd pointed all the technology and all the brilliant minds that existed in 1930, at a modern cellular tower, that they'd have recognized the signals to be coming from a technological civilization. In another century we'll no doubt be hugging the noise f…

> Modern encrypted spread-spectrum digital radio would have looked like random noise until quite recently

Topics like this are discussed in Stanislaw Lems, Masters voice novel. A really good read.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#216

Post by TomMarius »

talonx wrote: post #150
cptskippy wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Duron Now there's a name I haven't heard in a while. Duron, the poorerer man's Celeron.

You meant poorer, I presume. Poorerer might be something in a calculator?

The celeron was for the poorer. ;-)

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#217

Post by BlueTemplar »

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

Some would just have been faulty units : tried to turn my tri-core into a 4-core, but it didn't work...

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#218

Post by Certhas »

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.

This is simple linear thinking and a lack of imagination. As well as empirically wrong. Population expansion in humans ended because our culture adapted to the end of child mortality. Actually the massive expansion we saw and see was because culture took a few generations to do so. As soon as we conquer mortality as such our culture will shift again.

And that is only thinking about the impact of tech we might see this century.

Exponential growth is really a phenomenon of transitions. We are in a very rapid 10.000 year transition from biological system to cultural system. This transition accelerated further in the last two centuries. If we think about the end point of this transition it should be a system that is entirely defined by its culture rather than by its biology. Maybe even completely away from its biology. It's fun but idle to speculate what that culture will be like, but if experiences can be shared as easily as text today, what is the value of having billions of copies of similar experiences? What _is_ an individual in that situation?

Even if we accept your simple expansion/competition/ressources based model of reality* (and I see no reason we should) maybe combining consciousnesses leads to much better results. Maybe expansion will look like ever increasing use of energy resources to enable larger consciousness rather than maintaining more animal bodies.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#219

Post by BlueTemplar »

schoen wrote: post #131
hermitdev wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I first got my i7 6-core with quad GTX-690s (2 GPUs per card), I naively let Seti@Home run rampant when the computer was idle. Room they were in got up to around 90F when I let it run 100%. Sad to see they're shutting down.

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…

If you use an electric radiator for heating, might as well use that electricity to compute something worthwhile !

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#220

Post by layoric »

wtallis wrote: post #35
alliao wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Celeron 300A, the relative poorer man's Pentium

Weren't they also supported by the Abit BP6 motherboard, letting you use two of them as poorer man's Xeons?

+1 here who had the Abit BP6 dual celery setup. Had a pair of 400s running at close to 500 all the time. Both were lapped down to copper running FEP32 global win coolers. The wonders of Windows 2000 gaming machine with the GeForce 256 which was quickly followed by a GeForce 2 GTS upgrade as soon as it game out. Running quake on one CPU and no stutter MP3s on priority on the other. Good times.
Post reply on HN