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SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

bleepingcomputer.com

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Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#231

Post by BlueTemplar »

Certhas wrote: post #218
eloff wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isaac Arthur deals with this at length in his videos. Those projections are unlikely to hold for long. Cultures that don't expand will quickly be replaced by those who do and the process continues. Population expansion is limited only really by resources. You see this in all other species, but we somehow think it's different for us. That remains to be seen.

This is simple linear thinking and a lack of imagination. As well as empirically wrong. Population expansion in humans ended because our culture adapted to the end of child mortality. Actually the massive expansion we saw and see was because culture took a few generations to do so. As soon as we conquer mortality as such our culture will shift again. And that is only thinking about the impact of tech we might see thi…

Lots of wild assumptions you have there...

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#232

Post by Yizahi »

Balgair wrote: post #128
cletus wrote: post #80

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…

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…

Only dark energy and matter are just a placeholders really. We aren't sure they exist, we are just seeing that our calculations are off without obvious reason.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#233

Post by playworker »

bashinator wrote: post #101
therein wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment made me nod my head in agreement, laugh and also experience a wave of nostalgia. All at once.

I once overclocked one with a pencil. Just connected the solder points between some leads on the CPU package.

I remember doing this too, it unlocked the multiplier which they locked at the factory by slicing through some metal blocks with a laser. My Duron 600 would run at 800 with a normal cooler & fan, then I added a really loud Delta fan and a copper heatsink and it was stable at a magical 1Ghz. Eventually I got cocky enough to solder a resistor between a certain pin on the motherboard and earth which effectively increased all the voltage settings in the BIOS so I could push enough voltage through it to run at 1.2Ghz - it ran like this for years as my only PC. Good times :)

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#234

Post by squarefoot »

natch wrote: post #77
dpcx wrote: post #18

I 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.

Wondered the same thing! Perhaps "they" (the committee) were afraid that computers were getting powerful enough that we might just find something. Better pull the plug.

Or perhaps there's a lot more computing power demand for crypto coin mining that for aliens searching.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#235

Post by samuell »

notkaiho wrote: post #228
ravenstine wrote: post #8

In case anyone reads the headline and thinks that the SETI research center itself is shutting down, or that the project failed in some way: > "It's a lot of work for us to manage the distributed processing of data. We need to focus on completing the back-end analysis of the results we already have, and writing this up in a scientific journal paper," their news announcement stated. Maybe it's PR speak, but it does mak…

The singular in "journal paper" makes me sad. Surely there'd be more papers in this topic, on distributed computing for one, on the methodology of the analysis for another, and on any results for third.

The BOINC paper was published last year:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10723-019-09497-9

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#236

Post by rbanffy »

ravenstine wrote: post #8

In case anyone reads the headline and thinks that the SETI research center itself is shutting down, or that the project failed in some way: > "It's a lot of work for us to manage the distributed processing of data. We need to focus on completing the back-end analysis of the results we already have, and writing this up in a scientific journal paper," their news announcement stated. Maybe it's PR speak, but it does mak…

> or that the project failed in some way

Well... We haven't found anyone we can talk to yet so, in a sense, we are still failing.

Eventually we will.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#237

Post by notkaiho »

samuell wrote: post #235
notkaiho wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The singular in "journal paper" makes me sad. Surely there'd be more papers in this topic, on distributed computing for one, on the methodology of the analysis for another, and on any results for third.

The BOINC paper was published last year: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10723-019-09497-9

Thanks. Clearly been out of academia for too long.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#239

Post by sunaurus »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #182
cletus wrote: post #80

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…

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 conditions, so using Occam's Razor actually tells us that there's probably lots of other life out there.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#240

Post by Supernaut »

natch wrote: post #77
dpcx wrote: post #18

I 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.

Wondered the same thing! Perhaps "they" (the committee) were afraid that computers were getting powerful enough that we might just find something. Better pull the plug.

My Pentium II home PC identified a candidate signal for them in 2001! Sadly, I have no idea if the galaxy in question is still on their list of leads.
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