I ran it on my android and had contributed from almost past 3 years.
SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
141–150 of 356 posts
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#142I remember being a younger pup and building fleets of machines (including overclocking, etc) for the sole purpose of running S@H, and all of the amazing software the spun up around it... SetiSpy, SetiDriver, SetiQ. I often wonder how machines of today would compare in work production to my old Duron 800, but alas.
When I first got my i7 6-core with quad GTX-690s (2 GPUs per card), I naively let Seti@Home run rampant when the computer was idle. Room they were in got up to around 90F when I let it run 100%. Sad to see they're shutting down.
I'm surprised it lasted so long, the idle computer donation made way more sense back when processors didn't really change power consumption or downclock.
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#143Not 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…
I think this kind of thinking is roughly analogous to "why buy a phone now, when the latest model will be released next year"? Or, perhaps more on-topic, "why do any astronomical observation with this telescope when we will have a better one in a few years"?
I think the viability of efficient is a big "if", and will depends on a lot of factors (not just engineering ones, also social, environmental, and economical ones).
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It's not impossible that 95% of the universe is boring. 2% of the human body is the brain, and while poetry is written about other body parts, the brain is the one doing all the writing. Atoms are something like 0.05% electrons, but the interactions and behavior of the electrons account for almost all of the interesting parts, and with notably rare exceptions, the nuclei might as well be point charge/masses. Just bec…
I mean, that's my point. There's nothing to say it won't be very interesting. We just don't know yet.
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#145Not 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…
>3. Space habitats are more convenient and cheaper to move between than leaving or even entering a gravity well like Earth's. I have always thought that this would be a much more efficient way of living off Earth. Sci-fi wants us to believe that we can teraform planets. All they ever talk about are the atmosphere generators. However, they never address the reason the planet didn't have an atmosphere to begin with. To…
Why magnetic shields? If the planet is large enough, you get gravity for free. If not, a magnetic field wouldn't help with atmosphere. (Or am I missing something?)
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#146did they find anything?
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the late 90s I had a 486sx33 with one of those Cyrix 586 upgrade chips for the math co-processor slot. It was so hot it had a fan on it! Crazy! I also maxed out the RAM to 32mb and upgrade the SRAM in my Trident video card so I could do 256 color in Windows 95. I also had a 40mb Erwin Tape Drive for backing up my 100mb HDD. It wasn't fast but it was faster than reinstalling Tie Fighter from Floppies.
My first was an AMD 286 @ 12MHz, still have it in a cigar box somewhere.
Started with a zx81, graduated to a 286 with a whopping 2MB RAM, which was really really much, but at a time when everyone else was getting 386s.
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
You make the case that political issues haven’t changed much isn’t he past 2400 years, but then go on to say you’d like to see us manage things here at home before expanding into space? Those seem to be in conflict to me. I do agree that human engineering has developed far faster than human politics, but I think we need to just accept that this trend will continue.
The conflict is exactly what I'm pointing out. It's pretty easy to imagine a minority of administrators on a space habitat decide they'll take some critical system hostage unless they get a bigger share of whatever they want because they think (perhaps legitimately) they've been the victim of some injustice... overplay their hand, critical system fails despite nobody actually intending it, millions of people in the h…
While I see your point, it should be noted that we are perfectly capable of killing everyone on Earth as well. The only reason this hasn't happened is because the whole world came together to be more sensible[1] about nuclear conflicts than we were about less destructive conflicts, and because of a good deal of dumb luck. And killing everyone on Earth will only ever get easier as technology advances. At least a distributed civilisation means one community self-destructing doesn't mean the end of humanity.
[1] Not a high bar, and not by much. Nevertheless, we are still (barely) here.
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#149And how many aliens did they discover?
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#150I remember being a younger pup and building fleets of machines (including overclocking, etc) for the sole purpose of running S@H, and all of the amazing software the spun up around it... SetiSpy, SetiDriver, SetiQ. I often wonder how machines of today would compare in work production to my old Duron 800, but alas.
> Duron Now there's a name I haven't heard in a while. Duron, the poorerer man's Celeron.
You meant poorer, I presume. Poorerer might be something in a calculator?