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SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

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Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#261

Post by cletus »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #227
cletus wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if we step back a second, look at a Ringworld. I'm not sure if Larry Niven proposed this idea (in the book by the same name) or just popularized it, but the idea is basically this: If you take the mass of the Earth and turn it into a ring that encircles a star, spin it to create artificial gravity and put walls on the sides (on the inside) to keep an atmosphere in. What do you have? The same mass of Earth will hav…

Wait, isn't the force "that would tear it apart" the same as the gravity you wanted to generate?

An O’Neil Cylinder is a few miles wide. Stainless steel can handle the rotation required to create earth like gravity. If we can practically produce graphemes instead you can go up to several thousand miles in diameter (McKendree Cylinders). 1 AU in diameter is something else entirely.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#262

Post by simonh »

nr2x wrote: post #259
jtms wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Younger developers truly don’t understand the pain and suffering IE inflicted

“This site best viewed in Chrome”.

"This application is optimised for Chrome, but the default browser is Edge. Please cut and paste the following link into Chrome." Literally read this today.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#263

Post by patrickaljord »

nr2x wrote: post #259
jtms wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Younger developers truly don’t understand the pain and suffering IE inflicted

“This site best viewed in Chrome”.

Chrome is open source and available on all OS. Try running IE with flash and activex on linux in 1999. People today don't know how easy they have it :) (not saying you in particular).

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#264

Post by cletus »

mdorazio wrote: post #184
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but not for the reasons you outlined. Use Occam's Razor: there are no aliens. (Yes, I know I'm treading on some dearly-held religious beliefs now and will get lynched. Still, somebody had to say it.)

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…

> desire to communicate

This was my original point: you can’t hide a Dyson Swarm. It goes the other way too. You can’t really hide from a K2 civilization either.

We’re getting into Fermi Paradox territory here. The beauty of a lot of arguments here is that you don’t need to prove or even assume that civilizations will, on average, “hide” because it just takes one to be detected. So the arguments is actually “do ALL civilizations hide?”

This is a much harder argument to make.

> There could have been aliens nearby a million years ago that are now extinct or elsewhere

In Fermi Paradox terms, this questioned is framed as “is there a Great Filter ahead of us?” This question predictably has a lot of discussion. It’s hard to predict what that might be because even apocalyptic scenarios other than extreme bad luck (eg a nearby star going supernova) are unlikely to completely wipe us out at this point, even nuclear Armageddon.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#265

Post by growt »

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…

Perhaps, in the era of cloudcomputing, "crowdsourcing" computing power is no longer needed?

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#266

Post by MisterTea »

rootusrootus wrote: post #91
wtallis wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Indeed they were. I had that exact setup. Overclocked the hell out of them. Unlike the 550 MHz someone else suggested, I'm 97.6% sure I only had them clocked at 450 MHz.

I had a BP6 and remember 450 too (I may still have it tucked away somewhere). I think there was a 333 that could be pushed to 550 or something but not in SMP and I think it was slot 1 and not socket 370.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#267

Post by flopunctro »

dorgo wrote: post #221
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…

> but until we have a good story for fuel and waste processing then this is a nonstarter. Waste processing in space? Just give it a slight push in the direction of the sun (or whatever the right direction is taking in consideration gravity) and forget about it.

> a slight push in the direction of the sun

That's not how orbital dynamics work; a slight push in any direction won't change the orbit enough for that thing to not be a problem anymore.

To make something fall into the sun, one needs quite a bit of delta-vee, which means energy. However, if the thing isn't in any hurry (and I imagine waste isn't), one can simply attach a solar sail with a tiny computer for steering it, and let it brake for the next few thousand years.

(Kerbal Space Program should be part of school curricula)

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#268

Post by cletus »

Certhas wrote: post #207
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 con…

I don’t assume that. If however your goal is a digital existence then you still have energy as the limiting factor and the best way to maximize this is likely a Matrioshka Brain, which from far away is largely indistinguishable from a Dyson Swarm.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#269

Post by orbifold »

Balgair wrote: post #128
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…

This is based on the current knowledge of physics that we have. We know that it is fairly incomplete. ~5% of the universe is made of the stuff that you, I, a cloud, and the sun are made of. We understand this stuff very well, in terms of cosmic scale stuff. ~20% of the universe if made of dark matter. We know that this stuff falls down and really doesn't do anything else. Does it interact with itself, with us, can we…

I would say that while the above numbers are certainly the current academic consensus, what also is part of the consensus is that this missing matter is interacting weakly and at very high energies. So for all intends and purposes it is mostly irrelevant baring some unforeseen breakthrough that lets us interact with it more strongly (for the same reason everything but the electric force is kind of irrelevant from an engineering perspective).
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