161–170 of 356 posts
https://boinc.berkeley.edu/projects.php
I loved the concept of SETI@home and ran it on a bunch of computers at my university when I was a student.
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The pencil trick: "Unlocking the Duron and Athlon Using [a] Pencil Hold your CPU in your left hand and look very closely at the CPU, so as to clearly see the L1 bridges. Use a business card to separate the bridges so that you do not connect the L1 bridges to each other. Work your way across the bridges from left to right (using a business card as a separation tool) and connect the bridges by rubbing the pencil back a…
I had never heard of this trick. I love it though. Reminds me of using a hole punch to make a double sided floppy disk from a cheaper priced single sided floppy.[0] Of course there was the AMD multi-core CPUs that had some of the cores disabled via software and sold at cheaper prices. Of course there were software hacks available to re-enable those cores. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-sided_disk
With 16 GB and a SATA3 controller or PCIE-to-NVMe adapter it would still be a respectable performer today, in spite of the DDR2.
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The projects Primecoin and Riecoin are digital currencies that try to provide proof of work algorithms with (somewhat) scientific value.
There's GridCoin, as well, which utilizes BOINC for work units.
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…
Modern encrypted spread-spectrum digital radio would have looked like random noise until quite recently. I'm not sure if you'd pointed all the technology and all the brilliant minds that existed in 1930, at a modern cellular tower, that they'd have recognized the signals to be coming from a technological civilization.
In another century we'll no doubt be hugging the noise floor even more closely. It's not hard to imagine that even if alien civilizations are broadcasting omnidirectionally all around us, that we're simply too primitive to bother targeting with a message. Why waste the effort when you'd be able to communicate so much more information, and more efficiently, by targeting just a slightly higher baseline of receiving technology?
No Aliens found unfortunately :(
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2002-01-23/plea-agre...
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>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?)
The Earth's magnetic Van Allen belts deflect most of the sun's nasty radiation streaming at the planet. These belts are created by the molten iron core of the planet. Mars no longer has this magnetic shield, and the sun's radiation burned off the atmosphere. If we generate new atmosphere, it will just get burned off again unless we can generate some way of deflecting that radiation.
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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…
Just in mass. In volume(orbitals), electric charge, importance for chemistry, the proportions are way different.
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>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…
> Sci-fi wants us to believe that we can teraform planets. Given or current sample size of 1, clearly we can. It's the part where the teraforming produces a more habitable planet that we haven't gotten down yet. But hey, this is only or first attempt!