Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

bleepingcomputer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 356 posts

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#301

Post by cletus »

dorgo wrote: post #221
cletus wrote: post #176

Earlier 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.

It's actually cheaper (in delta-V terms) to leave the Solar System than it is to hit the Sun [1].

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5lt50r/why_does...

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#302

Post by mixmastamyk »

justinclift wrote: post #274
mixmastamyk wrote: post #138

I ran it on the weekend once on the queue at Disney animation, maybe a hundred CPUs on SGI Origins. Went from zero to top ten-ish percentile in a half hour or so. Good times until I got a stern talking to by some systems guy.

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*…

Nice attitude buddy, maybe the problem was you. Companies regularly waste 1000x more on executive salaries.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#303

Post by geniium »

mstade wrote: post #294
jgehrcke wrote: post #249

Back 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!

Was about to write the same :)

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#304

Post by mnd999 »

pmarreck wrote: post #284
nr2x wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“This site best viewed in Chrome”.

Dude, IE was Windows-only. It went against everything the open Internet standards advocated for. And on top of it, I was a Mac guy, and Mac IE was a completely different beast, so I had to code for Windows IE, Mac IE, then Safari and Firefox and eventually early Chrome. And Windows IE was always the motherfucker who you had to figure out these nasty CSS and JS hacks for to get, forget pixel-perfect, how about pixel-s…

> Dude, IE was Windows-only.

Not originally it wasn’t. The UNIX versions are an interesting relic.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#305

Post by evultrole »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #190
mdorazio wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a bit too broad of a statement to be plausible. It's likely there are no aliens near us in time, space, technology, and desire to communicate to make such a search fruitful right now. There could very well be aliens on the other side of the galaxy that we can't see. There could have been aliens nearby a million years ago that are now extinct or elsewhere. There could be aliens right now that are pre-industrial…

Okay, let me qualify: there are no aliens in the visible universe. Of course what exists or doesn't exist in the universe that's not visible is pure unscientific speculation; might as well be made of blue cheese as far as science is concerned. > Space is ridiculously big. The universe is ridiculously old. This isn't true. Mathematical concepts of infinities and limits are "ridiculously big". Space is finite and thus…

OK, you know that whole big bang thing? That didn't start with a singularity the size of a golf ball, that was an infinitely large singularity that "exploded" and got bigger.

The singularity was infinite. Space is infinity, but bigger.

Everything you said is unsupportable

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#306

Post by jaywalk »

mnd999 wrote: post #304
pmarreck wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude, IE was Windows-only. It went against everything the open Internet standards advocated for. And on top of it, I was a Mac guy, and Mac IE was a completely different beast, so I had to code for Windows IE, Mac IE, then Safari and Firefox and eventually early Chrome. And Windows IE was always the motherfucker who you had to figure out these nasty CSS and JS hacks for to get, forget pixel-perfect, how about pixel-s…

> Dude, IE was Windows-only. Not originally it wasn’t. The UNIX versions are an interesting relic.

It was available on MacOS as well.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#308

Post by jodrellblank »

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…

> enough to create enough living area for something like 10^16 to 10^18 people.

Enough for them to do .. what? Trapped in a closed box, with no unexplored 'natural' non-engineered habitat, nothing to dig for, no unknown/unowned resources, no resources to use to escape.

Enough to let the cylinder owners extract money from their non-optional labours? Then it will certainly happen, but that doesn't make it look a happier or more desirable future.

Re: SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

#309

Post by Certhas »

cletus wrote: post #268
Certhas wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is, why do you assume that advanced civilization would maintain 10^18 animal bodies to carry around brains? That's ridiculously inefficient. It's also unclear why you would expect an advanced civilization to be built on a large number of individuals either. That, too is derived from an animal impulse to procreate and maybe a reaction to mortality. Say that in the next thousand years we manage to move con…

I don’t assume that. If however your goal is a digital existence then you still have energy as the limiting factor and the best way to maximize this is likely a Matrioshka Brain, which from far away is largely indistinguishable from a Dyson Swarm.

And why would energy be the limiting factor? Maybe the limiting factor will be accidental entanglement with the environment of your quantum computer, and you want to cool your system waaay down to avoid thermals interfering with your finely tuned computation engine. Having a hot sphere around a star seems like a terrible set up to do that. Maybe sitting out in a hydrogen cloud and running well controlled fusion would be a much better for that.

I'm not saying one or the other is more or less likely, but the range of possibilities is vast and unimaginable. The idea of energy (in the sense you and I use it now) is not even 400 years old. Harnessing ever larger amounts of stored energy was the hallmark of the industrial revolution. Declaring it to be the fundamental law underlying civilization is like concluding that the earth is flat: You mistake the shape of our immediate environment (the recent past and short term future) for the structure of the overall thing.

We are quite definitely headed in the next couple of hundred years for an end to exponential growth in energy consumption. Exponential growth near where we've been would lead us to cooking the earth in 300-400 years. By the time we're capable of doing solar system scale engineering we will have had millennia of 'culture' that exists within a constant energy envelope. What these entities will value, or want to do is beyond anyone's guess.

Post reply on HN