Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a fascinating comment, thank you. I personally suspect the engineering challenges might pale next to the challenges of political organization. Quite simply, the continued human expertise and organization necessary to manage and sustain such a system is far, far beyond anything we have today. We can't even manage to globally reduce CO2, and the recent government responses to coronavirus have led a lot to be des…
TIL it was Steve Bannon that killed off Biosphere 2.
SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
291–300 of 356 posts
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#292Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#293Not 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…
There are several gaps in logic here but in my opinion the most remarkable assumption here is:
- the only way that alien life could be intelligent is if they exploit the resources of their solar system maximally.
Don't we have enough evidence yet that maximal exploitation of resources is a Very Bad Idea?
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#294Back then, I was quite young. Around 2002. We were like 5 boys getting into overclocking. For our SETI team, the "Bücki crunching connection", from my small hometown in Germany. I just tried to find an old screenshot from back in the day, and wow I found one, from 2002: https://imgur.com/a/L5Q5PMR So funny, it is all there: ICQ, mIRC; an icon to launch Quake III. And some SETI crunching stats. In Internet Explorer. S…
Oh man those screenshots really are a throwback:
- [x] Quake - [x] Classic windows UI; custom scheme
- [x] Double height task bar
- [x] ICQ & mIRC for all your communications needs; I'll give you a pass for Outlook when there were clearly "better" alternatives like Pegasus ;o)
- [x] Broken icon in taskbar launcher area
I'm loving it, thanks for sharing!
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
He is saying that we are currently transformong the earth's atmosphere into a less hospitable one through a process of pollution / emitting greenhouse gases. In my view, given that we can do this, it is not unreasonble to assume that one day we will know enough to be able to tweak a planet's habitability in the opposite direction, or in other words, make an inhabitable planet habitable.
> "make an inhabitable planet habitable." Aren't those the same thing? Shouldn't this be "make an uninhabitable planet habitable"?
Yeah, my mistake.
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah. You wouldn't believe the number of idiots that went around covertly attempting to run this (and similar) on the production Unix servers of their employer. Saying that as the lead Solaris SysAdmin for a large telco project a few decades ago, with one manager in particular who repeatedly kept on firing it up on the main (high end SunFire) billing cluster servers. Even when expressly told not to. That guy was a f*…
Prolly he really wanted to find out that we’re not alone in the universe. Sucks to know we’re alone and no one has reached out.
SETI was probably only ever going to catch an intentional transmission it's far from proof we're alone.
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Quite simply, the continued human expertise and organization necessary to manage and sustain such a system is far, far beyond anything we have today. I get your concern but the differences are significant. 1. Habitats are mobile. If you don't like the neighbours you can up and move, something not possible with geography on Earth; 2. Land area is essentially infinite, not so on Earth. > We can't even manage to globa…
> but until we have a good story for fuel and waste processing then this is a nonstarter. Waste processing in space? Just give it a slight push in the direction of the sun (or whatever the right direction is taking in consideration gravity) and forget about it.
Pushing something into the sun requires removing most of it's orbital velocity not just a simple push. A small push in an orbit will create something on a very similar orbit to you that absent a nearby body to induce a lot of drag will intersect with your orbit in 2 places (not at the same time you're there fortunately in pretty much every case).
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#298or they have already found em aliens
twiddles thumbs
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
Protein folding might work as a proof-of-work algorithm. One big problem is of course that it's useful work that could conceivably be monetized. Proof-of-work works because a theoretical attacker would have to invest huge resources into an attack. For bitcoin it's trivial to say "for attack scenario X an attack has to spend at least Y", and as long as the expected reward is lower than Y the network is safe (that's fo…
Isn't "maybe I can monetize this protein" less of a sure bet than "I can rewrite these transactions" ?
An attack on proof-of-work wouldn't let you rewrite arbitrary transactions. At most an attacker could exclude certain recent transactions—most likely their own—reverting payments which were previously deemed "complete" and replacing them with conflicting transactions. All transactions still need to be signed with the proper keys, however, so the attacker can't just lay claim to others' coins.
Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years
#300Not 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…
There are several gaps in logic here but in my opinion the most remarkable assumption here is: - the only way that alien life could be intelligent is if they exploit the resources of their solar system maximally. Don't we have enough evidence yet that maximal exploitation of resources is a Very Bad Idea?
I wouldn't call using 1% of the mass of Mercury to create enough living area for a quintillion people and using most of the energy our Sun produces anyway to be analogous to anything you're alluding to on Earth thus far.
But the point here isn't to dive into the moral issues. It's not even to ask what MOST civilizations would do. It's simply to ask would ALL civilizations restrain themselves this way? If the answer is "no" then we'll find at least one. Saying no civilization would engage in this kind of growth when it looks entirely possible seems like far more of a stretch than the scenario I outlined.