https://foldingathome.org/
there's always folding@home if you like contributing idle cycles to projects like this. it's not quite alien hunting but it's kinda neat to try to brute force protein structures to beat various diseases.
SETI@home is in hiberation
91–100 of 145 posts
Re: SETI@home is in hiberation
#92I 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.
Oh, I feel this. As a pre-teen, I loved it. SETI@Home running on our family's Pentium 100, X-Files, and hanging out on the "Parascope" forum and chatroom on AOL for all things UFO related. An "I Want To Believe" poster on my wall.
I've (thankfully) moved on past that, but I look back at that with nostalgia.
Re: SETI@home is in hiberation
#93It 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.
This is extremely far from any of my expertises, but I'll offer an answer while no one else did (please correct me!). Basically, all medicine (i.e. drugs) we have are proteins or certain compounds that fit within some of our cell's (or viruses) molecules and does funny stuff to them, like disabling certain parts, acting as a signal to regulate behavior, and so on. Doing funny stuff is basically about fitting into another molecule. So research about how proteins (most molecules (after water) in our body, I guess) interact is incredibly important in basically all medicine, specially in the discovery of medicine (like suggesting compounds (drug) that could fit in certain receptors or perform certain function), and understanding disease/pathologies (which give ideas on how to prevent and treat them).
If folding@home helps to understand and model this behavior of molecules (which I guess tends to be difficult and unreliable to do without the aid of computers), it is extremely helpful. Now I don't know other details like, perhaps molecular biology is the bottleneck and there is scant available molecules to analyze (reducing its impact/marginal sensitivity), or perhaps compute really is a bottleneck in this particular problem. But nonetheless it seems like a great project for which contributions do make a difference.
(Note: although, that said, if you were expecting something like 'compute->miracle drug comes out', I believe that's not quite how it works; research in general rarely works that way, I think because the constraint space and problem space that would require this approach is too large and complicated; and in fact I believe many if not most significant discoveries have resulted from playing around and investigating random molecules, often from (nonhuman) animals, plants and bacteria[1]; although molecular sciences (molecular biology) seem to enable a slightly more methodological approach)
[1] The GLP-1 based weight loss drugs for example came from investigating the Gila monster lizard venom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLP-1_receptor_agonist#History
Re: SETI@home is in hiberation
#94Wanted to share this funny SETI@home prank that Monzy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Maynes-Aminzade ) did in 1999, where he created a fake VB app that tricked a coworker into believing that his computer successfully found an extraterrestrial signal. The original site is down, but jump to November 5, 1999 to see the screenshot. https://web.archive.org/web/20030404093458/http://www.monzy....
Yishan Wong jumpscare
Re: SETI@home is in hiberation
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Pilots from the Eastern Bloc and NATO countries have had sightings. It's not just a US thing. People have been claiming to see them for longer than the USA has existed.
Re: SETI@home is in hiberation
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There's some genuinely weird shit unexplained, I'll give you that. Unlike Bigfoot, where you can look at a map of the historical range of bears and see it exactly matches where all the Bigfoot sightings are.
People claim to see Bigfoot creatures in the Mississippi Delta and Florida... Even Scotland. None of these are much noted for their bears.
Re: SETI@home is in hiberation
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not a conspiracy anymore
I'd really like to see it disclosed by a government that isn't panicking about epstein files/being impeached and trying to cover up other stories before I'm fully convinced
I would be more interested in the former USSR or China, maybe Iran and Latin America. The Eastern Bloc must have covered up a lot of stuff but would have wild stories.
Re: SETI@home is in hiberation
#98Oh man, SETI@home! That takes me back. That screensaver was a total vibe—my little gateway drug to distributed computing. It was wild feeling like my humble PC was out there, just a small cog in this massive cosmic search party. The thought that it might, against all odds, stumble on "the signal"... that was the magic of it. That specific kind of hopeful, nerdy optimism of the early 2000s is hard to find now.
You hit the nail on the head about missing projects like that. It wasn't just about the science; it was about the story, the shared dream. You felt like you were part of the crew on the starship, even if you were just scrubbing the decks. Modern BOINC projects are awesome, but they don't quite have that same "Holy cow, we're listening for E.T.!" mainstream charm. It was our generation's version of a barn raising, but for the galaxy.
Thanks for the nostalgia trip, my dude. Here's hoping the aliens are just shy and on dial-up.
Re: SETI@home is in hiberation
#99on the other hand, WETI still seems to be up, so you could contribute there.
Re: SETI@home is in hiberation
#100Apparently they are not completely finished with the project - according to this article from five days ago, there are still some signal candidates currently in the process of being re-observed with the FAST radio telescope.
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/search-for-life/this...