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SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

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Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#331

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

sunaurus wrote: post #239
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.)

I think you're using Occam's Razor incorrectly here. Here are all the facts: 1) There's an incomprehensibly large amount of stars and planets in the universe 2) On one of these planets (Earth), there are conditions which have lead to the appearance of life 3) These conditions are not unique to this planet We don't know of any fact that would exclude the possibility of life coming about on other planets with similar c…

Point 1 definitely isn't true. (Observable) space is actually tiny and young.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#332

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

evultrole wrote: post #305
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

OK, you know that whole big bang thing? That didn't start with a singularity the size of a golf ball, that was an infinitely large singularity that "exploded" and got bigger. The singularity was infinite. Space is infinity, but bigger. Everything you said is unsupportable

Like I said, I'm talking about observable space. Science only talks about things that can be observed (by definition), so as far as science is concerned, we must assume that we are alone in the (observable) universe until further evidence.

What's out there outside the observable universe is fun to speculate about, but it's armchair philosophy, not science. Maybe there's an infinite variety of life and somewhere out there right now Gandalf is wielding a light saber while riding a dinosaur. Maybe we're alone in the universe because the Earth so happens to sit right on the only information complexity singularity in the universe. (We really don't know anything about the information structure of the universe yet; all the "dude, the universe is really big" arguments assume that information is distributed uniformly across the universe, but this obviously doesn't match observed reality.)

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#333

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

speedplane wrote: post #213
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Like I said in another comment below - you're assuming information is distributed uniformly across the universe, which we don't really know and can't assume because it certainly isn't in the solar system.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#335

Post by justinclift »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #302
justinclift wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. You wouldn't believe the number of idiots that went around covertly attempting to run this (and similar) on the production Unix servers of their employer. Saying that as the lead Solaris SysAdmin for a large telco project a few decades ago, with one manager in particular who repeatedly kept on firing it up on the main (high end SunFire) billing cluster servers. Even when expressly told not to. That guy was a f*…

Nice attitude buddy, maybe the problem was you. Companies regularly waste 1000x more on executive salaries.

Heh Heh Heh. I knew someone would take that approach.

Put it this way. Explaining to the customer higher ups why that crap was running on their central billing cluster servers when an outage occurs and the place loses revenue ($mil's).

"Job ending" for the manager in question is a good description. ;)

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#336

Post by Vaanir »

ldayley wrote: post #3

Anectdata: I set up an old computer with this in 2009, but a few months later I heard about this thing called cryptocurrency mining... EDIT: The article notes that they are reaching a point of diminishing returns with the distributed nature of the SETI@HOME tasks, but I can't help wondering if things like crypto had an impact on participation with this and other @HOME-style academic projects[0]. [0]: https://boinc.be…

I was in a similar boat to you, except I set up my new i7 rig (at the time) for SETI@HOME because I couldn't get mining to work properly, or it kept crashing!

Remnants of my attempts are at home on my PC somewhere, there are no wallets from my searches of my drives :-(.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#337

Post by jerf »

crazygringo wrote: post #326
jerf wrote: post #313

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." You don't need "a system" for doing this. You only need one. 9,999 of 10,000 habitats could be staring into their naval, but the one building more will still be building more. So, I think you ought to flip the intuition around; it's not a question of keeping everyone…

You can see my other comment for clarification: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22480827 It's not about habitats coexisting with each other or not, it's about them imploding internally because people develop factions, compete for resources internally, threaten brinkmanship with critical systems, and eventually someone goes too far -- like people do all the time in countries all around the globe today. Except a c…

Yes, some of them will die in civil wars.

But not all of them. And the ones that survive have the opportunity to learn from the ones that didn't.

That's less different from Earth than you may think. We've witnessed entire countries collapsing even in the last few years. If it wasn't for Earth providing free air, reasonably cheap water, and not-that-difficult food even when your local political system collapses, nobody on Earth would even consider switching their country to run on Communism; rather than merely killing dozens of millions of people it would be witnessed as bringing total extinction to anyone who tried it.

Basically, evolution doesn't stop.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#339

Post by growt »

takeda wrote: post #315
growt wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I doubt cloud computing fits for their use case. They need constant power, and using "cloud" would be much more expensive than to have their own hardware (and of course even more expensive than using someone's else's computer). The reason why SETI@home is not popular anymore is because how our hardware adapted. Back in the days the CPUs were constantly operating at the same speed. So if you left your computer on, it…

You're right, that might be the real reason. But did they report a decline in users or cpu hours? What I thought of was more like Amazon, Google or Microsoft "donating" some idle instances, or something like that.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#340

Post by surge »

Considering how much carbon footprint it creates, I'm not sure the trade off was worth it. I'm happy they're shutting it down for now. Maybe once everyone is on renewables/cleaner energy sources it'd be a project worth restarting for using idle capacity.
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