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SETI@home is in hiberation

setiathome.berkeley.edu

41–50 of 145 posts

Re: SETI@home is in hiberation

#41
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that all SETI endeavors haven’t really found anything is actually a very valuable result, because it constrains “they’re everywhere, we just haven’t been looking” arguments quite a bit. Even humanity’s (weak) radio emissions would be detectable from tens of light years away, and stronger emissions from much further. So the idea that intelligent life is absolutely everywhere that was liberally tossed around a…

>Even humanity’s (weak) radio emissions would be detectable from tens of light years away, and stronger emissions from much further. That's not true. Non-directional radio transmissions (e.g. TV, broadcast radio) would not be distinguishable from cosmic background radiation at more than a light year or two away [0]. Highly directional radio emissions (e.g. Arecibo message) an order of magnitude more powerful than the…

Thanks, these rules of thumb are very useful.

When you say perfectly aligned, what kind of precision are we talking about? If we aimed a receiver at a nearby star, would we be able to achieve this kind of precision?

Re: SETI@home is in hiberation

#43
post #26

Used to have this running on all of our computers in the office back in 1999, or 2000. Such a satisfying screensaver! Then I went even further and put it on the servers too.

If i remember correctly, back then even some sysadmins were even fired over it because of the usage of resources. It also sprouted some weird projects on how to distribute all those unused cpu cycles for other things.

Re: SETI@home is in hiberation

#45
post #17

It looks like folding@home is still going https://foldingathome.org/ I'm quite surprised these are still around as I hadn't seen them mentioned in so long. I always assumed the phase out of screensavers (and introduction of CPU low power modes) were terminal for them.

I would've thought that with the advent of general purpose GPUs, cloud computing, etc that they would've run out of work by now.

Re: SETI@home is in hiberation

#46
post #17

It looks like folding@home is still going https://foldingathome.org/ I'm quite surprised these are still around as I hadn't seen them mentioned in so long. I always assumed the phase out of screensavers (and introduction of CPU low power modes) were terminal for them.

How many papers have been published as a result of this, and more pertinently, how many "real" things are now being made or used based on that? I'm hoping it's not all just perpetual "regrowing teeth" territory where nothing ever comes from it.

[flagged]

Re: SETI@home is in hiberation

#47
post #26

Used to have this running on all of our computers in the office back in 1999, or 2000. Such a satisfying screensaver! Then I went even further and put it on the servers too.

If i remember correctly, back then even some sysadmins were even fired over it because of the usage of resources. It also sprouted some weird projects on how to distribute all those unused cpu cycles for other things.

And yet, distributed computing only became huge when people could earn / generate money off of it. Seti / Folding walked so that bitcoin could run?

Re: SETI@home is in hiberation

#48

My first internship was at DEC / Compaq in 2000. I was on their C compiler team and my project was to build seti tools with their updated Alpha Linux C compiler and compare perf against the tools built with the GNU C compiler. It was a fun project.

That is very fun.

Re: SETI@home is in hiberation

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many papers have been published as a result of this, and more pertinently, how many "real" things are now being made or used based on that? I'm hoping it's not all just perpetual "regrowing teeth" territory where nothing ever comes from it.

[flagged]

I wasn't aware asking a question was FUD. That's also a list of achievements with no links without any information regarding how much if any volunteer contributed computing has contributed to them.

> please have a look around before spreading FUD

Please don't turn HN into reddit.

Re: SETI@home is in hiberation

#50

I feel sorry for every child who didn't have SETI@home and X-Files at the same time during their childhood. The truth is still out there.

When conspiracies were a bit more fun. Anyone else collect The X-Factor partworks magazine? I used to love reading it.

Of all the current US conspiracy theories, the UFO/UAP conspiracy is still the most interesting and fully developed/ongoing conspiracy space. Just check out the recent 'Age of Disclosure' documentary from this year.

I'm not arguing a position on the theory, just saying it's very active and has the old-school qualities that were present in the 90's.

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