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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

#281
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…

Haven't seen the channel but it's likely that there's other filters that we don't fully understand yet facing us in the future that prevents aliens from creating dyson swarms. Because I'm an eternal optimist I tend to think of these filters as very positive, things like finding alternative sources of energy to stars, or reclusing themselves in some VR utopia.

> or reclusing themselves in some VR utopia.

Interesting that you might consider that a positive outcome. My immediate reaction is that it would be a very negative one. It feels like giving up - "it's not great out here, we can't make it better, might as well plug in and pretend."

Maybe I'm making the same mistake as people trying to apply home ec budgeting to national economies; if I just dropped everything and started playing video games it would be bad, but the same might not be true for entire civilizations who are further up the Kardashev scale than humans.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#282

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…

Just wanted to say thx for writing a blogpost. Rare to see great history snippets left as a comment on HN with any link to a longer form content from the author’s perspective if one is curious.

Thanks for the kind words!

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#283
I find it quite funny that people still think that we'll "find" ETs by looking for them.

ETs gave us their DNA. They are our ancestors. Which is why "contact" has been a reality since "our beginning" on Earth.

Physical contact will (officially) happen when humanity is ready for it, measured by the maturity of our shared consciousness.

Marina Jacobi is among those who currently are in direct and constant telepathic contact with various groups of ETs. She often channels them (there are many others who do this too). Check out her Quantum Manifestation Series to learn about what's going on: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKaW-6KuhVvEIX-oRG7cBZQ

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#284
post #259
post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

“This site best viewed in Chrome”.

Dude, IE was Windows-only. It went against everything the open Internet standards advocated for. And on top of it, I was a Mac guy, and Mac IE was a completely different beast, so I had to code for Windows IE, Mac IE, then Safari and Firefox and eventually early Chrome. And Windows IE was always the motherfucker who you had to figure out these nasty CSS and JS hacks for to get, forget pixel-perfect, how about pixel-similar rendering vs. other browsers.

If you wanted pixel-perfect it was a fucking nightmare. Literally doubled your work time just to add WinIE compatibility. This was in the IE5/6/7 era.

Speaking of JS... all this was made worse because there were NO good JS libraries at the time to make things easier. Debugging consisted of alerts. Eventually, Prototype (and later Jquery) were literally godsends, and there was some JS lib (forgot the name) which added a reasonable debugger (this was before browsers themselves had reasonably good integrated debuggers!)

Chrome is not like that. The same rendering engine exists on Linux, Windows and Mac, and it has an open-source highly-compatible version, Chromium.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#285
post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Try designing an email newsletter for Outlook. Microsoft really hasn’t moved on that far.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#287
post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You spin them to create “gravity”, which is really just centrifugal force.

So what sort of geometry would they have, toroidal, cylindrical ? I was initially thinking you meant they would be spheres but I'm not sure how you would generate gravity on a sphere, unless only the equatorial region was inhabited.

The type of habitat he is describing is known as an O'Neil cylinder. The wikipedia page for the topic probably answers most questions you have about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O'Neill_cylinder

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#288
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We think it's different for us because the reversal in population growth is correlated with education and development levels. These are factors which aren't present in animal populations. If we lived in a world where every culture had achieved a certain level of education and development (and most all of them do want to get there), it's likely they would all have flat or declining populations. They might have to heav…

This seems to currently be a thing. It's a little premature to say it's going to apply to all cultures across all time. In fact I'd take the opposite side of that bet.

The thing is if there's any culture for which that's not true, like Mormons, Orthodox Jews, some groups of Muslims, whatever. In a few generations they replace the cultures that don't have a lot of children like our own. Then expansion continues.

I could see expansion slowing even reversing temporarily, but it seems hard to imagine it permanently ending.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#289

I find it quite funny that people still think that we'll "find" ETs by looking for them. ETs gave us their DNA. They are our ancestors. Which is why "contact" has been a reality since "our beginning" on Earth. Physical contact will (officially) happen when humanity is ready for it, measured by the maturity of our shared consciousness. Marina Jacobi is among those who currently are in direct and constant telepathic co…

...

This is HN -- you post unscientific crap and it will be called out -- that lady seems like a crackpot.

She does not channel or contact ET life.

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