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SETI@home is in hiberation
11–20 of 145 posts
Re: SETI@home is in hiberation
#12Re: SETI@home is in hiberation
#13I remember feeling like a right scientific benefactor running the SETI@Home screensaver on my Pentium II, looking at the fancy graphs. Was it all for nothing?
The fact that all SETI endeavors haven’t really found anything is actually a very valuable result, because it constrains “they’re everywhere, we just haven’t been looking” arguments quite a bit.
Even humanity’s (weak) radio emissions would be detectable from tens of light years away, and stronger emissions from much further. So the idea that intelligent life is absolutely everywhere that was liberally tossed around a few decades ago is pretty much on life support now.
Re: SETI@home is in hiberation
#14The 14 year old me wondering if aliens were being discovered on my pentium 4 feels like the answer maybe out there. BOINC and SETI.
Re: SETI@home is in hiberation
#15I remember feeling like a right scientific benefactor running the SETI@Home screensaver on my Pentium II, looking at the fancy graphs. Was it all for nothing?
Well it led to the creation of BOINC, a distributed computing system that probably has led to scientific advances in other fields
So I wouldn’t say it was all for nothing, but it’s main benefit was the idea, and not the results it generated
Re: SETI@home is in hiberation
#16[deleted]
Re: SETI@home is in hiberation
#17It looks like folding@home is still going https://foldingathome.org/
I'm quite surprised these are still around as I hadn't seen them mentioned in so long.
I always assumed the phase out of screensavers (and introduction of CPU low power modes) were terminal for them.
Re: SETI@home is in hiberation
#18Wait, they have been in hibernation for almost several years, why to publish it now?
It just completed. Published paper. Final release & final analysis: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ade5ab/...
TLDR of jve's AI comment:
You know of this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal
SETI at Home was a screensaver that was looking for signals like that via distributed searching and they didn't find anything (but they do have telescope time for tackling the 92 highest priority follow-up scans).
Re: SETI@home is in hiberation
#19Contributing resources to a scientific experiment aligns contributions with outcomes, since getting a hit is knowledge that everyone benefits from: the result (including a negative result) is in the public domain and benefits everyone to know. In this case, the result is that after 20 years of distributed search, no plausible ET signal was found and verified. That's good to know!
Re: SETI@home is in hiberation
#20I rebuilt my PII system last year and really wanted to run SAH on it for old time's sake but sadly that hasn't been possible for a long time. I miss watching that old screensaver and optimising the system performance so I could get through a WU in less time, iirc at the time it took about 18 hours each.