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SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

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Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#241

Post by kubami »

eganist wrote: post #153
bashinator wrote: post #101

Earlier 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.

Ah! Athlons. My overclocking journey picked up when I built a DIY watercooler out of a bent 5mm cooper sheet (at which thickness you stop calling it "sheet"?) polished to a mirror finish. At some point, during the peak of easter european winter I kept the heat exchanger outside in the -20*C temperatures!

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#242

Post by dasKrokodil »

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…

> space habitats

What about gravity? Is it possible/feasible to have long-term habitats without any meaningful gravity?

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#244

Post by jacobwilliamroy »

dekhn wrote: post #117
dmurray wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could the average technically savvy user, let's say willing to use Google a bit but not to obtain a biochemistry degree, tell which subprojects are possible bioweapons? Not a rhetorical question.

Typically, there is a stated/intended plan for each project. This page lists active projects: https://apps.foldingathome.org/psummary Unfortunately, the project pages return a 502 but Google cache helps: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:q6DvOt... I'm going to guess that if you inspect each project it has a purported (positive) medical use and you'd have to make a judgement call on each project ba…

Thanks for answering my questions which were also not rhetorical.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#245

Post by Cthulhu_ »

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…

In the current political (capitalistic) climate, a project like this would only be pursued if there was a vested financial interest; they're pursuing visiting asteroids mainly to see if there's a lot of rare / valuable materials in them (e.g. platinum), and making getting into orbit cheaper for financial gains as well (decreasing costs, increasing volume; also, space tourism).

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#246

Post by Cthulhu_ »

gambiting wrote: post #198
cletus wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

Getting my sci-fi hat on here but, it would in theory be easier for them to pool their money together and buy / build their own spaceship. Of course, this assumes that each ship is its own political entity; in practice, we'll probably see the equivalent of countries and states but in space, spanning territories and jurisdictions that span multiple habitats.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#247

Post by Certhas »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #231
Certhas wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thi…

Lots of wild assumptions you have there...

I think my comment contains speculation that is labelled as such, and historical observations. What assumptions do you mean?

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#248

Post by salawat »

cletus wrote: post #176
crazygringo wrote: post #93

Earlier 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;

Mobile? Are we talking O'Neal Cylinders here? While yes, technically they will be mobile, I highly doubt the reaction mass requirements to actually move a constructed space habitat on the scale of maintaining as near to self-sufficiency as possible a city size population would be terribly practical, especially if everyone was doing it wantonly.

Keep in mind the effect as of late with Moore's Law in processors, and realize that the same phenomena is likely to happen with spaveflight in that yes, the technology will scale in capacity, but a great deal of that capacity may be expended in rendering the technology "more accessible" to the less specialized consumer as opposed to remaining in a state where you're actually optimizing for maximum throughput theoretically possible.

Cars/motorcycles would be another example of the same phenomena I'm trying to get across in that we're trading technically superior performance of the motorcycle (maximally efficient, yet relatively hard to control and severe to lose control of) vs. The relative safety and friendliness offered by a car to an less skilled user, even if lugging around all the extra metal eats into the overall efficiency of attaining movement of small packets of material from point A to point B via motion attained through internal combustion processes.

Never mind the political issues. I fail to entertain enough optimism to realistically expect even getting beyond the ISS-like stage of space habitation within my lifetime at the rate we're going, and fully expect climate/ecological breakdowns to start creating too much conflict to really keep us moving forward in a cooperation friendly regime.

I'd love to be proven wrong though.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#249

Post by jgehrcke »

Back then, I was quite young. Around 2002.

We were like 5 boys getting into overclocking. For our SETI team, the "Bücki crunching connection", from my small hometown in Germany.

I just tried to find an old screenshot from back in the day, and wow I found one, from 2002:

https://imgur.com/a/L5Q5PMR

So funny, it is all there: ICQ, mIRC; an icon to launch Quake III. And some SETI crunching stats. In Internet Explorer.

Seemingly we were actually crunching under one account for the team OC-CARD.de (http://www.setiatwork.com/team/teamstats.cgi?teamid=30308)

You might have done the same, but I am still sharing this because this has influenced me a lot:

I bought an AMD Duron, some arctic silver heat paste. I took a lead pencil to connect some dots on the CPU to unlock the multiplier freely, got a freaking heat sink, and overclocked the hell out of the Duron. I needed to hide this from my parents, but of course the plan was to crunch 24/7.

I found another screenshot, the file is called "duri@fsb133.jpg". Looks like I knew what I was doing:

https://imgur.com/a/eG9nmdO

Edit: looks like our team (OC-CARD.de) was actually among the top 200 of all SETI teams. Wow, yeah there were some serious people in the team, like "Butcho", ranking in the top 1000 of individuals. No idea who that guy was and where he got the compute resources from. That's the romantic part of that Internet era.

Edit2: turned this into a very quick blog post to properly archive my own memory here: https://gehrcke.de/2020/03/setihome-hibernation/

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#250

Post by pmarreck »

jgehrcke wrote: post #249

Back then, I was quite young. Around 2002. We were like 5 boys getting into overclocking. For our SETI team, the "Bücki crunching connection", from my small hometown in Germany. I just tried to find an old screenshot from back in the day, and wow I found one, from 2002: https://imgur.com/a/L5Q5PMR So funny, it is all there: ICQ, mIRC; an icon to launch Quake III. And some SETI crunching stats. In Internet Explorer. S…

I was a new web developer in that era and the bad taste in my mouth left by that era's Internet Exploiter is still strong. LOL. ugh.
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