seti@home coming to an end

P

PeaKr

Gawd
Joined
Sep 6, 2004
Messages
960
I loaded seti on my computers back in the early aughts, exciting to think you might be the ONE! However living in the southwest all that heat and power from my Athlons eventually caused me to shut it down. I remember reading somewhere that discovering life in the milky way was equivalent to finding an atom in a haystack. Hmm, maybe that was from Cosmos, can't remember now.

Article:
 
Much as I love the concept and all the great people involved, it was a waste of time and resources. Of course intelligent life exists elsewhere in our galaxy and the universe - it's mathematically impossible for it not to - but at distances humans can scarcely conceive and no guarantee any billions of years old civilization had developed a means of transmitting signals or impulses.
 
viivo said:
Much as I love the concept and all the great people involved, it was a waste of time and resources. Of course intelligent life exists elsewhere in our galaxy and the universe - it's mathematically impossible for it not to - but at distances humans can scarcely conceive.
Click to expand...

I would argue its mathematically impossible for it to exist. The chances of life evolving once is statistically zero...the chances of it evolving in multiple places is even less statistically probable.

So I agree with your conclusion that it's a waste of time and resources. Far better to use the resources for folding@home IMO.
 
kirbyrj said:
I would argue its mathematically impossible for it to exist. The chances of life evolving once is statistically zero...the chances of it evolving in multiple places is even less statistically probable.

So I agree with your conclusion that it's a waste of time and resources. Far better to use the resources for folding@home IMO.
Click to expand...
Life has evolved at least once, which means it's chance to exist anywhere else is also larger than zero, but the size of the universe (including the time dimension) is so huge that's it's very unlikely that we could meet or even see it.

We can claim no special place in the universe. It's impossible for something that can happen to only happen once, the infinitely vast scope in time and space all but guarantees it.

But looking for it is a waste of resources I agree, still not as big a waste as cryptocurrencies.
 
Let's say after all this computing you find a blip that is from an artificial origin. What would we then do with this information? It could have been sent from so far away that the civilization had come and gone before it reached us even. So the end result would be the same as now "we might not be alone out there". If something exists and wants to interact with us, I bet it wont be because some kid in his basement with a screensaver running finds it.

Nothing will contact us until we achieve faster than light travel and become a threat to the galaxy lol.

It would be kind of cool to discover ancient remnants of an old advanced civilization. That and we need some of those things to steal to jump our technology up a bit lol.
 
I've abandoned seti@home many years ago, I stopped actively particpating in 2014.

But it seems some computers I had under my control were still working for a while after that: Last Contact: 25 Mar 2017, 3:44:01 UTC
 
viivo said:
Much as I love the concept and all the great people involved, it was a waste of time and resources. Of course intelligent life exists elsewhere in our galaxy and the universe - it's mathematically impossible for it not to - but at distances humans can scarcely conceive and no guarantee any billions of years old civilization had developed a means of transmitting signals or impulses.
Click to expand...

Or more likely billions of years old civilizations only transmit anything we could detect for a couple hundred years at most.

Even our own civilization has been getting quieter every year as our technology advances. The chances of that small few hundred year window of radio transmissions strong enough and of a type we understand well enough to receive just happening to pass us by... well the chances aren't good. There could be millennia old civilizations a few light years away... but if they are transmitting ultra low power, or using other much more efficient form of long range communication we would never hear them.
 
I believe life is strewn all over the universe and probably in many diverse forms, whether or not its intelligent who knows, we could be a fluke but are we really that intelligent? Probably within the next 50 years missions to Enceladus or Europa will reveal microbial or fossil life. I'd be cool to see some type of platform in a solar orbit utilizing ai and robotics to build and deploy drones around the solar system. The seeds for life are out there, they just found protein in a extraterrestrial meteorite.

https://www.sciencealert.com/scient...known-extraterrestrial-protein-in-a-meteorite
 
I remember back in the day, I set this up to run on almost every computer in my high school.
 
My opinion on this is such:

SETI was a waste of time. Its purpose of prospecting for extraterrestrial life was exciting, for sure. I do believe that other life has formed out there somewhere in the estimated 13.7B-13.8B year old universe, even though any forms of extraterrestrial life may be long extinct/destroyed given that there are an estimated 100B-2T galaxies that are constantly changing/colliding, each containing an estimated range of 100M-100T stars that are constantly dying/birthing, with a small percentage of those stars estimated to have planets orbiting with the same Earthly dangers such as comets and asteroids...over a vast estimated 11-12B years ago when the first planets came into existence.

It becomes quickly apparent that it is statistically infinite that, elsewhere in universe, the right conditions being present for life to form and for life to have formed in those conditions (either somewhere along the timeline of the past or happening literally right now) did/does exist.

So, why is SETI a waste a time? Because humans will likely never discover (or publicly divulge) attestable proof of other-worldly life before the Holocene (or ongoing Quaternary, depending on which line of though you subscribe to) mass extinction event (which will likely eradicate humanity) concludes in an estimated couple thousand to few ten-thousand years from now.
 
SETI@home was a great demo in distributed computing regardless of your view on this subject or folding proteins or whatever. And I did get in trouble running it on the servers at school some 20+ years ago

That said my views is having a cpu, or gpu utilized at 100% is not something I want to do, more so with todays processors which do run hotter in general. There are no "wasted cycles" with my computer, having head room that is available for me to use is not a waste. Practically running a stress test on a processor 24/7 is not something I want to do
 
Aliens exist. I've seen their ship on two separate occasions. But no one believes me, so it doesn't matter.
 
PeaKr said:
I loaded seti on my computers back in the early aughts, exciting to think you might be the ONE! However living in the southwest all that heat and power from my Athlons eventually caused me to shut it down. I remember reading somewhere that discovering life in the milky way was equivalent to finding an atom in a haystack. Hmm, maybe that was from Cosmos, can't remember now.

Article:
Click to expand...
Thanks op. This is a little bit sad.
 
  • Like
Reactions: PeaKr
like this
I originally read this as SETI is coming to an end. Panic set in then quickly subsided. :oops:
 
Darn, it was one of the few BOINC projects which had workloads which supported Intel iGPUs.
Definitely a sad day, but understandable in the long run.
 
Well, I wasn't joking about seeing the ships, but I was having fun with the alien comment.

I mean, I don't know what it was. Could have been some advanced military aircraft that is unknown to the public.

Still pretty crazy, though.
 
Not to be a troll, but has there been any published results from any of the @home projects?
 
Nimisys said:
Not to be a troll, but has there been any published results from any of the @home projects?
Click to expand...
Nothing substantial. To detect signals sent into space by an alien species would require a receiver larger than Earth. If they can ever put some satellites into orbit around the Sun, they would have one big enough to pick it up.

Any species smart enough to know we are here, that were intentionally sending us signals, would probably do it in a way that we could detect. And that's the key, intentional vs unintentional signaling because you would use different methods. Unintentional is like us sending out episodes of Star Trek into spaces in the 60's from Earth based transmitters. Intentional would be pointing a directional antenna at a star and using gamma rays (if we could do that, we can't) or something strong like that.
 
Pretty much waste of time anyway, the universe is too grand and old, we are just a mere speck of dust floating in the a room looking for another speck that might have already settled of the floor or have yet to be lifted.

odditory said:
Did you write down the license plate?
Click to expand...
I heard that phrase from somewhere......
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top