500-fold Increase in Data Flow from SETI Telescope

coondoggie brings us an article from Networkworld about a flood of new data for the SETI@home project. We discussed something similar a few months ago when a new telescope array went live. The vast amount of processing power required to handle the new data is prompting the SETI@home team to make a plea for more volunteers. Quoting the press release: "What triggered the new flow of data was the addition of seven new receivers at Arecibo, which now let the telescope record radio signals from seven regions of the sky simultaneously instead of just one. With greater sensitivity and the ability to detect the polarization of the radio signals, plus 40 times more frequency coverage, Arecibo is set to survey the sky for new radio sources."

FoldingAtHome

[perspectival]

Protein Folding should take precedence over pointless searches for noise-in-patterns.

Left seti when they went to bonic

[huxrules]

If they want more people then they should get rid of that silly bonic thing. I never liked it.

Re:FoldingAtHome

[TeknoHog]

Protein Folding should take precedence over pointless searches for noise-in-patterns.

So what are you doing here, wasting your important CPU cycles?

Re:Not trying hard to keep what they had...

[fm6]

These folks have millions of compute nodes. And very little resources, which is why they set up this network in the first place. You really think they have time to go chasing after silly little bits of data that matter only to you? Next you'll be wondering why GW Bush never returns your calls.

are the cycles really "spare"

[atarione]

i was kinda interested in this at one point then when I installed SETI@home i realized that it made my proc max out 24x7 and shoot up to it's load temps (obviously) and of course use more electricity. i decided that I wasn't willing to stress my equipment or pay for the electricity to run this type of software ( I do of course realize you can set the amount of cpu it uses.. but still) I think that all these distributed projects kinda try to gloss over the fact that it isn't free to participate ... and given the $100+ a barrel oil at the moment people that chose to participate should probably be made more aware of what the costs and wear and tear impacts really are.

Parent is wrong

[NotQuiteReal]

People should have a free choice about the causes they donate to. If you made everyone pick Protein Folding, it would be akin to just another tax.

Just because you think you know what people should do, doesn't mean you do.

oh I dunno

[Quadraginta]

There's a logic error here, I think. By this logic, we should do nothing except the very highest priority thing in our life, and society should pour all of its resources into the very most important priority. For example, we should all live in a thatched hut, eat weeds and grubs, wear the untanned raw skins of animals (or just go naked), and slave 18 hours a day so all our labor and energy can go into....whatever the single highest social priority is...curing cancer, fighting war 'n' injustice, whatever.

Which is silly. The goal of life is maximize overall satisfaction, not accomplish one single highest goal. It's important to rank your priorities, of course, both as an individual and as a society. But the notion that because A is "more important" than B implies ipso facto that A should get all the resources and B should get none is maximally silly.

Indeed, it's kind of OCD obsessive to always be focussed on pursuing the Top Goal, the kind of thing that when we see people doing it in practise -- giving up everything, including enough sleep and good nutrition, to, say, play World of Warcraft and become the biggest baddest player -- we conclude they need to do some growing up.

How wasteful is SETI?

[Darth_brooks]

Fine, I'm burning cycles running a project that may (heck, when it comes to SETI, probably) won't see any tangible results.

But how is contributing to a project that was the basis for mainstreamed distributed computing any more wasteful than blowing 9 hours a night on WoW? I'd love to see a breakdown of the increased energy usage from a high-end CPU and a good video card vs. a PC that's on anyway and running BOINC when it's idle.

Screaming "carbon footprint!!" about something as trivial as BOINC is the real waste. Here, I've swapped 80% of the lights in my house for CFL's, and I burned 10 bucks worth of electricity last month (with an electric heater and 4x computers in the house no less!) does make me green enough to spare some processor cycles now?

Re:FoldingAtHome

[jafiwam]

Protein folding is important, however discovery of ETI ranks up somewhere along with; fire, wheel, tools, calculus.

Find a protein, you change many lives for the better.

Find ET, and you change the course of the human race forever.

I will choose what to do with my extra CPU cycles myself, thank you very much. To me, ET is more interesting.

(Yes, I should know, it was my computer that discovered the candidate object for SETI@home back in 2004. Got on TV and weekly reader for that. What have YOU done with your spare CPU cycles?)

My only regret is BOINIC runs so crappy and is so hard to manage (come on, install a program that crashes upon resume, gotta dig out the right profile, gotta figure out how to sign up for projects = fail).

Fucking ignorant

[Anonymous Coward]

"Oh, but it uses my precioussss energy!"

Of all the things in the world that monumental amounts of energy are 'wasted' on each day (powering bin Ladens dialysis machine,lighting the creationism museum,all the power used by all the dictators and oppressors of the world who shouldn't be allowed to LIVE let alone use resources), 'wasting' a few of them LOOKING FOR FUCKING EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE doesn't even come CLOSE to being classified as a 'waste'. FUCK! Am I at the wrong site?!!

Re:Is SETI even needed?

[hibji]

I guess it depends on what you really care about. Personally, knowing that there are intelligent beings out there would affect me a whole lot more than a cure for cancer. It changes the way I think about myself and my place in the universe. Think about all the crazy things that will happen with the world's religions. That alone would be worth it to me. Of course, right now, I don't have cancer nor anyone close to me. Like anything else, I reserve the right to change my mind.

I agree with you about Prime95 though.

Re:FoldingAtHome

[Anonymous Coward]

Find a protein, you change many lives for the better.

Find ET, and you change the course of the human race forever.

This is a bias and gambling fallacy. You have $10 bucks. You can buy dinner, or try and win 1 million dollars at the pocker machines. 1 million dollars can change your life, but you'll not get 1 million dollars, you'll just waste $10 and cheat yourself out of dinner.

SETI is listening for possible radio signals coming from the nearby galaxies to Earth. When I say "nearby", that's million of light years away.

It means if SETI finds something, it'll be millions of years old, and it'll take another few million years until the ETI sees our answer. You'll not change course of humanity. You may likely die in 40-50 years from something that Folding@Home could have helped cure, though.

Re:FoldingAtHome

[penrodyn]

Do you think as lay people, we should tell federally funded scientists what to work on? I for one would like to see research done on many fronts, we can afford it as a society given the vast sums of money society spends on a worthless war. It is ironic though that many of the techniques being used to investigate cancer today were developed from work done in the 50s and 60s on viruses that infect bacteria. Now if you were in charge, I presume this work would never have been funded, let's be honest who really cares whether bacteria get infected or not, better tackle cancer first then worry about other areas of research?

Re:come on, people!

[packeteer]

SETI is important not just because it could find aliens. There is the distinct possibility that we are alone in the universe (not that likely in my opinion). A positive result would be more interesting than this constant negative we have been getting but it is important that we find out what is going on. Just because we may never see a positive doesn't mean we should stop. Having the evidence that we are indeed alone is just important as having evidence that life exists out there.

What seems to be overlooked about SETI

[doggod]

I almost never see anyone take note of what I deem to be the only to-date achievement of SETI -- defining a larger and larger region of space where it is known that there are no radio signals indicating intelligent life. Everyone seems to be focused on the expectation -- seemingly bordering on the religious -- that ET life will be found because it just HAS to be there.

I would note that there is no fundamental reason for this axiomatic proposition, and it makes much more sense simply go with the data rather than stubbornly cling to a belief for which there is so far not a shred of evidence -- much as the creationists do with regard to geology and archaelogy, I would note.

Maybe sometimes some evidence will appear for ET life. That will be interesting, if so. In the meantime, we have a rapidly growing contrarian body of evidence, so we should accept as our tentative conclusion that we are, in fact, the only life in the universe.

Re:FoldingAtHome

[TrappedByMyself]

Protein folding is important, however discovery of ETI ranks up somewhere along with; fire, wheel, tools, calculus.

Yes, but spending your spare cycles on protein folding will actually accomplish something.

Re:How wasteful is SETI?

[Anonymous Coward]

Environ-mentalism is a religion, complete with militant radicals, and no you are not Holy enough.

Re:Parent is right.

[Duncan Blackthorne]

Probably true -- except that if there are other intelligent races out there, they've probably been unwittingly transmitting their equivalent of radio and television entertainment out into space for at least as long as we have, and the way things are going here it's very likely in that case that their entertainment is orders of magnitude higher in quality than what we've been turning out for the last few decades. ;)

Benefit of SETI

[spineboy]

They started and demonstrated that distributed computing was a viable way to solve huge problems. SOmetimes basic research doesn't have an immediately applicable product - but sometimes the groundwork they lay provides for fruitful endeavors - e.g. Apollo program. No one thought electricity would be terribly important when it was first discovered, or the phone either. Give it a chance - maybe finding aliens might make us put aside our petty differences as countries.

Re:FoldingAtHome

[wmac]

ET is more interesting to you until a very near relatives comes up with a serious illness like Cancer, AIDS, ... Then you will regret the priorities you set.

Re:come on, people!

[cheater512]

Its a distinct possibility that we'll never find the aliens.
All the evidence says that us being alone in the universe is next to impossible.

Aliens won't use radios...

[cylcyl]

It just occurs to me that SETI by using telescopes looking for radio data is a dead end because doesn't it assume that the alien will use some form of radio based technology for communication? However, if it's an intelligence we're interested in (ie. one capable of interstellar FTL travel), it probably would not use sub-light tech like radio. Radio might have been a transition tech for a phase of the civilization. So, we're assuming, in SETI, that we're looking into a period of time in that uses that transition tech. Isn't that even more unlikely to succeed than initially thought?

I hope people realise

[4D6963]

I hope that people realise that by covering 7 regions of the sky instead of one, and 40 times as much spectrum bandwidth as before, assuming that aliens are as likely to emit on any of these frequencies (which after all is not such a bad assumption considered we don't know a thing about them), statistically that will make us discover alien signals 280 times faster than before.

Very basically, that means that if we were say 1,000 years from finding an alien signal with the previous setup (which you can't say sounded so unlikely, I mean we barely listened for 40 years, and not always with the means we have now), we are now 3 years and a half away from that instead.

Folding at Home Costs me a Job

[Yergle143]

This structural biologist offers the following insight. I looked
over the papers published by the FOLDING@Home guys and I didn't
see a lot of medically important results. Actually it looks like
the computational equivalent of naval gazing. I wonder why
the authors don't just get dirty and use crystallography
and/or NMR to solve their structural questions. I looked at their
recent paper trail, no (ok 1) Science/Nature papers...

I guarantee that if SETI@home finds a signal in the static the
authors will get the cover of science/nature (and a trip to Sweden).
Maybe beyond:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118884/ [imdb.com]

Save my job -- don't do FOLDING@Home
---537