SETI@home is in hibernation

SETI @ home is run by the SETI Institute. As a participant in SETI @ home, your only contribution is your computing power.

The SETI League has a much more interesting program called "project Argus": http://www.setileague.org/argus/

Its a distributed version of SETI at home whereas you own and control your own receiver. Its run by folks in the amateur radio community. It was launched in the late 90's before the advancements of SDRs and has alot of potential today. Its truly an open source initiative which is what SETI should be.

You might say "a backyard radio telescope cannot compare to Arecibo or the Allen Array". In terms of antenna gain you are right, but right now, the Allen Array can only look in a few directions simultaneously and Arecibo is a pile of rubble. Many smaller telescopes is better than nothing.

Any radio telescope that exists can compare favorably to Arecibo, actually.

> A modern phone could last weeks as a browsing device, if looking at static html

That's what I do. Weeks is a bit of a stretch. Maybe one of screen time is limited. That said, discord (the website) drains my laptop battery almost as fast as gaming does. They do spawn a separate WebGL context for each animated emoticon. Crazy, crazy thing

> Put another way, people concerned about power usage, should realise that using node, means burning more coal/NG. Literally.

Sure. At the same time, though, a single car trip to the movies burns orders of magnitude more energy than all your gadgets running JS for an year.

Just because they had already been made doesn't mean that you using them has no impact on the world. If you hadn't used them then other people would have, there would be less demand for GPUs, and fewer GPUs would be made in future.

You're clearly smart enough to understand that; you just don't want to because it makes you feel guilty. Honestly I think you should just own it. I assume you made a suitably large amount of money? I can't say I wouldn't have done the same but I hope I would have the honesty to admit I basically burnt down a forest to take money from idiots.

> If is really interesting to me how people have some sort of moral obligation to tell others how to spend energy.

It's almost as if we all live on the same planet and the way we spend energy affects other people!

As someone with a background in both physics and psychology, I appreciate your skepticism. However, it's crucial to recognize that human knowledge and imagination are often the limiting factors in our understanding of the universe.

The Alcubierre Warp Drive, for example, is a theoretically plausible solution to surmounting intergalactic distances in normal lifetimes, although it remains practically impossible for now: https://phys.org/news/2017-01-alcubierre-warp.html. A recent paper proposes an update using solitons: https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.07125. Additionally, research on wormholes, such as Kip Thorne's work on traversable wormholes, highlights another potential avenue for interstellar travel, despite the current theoretical and practical limitations.

Throughout history, many seemingly insurmountable barriers have been overcome through the power of imagination and human innovation. For example:

1. Lord Kelvin, a prominent physicist, claimed that heavier-than-air flying machines were impossible, but the Wright brothers proved otherwise with the first successful airplane flight in 1903.

2. Ernest Rutherford, the father of nuclear physics, once declared that extracting energy from atoms was "moonshine" – yet nuclear power plants are now a reality.

3. The concept of continental drift, proposed by Alfred Wegener, was initially ridiculed, but it eventually led to the widely accepted theory of plate tectonics.

These examples demonstrate how scientific progress often hinges on the ability to challenge prevailing beliefs and imagine new possibilities. Our current understanding of the universe is based on mental models that have evolved over time and will continue to change. Newtonian physics, once considered the gold standard, was later expanded upon by the revolutionary theories of relativity and quantum mechanics, paving the way for previously "impossible" phenomena.

At the American Physical Society's Division of Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics (DAMOP) meeting, for instance, researchers discuss groundbreaking experiments and theories that would have been considered absurd just decades ago. Quantum entanglement, superposition, and teleportation, which were once mere theoretical constructs, are now supported by empirical evidence and even employed in emerging technologies like quantum computing.

In conclusion, while skepticism is a healthy part of the scientific process, it's essential not to dismiss the potential for extraterrestrial intelligence or advanced interstellar travel based solely on our current understanding of the universe. Our collective imagination and the relentless pursuit of knowledge have historically expanded the boundaries of what was once considered impossible, and there's no reason to believe this trend will cease.