SETI@Home to Crunch More Data 165
BigDave writes: "In this article on Wired, it describes how SETI is gradually running out of data, as the current data acquisition system cannot keep up with the rate of processing (since they now have 3 million users processing data). They have acquired a new high-speed digital data recorder which is Linux-powered, and was donated by Hewlett-Packard."
Spare processing power? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Spare processing power? (Score:1, Troll)
I'm leeching onto your highly-rated post just to make a note that it's not Hewlett-Packard anymore, it's probably "Compack", "Hewlett-Paqard", or something of that sort since they merged.
Re:Spare processing power? (Score:1)
Is it not a waste? (Score:3, Interesting)
Why not spending that processing time on some relevant projects where you can help make a differences? Like http://foldingathome.stanford.edu/. Or similar projects for scanning for asteroids or anything else that just has a plausible purpose.
Re:Is it not a waste? (Score:1)
Re:Is it not a waste? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's just the idea that matter, searching for little green men is something people can imagine, while cryptographic keys or proteins is not "close" enough to the people, if you know what I mean..
- xmath
Re:Is it not a waste? (Score:1)
I think it's just that SETI@home came first and managed to become the most famous distributed project. And yes, it's much cooler than cracking a stupid encryption challenge -- you already know beforehand that it CAN be cracked, whereas at SETI there's something to be researched and the result is unknown.
However, if they really have too much processing power and not enough data, SETI should probably tell their users to help a different project and come back later.
Re:Is it not a waste? (Score:1)
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/cgi?cmd =team_lookup&name=de.soc.mac
Re:Is it not a waste? (Score:1)
Maybe some of us aren't prepared to contribute to work that is essentially just prescreening drug candidates that will then be used in animal experimentation.
Perhaps the screensaver should give an estimate of the number of animals you have killed so far -- they must have an idea of the rate at which they expect to find suitable candidates, and the number of animals that will die in the initial investigation of a typical candidate drug (99% of which will turn out to be useless) is known, so this would be easy to calculate.
Perhaps the screensaver should feature a special animation every time you've killed a whole animal... :-/
Disclaimer: This is my own opinion based on my limited knowledge of the Intel/Oxford Cancer-Busting Project. It is based partly on assumption based on the contents of the website (which makes no mention of the research being non-vivisectional) but mainly on a question and answer that appeared in the website's user forum, in which a member of the Oxford team, responded to the concerns of one potential user by stating (to the best of my recollection) that any technique that allows drug candidates to be prescreened by computer will reduce the level of animal experimentation. I take this as fairly convincing evidence that the project is expected to include a vivisectional phase once suitable candidate drugs have been selected.
If someone from the project wishes to correct me, I would be only too willing to retract the above remarks (in part or in whole, as appropriate) as well as to support the project by running the screensaver if the research project is completely non-vivisectional.
Re:Is it not a waste? (Score:1)
Unless we as a society are willing to accept the risks ourselves, to acknowledge that the notion of a doctor as a miracle work )whom with one wave of thier stethoscope can heal with out risk), to throw out the scapegoating of medical practitioners when errors occur (taking a more systems approach) and generally get a lot less legal suit slap happy and its a price, a sin if you wish, that has to be bourn. Thanks to such we have the LD50s of distilled water and paper, such more a ridiculous worthless value I can not fathom, being closer to the maximal volume of the rats stomach than any significant value.
Consider it in this perspextive, by chosing to contribute to are making the best of a bad situation, animals are going to be used whatever, you can just help minimise the number.
Re:Is it not a waste? (Score:1)
It's not at all clear to me that this project will reduce animal experimentation.
Most of the compounds tried by the screensaver would never have been tested on animals, perhaps because they didn't seem plausible enough candidates, or simply due to lack of resources.
In any case, it's a personal decision. I generally choose not to contribute to vivisectional research, and that decision hopefully reduces animal experimentation to some small extent. Others can choose to do otherwise (within the extent of the law, current and future).
In terms of toxicity tests, there is actually very little evidence for a good correlation between mouse/rat and human drug toxicity. There are many drugs that were non-toxic in rats and/or mice, but proved toxic in humans -- so who knows how any valuable drugs that were non-toxic to humans were rejected because of their rodent toxicity?
Far too little effort (and funding) goes to research into reducing and/or eliminating the need for vivisectional experimentation. Techniques using human tissue cultures very probably have the potential to replace a significant proportion of animal experiments and to give more accurate results as well.
I'd suggest that those in the UK interested in this area look at two charities that fund research that aims to ultimately replace vivisection.
I believe that both approaches complement each other.
There are probably similar organizations in the US and elsewhere, but I have no references. (Both the above organizations have a links section on their website. FRAME's links page [frame.org.uk] is particularly unusual in that it lists links both pro and contra vivisection, and lets the reader decide. The Dr Hadwen Trust also has a links page here [drhadwentrust.org.uk]) -roy
Re:Is it not a waste? (Score:1)
Re:Is it not a waste? (Score:1)
Can anybody explain to me why OGR is beneficial?
Re:Is it not a waste? (Score:2)
I mean the "aliens" could be weak, but what if they aren't? What if they need exactly what we have and they are willing to do anything to take it.
I would much rather waste my CPU time than max it out looking for annihilation.
Just my worthless
Re:Is it not a waste? (Score:2, Interesting)
I would much rather waste my CPU time than max it out looking for annihilation.
Careful there: First, seti is a PASSIVE search for ETs - we're not trying to send anything, we're just listening. Even if any anliens we happen to find should turn out to be nasty, I'd much rather have good inteligence on them than sitting on my dumb ass and get a nasty surprise one day.
Also: "visiting to take take over" would be pretty low on my scale of possible threats: lightspeed barrier and travel time should make any personal contact pretty much improbable.
If I'm going to worry, I'd be more along these lines:
Alien paranoid race: they've got their own version of seti, they wait till the wavefront of electromagnetic radiation produced by an emerging civilisation (i.e by us) reaches them. Next they take steps to prevent us ever becoming a problem for them: just set some nice massiive missile in motion, accelerate to relativistic speed and have it home in on the radio signals.
Raw materials: Once you've got an interstellar civilisation going, you might need raw materials, and lots of them. So, scan star systems for planetary systems with jupiter class planets. (they sould be able to find these easily - even we've managed to do as much). Send a bunch of unmanned probes over to replicate using resources found at the target and return processed raw materials. Takes a long time but then, you'd have to think in fairly long spans anyway as soon as you're considering more than one solar system. If one such mining/gathering probe happens on our system - tough luck; they'd probably not even notice we're here (or they just don't care).
Re:Is it not a waste? (Score:2, Informative)
Of course it's. I think many will disagree but there's no point breaking RC5 or any other cryptographic key. We already know that it's possible. It's like breaking a glass. The only question is if it will break with the first hit... or how long it will take to break the key - we already know it'll happen sooner or later anyway. If we weren't breaking the key with brute force it could be more interesting...
Searching for ET is more interesting because we don't know the answer for sure. Probably we won't find anything. OTOH, why miss the change to be the discover if we do?
In the end, helping with folding problem [stanford.edu] would probably be the sane thing for a geek because there's a nice probability that we get something usefull out of used CPU time.
Re:Is it not a waste? (Score:1)
What kind of data would be received? If it's something like Radio and TV, then we might get scientific broadcastings, so we could learn from them even if they are extinct.
Of course, it's probably very hard to decode those signals.
Re:Is it not a waste? (Score:4, Interesting)
What if we found ET? - that would be the biggest discovery imho. Besides that, I think it's "stupid" to discuss what project is better - the result is way to often a flamefest :(
I run Folding@Home myself for Arstechnica (the #1 Seti and Genome team!) though, but that is a matter of personal preference.
We have a nice page with introductions to the different Distributed computing (DC) projects we are involved in right here [arstechnica.com]. We "hand out" that page to new members of our "DC family". Then they can choose themselves what project they would like to support.
Re:Is it not a waste? (Score:1)
But anyhow, I'm still in the top 200 there myself. *grin*
Re:Is it not a waste? (Score:1)
In folding@home, yes - in genome@home, no. You may as well join the winning team now instead of later ;)
Re:Is it not a waste? (Score:2)
the civilization is already extinct. Ok, so we know that there's chances
of life out there - what else is new?"
Maybe we should set our priorities straight. First let's use that network
to figure out how to get to a distant S.O.S. while there is still hope,
should we find one. Then let's use that network to create the Robot and AI
(because it's to damn cold up there for anyone in their right mind to want
to go to what we might think is an S.O.S. - not to mentioned being
preparied to help...)
Oh wait, there would be Intellectual Property battles in all of that, we'd
never get off the ground. Hmmm, guess that just leaves Imaginary
Vouyerism of extinct intelligent races. Hmmm, wonder if I can file a
patent on that and royality tax the hell out of SETI@HOME... Least we now
understand the @home part in a new vouyerism light...
And with all these people who claim to have seen UFO's and had encounters,
you'd think if SETI@HOME can't detect Alien life in our own back yard,
what makes'em think they can find it in someones elses back yerd?
Damn them Aliens are really good at playing hide and seek.
Re:Is it not a waste? (Score:1)
Seti@Home may be the largest scale search for extra-teristrial inteligence currently in progress, but it's still prety limited.
The NASA SETI project would have been the first (and only) really serious attempt to see if there is any evidence of someone out there, but NASA's funding for the project was axed shortly after it started.
The fact that we've never found anything out there proves nothing. We've never seriously looked.
Re:Is it not a waste? (Score:1)
do I think there is other life out there? or course, it is possible, there is just so *much* out there that the chances seem decent.
do I think it will be intelligent? well, that depends on how you define intelligence. even on our own planet there is much disagreement as to what defines intelligence just within humans (Howard Gardner at Harvard for instance could elaborate on this). or if you want to take a page out of The Collapse of Chaos (I think that is Ian Stewart), depending on the criteria, humans might not even be considered to have any intelligence - we are just biased towards out way of thinking.
it seems like there is a pretty good chance of life out there, but that good chance is more towards mold, fungus, spores, bacteria, virus, etc - not complex creatures as ourselves.
then you don't know if they can even comminucate to each other, let alone broadcast a signal out. and if they could, is it something we could detect? and then if that were the case, would we even know if we did get it, and could we understand it?
it goes back to the same base human nature things you learn in a psych 101 class or poli sci - people are weak by nature, they feel vulnurable in a world they can't control - therefore they need to be controlled, they need to feel they have a purpose, and they need to feel like they aren't alone.
this applys from everything to the rash of movies coming out that show men spending their lives looking for a woman they just happened to see - if gives women that feel lonely hope that there is someone out there looking for them, making them feel special.
this is also much like religion in my mind - an opiate to calm that feeling that maybe you are worthless, maybe you have to purpose here, and maybe you aren't special, and maybe, there really is nothing after this.
instead of blowing this life, do something good with it - or find religion and look to the stars.
Re:Is it not a waste? (Score:1)
I think protein folding efforts are also worthwhile, and I think there is also use in the g.rulers.
they have real hard concrete evidence of what their goal is and they will know when they've found it - otherwise, the rest are just good projects to bring people together, and maybe you get a screensaver out of it.
Re:Is it not a waste? (Score:1)
Re:Is it not a waste? (Score:1)
everyone has a different sense of fun I suppose. personally, I see it on the same level of "fun" as if someone said "here is this math problem I want you to solve" (and I love math/logic problems) and it turns out it is impossible to solve (find what pi to the last digit is, and then divide by two)... that then falls, IMO, away from "fun" and into "waste of my time"
Re:Is it not a waste? (Score:1)
Re:Is it not a waste? (Score:2)
A scientist assumes nothing. That's how we've gotten this far.
Why not spending that processing time on some relevant projects where you can help make a differences?
Perhaps because I feel the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence is incredibly "relevant"?
Discovering life elsewhere would be the most important discovery I can possibly imagine. Your problem is your viewpoint is too small, too Earth-centric.
Re:Is it not a waste? (Score:3, Interesting)
"Participants in the Intel-United Devices Cancer Research Project are sent a unit of molecules over the Internet. Their PC will analyze the molecules using drug-design software called THINK. The THINK software analyzes the molecular data by creating a three-dimensional model and changing its shape (or conformation) to attempt to dock it into a protein site. When a conformation docks successfully and triggers an interaction with the protein, it registers as a "hit". These hits are what this research hinges on. Any one hit may be the one that will ultimately lead to a cure. All hits are recorded, ranked as to strength, and filed for the next stage of the project."
Yes United Devices themselves are for profit, but at least the project could do some good. Not saying others like foldingathome can't. But Remember that cancer is the #2 killer in the US after heart disease.
It's a philosophic question, not scientific (Score:3)
The specific scientific gains from any "information" received could be great, but more likely it will be meaningless or trivial.
We, as a society, will have to come to terms with the fact that Humankind is not the sole divine purpose for the universe to exist. Similar to Galileo's findings hundreds of years ago, once again we'll have proof that We Are Not The Center Of The Universe (tm).
For those of us that already believe that there is life elsewhere, this will be an amazing turning point. For those who are bound in religious beliefs that don't include any room for such possibilities, there will be great unrest and conflict. However, hopefully, as in the past, religion will slowly incorporate this new evidence into their rote, and move forward.
I, for one, hope that it would be the one single scientific fact that could help unite the world. We're not alone. It's now "humankind versus the Universe", not U.S. versus Afganistan. We've a lot more in common with each other than we do with "them", and it may make our petty differences seem insignificant.
Is that not a worthwhile goal?
MadCow.
Re:It's a philosophic question, not scientific (Score:2)
Right. Let's find life Out There so.. we can go kill it.
Seriously,
We've a lot more in common with each other than we do with "them", and it may make our petty differences seem insignificant.
People just have to fight. If it's over who gets to be the head of your local P.T.A. (parent-teachers' association for non-USians) you're just lucky. If our aliens actually turn out to be "friendly" we will continue to fight amongst ourselves since we can't find conflict elsewhere. As long as we're mentioning afghans, I'll make an example of them. Once they had expelled the russians they decided to plunge themselves into civil war. Great.
Re:Is it not a waste? (Score:2)
How many examples of extra-terrestrial intelligence have ever existed, as far as we know now? Zero.
If SETI finds a signal, how many examples of extra-terrestrial intelligence have ever existed? At least one.
I dunno about you, but I'd reckon such a discovery would be regarded as pretty damned significant by anybody who bothered to think about the issue for more than a millisecond.
Re:Is it not a waste? (Score:1)
Did anyone ever calculate how much energy a civilization would need to use in order to send a signal that would happen to arrive at us. Presumably the civilzation does not know we are here so they would have to radiate enegy to a large portion of their sky. I did a quick calculation assuming they had to do it in all directions and 1 watt would arrive at the destination.
One watt of power to be received is quite a lot more than is neccessary; the _sending_ power of Pioneer 10 is only 8 watts and at the current distance the strenght of received signal is "only about a billionth of a trillionth of a watt", as this link [nasa.gov] proves.
wouldn't you think they might want to... (Score:2)
Re:wouldn't you think they might want to... (Score:1)
Is it more likely that we missed something due to not doing enough analysis on the data, or due to not processing the right frequencies.
They have already increased the amount of data processing done on the raw data at least once with the introduction of the triplet analysis
To turn it around, I'd hate to think we missed something by wasting resources on ever more complex processing of a limited frequency band, when there was a very obvious signal out there but we just didn't bother to listen on the right frequency.
Re:wouldn't you think they might want to... (Score:1)
Nonsense. SETI performs a Fast Fourier Transformation (FFT) on the raw data, which separates out the frequencies into pure sine waves. Fourier's theorem is that any and all waveforms can be represented as a sum of sine waves. We don't need to do "process the right frequencies" - FFT processes all the frequencies.
Please note (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Please note (Score:1)
So run SETI@Home to make sure your computer always exists
Distributed Cracking (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been thinking about the whole distributed computing issue recently. SETI@Home and Distributed.net have proven how effective large scale parallel processing is. OTOH, Nimda has proven how effective a very simple worm can be.
Joe Cracker just managed to get ahold of a password file from his favourite .mil site. But now he's stumped. He tried his regular password cracking programs, to no avail. He decides to code up a quick worm in Visual Basic, and in several hours he has thousands of computers working at his task.
Re:Distributed Cracking (Score:1)
Re:Distributed Cracking (Score:1)
Re:Distributed Cracking (Score:1)
Why not try distributed.net, math geeks? (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.distributed.net [distributed.net]
Re:Why not try distributed.net, math geeks? (Score:5, Funny)
When will they start on rot13?
Re:Why not try distributed.net, math geeks? (Score:2, Funny)
A bunker deep beneath an unnamed mountain somewhere in the western US.
Sir, we've had all of our top computers working on this message for months, and we can't crack it. Seven of our top cryptanalysts have starved to death while trying to decipher the thing. General, sir, we're losing this battle.The general pauses to think for a moment. Then he speaks.
Colonel, do we still have that agent on the Captain Crunch marketing board? Good. Have him slip these Captain Crunch Secret Decoder rings into the marketing plan.
A short phone call later, and twenty thousand little kids were working on the uncrackable ROT13 cipher.
Re:Why not try distributed.net, math geeks? (Score:1)
RC5 isn't that impressive from a technological standpoint. The time it'd take can be estimated on paper, with maximum and minimum times. Heck, the key could of been found during the first 3 minutes of the contest.
Re:Why not try distributed.net, math geeks? (Score:1)
Re:Why not try distributed.net, math geeks? (Score:1)
Other data (Score:3, Interesting)
Dont get me wrong, i like SETI
but SETI@HOME is silly i think, when there are more important things to do. How about we apply some global computing power to getting INTO space, rather than wasting it listening to millions(?) of stars?
Re:Other data (Score:1)
Already working, (Score:2)
I agree that SETI@home has a low cost/benefit ratio, that's why I'd rather crunch the data rather than have tax dollars pay some more for less. My 'puter has found lots of interesting signals, maybe one of them is a key to an important non-Seti phenomina.
The technology is pretty well proven wth SETIatHome so I'm sure that other more mundane uses for it will be instituted. And actualy my last up-grade was driven by the desire to crunch data a bit faster so it easy for me to see SETIatHome aiding the tech secter.
Re:Other data (Score:2)
If you like to do something different, you can find a nice overview of a few different projects here [arstechnica.com].
Further questions can be asked in our forum.
Re:Other Projects (Score:2, Informative)
BTW S@H have admited for a long time that they send out each unit 3 or 4 times, for double-checking, and because they aren't splitting/recieving the units from Arecibo fast enought. However they only use a small band of Arecibo's datastream, centered on the H-OH 'waterhole' (1420MHz +/- 1.25 MHz); this should improve the rang of frequencies covered.
There is talk of using southern SERENDIP [uws.edu.au] as a second antenna to get better sky coverage. They have another problem; S@H accounts for about 30% of Berkeley Uni's total out going bandwith, outside the Space Science Lab, the net admins aren't that happy about this. Unless they can get other SpaceScience Universities to share the load, they can't increase their userbase much more.
Re:Other data (Score:2, Flamebait)
Fucksake...
Take any (any) endeavour, and you can come up with something more important if you put your mind to it. Protein folding? Why waste your time on such a trivial task when you can sell your computer and donate the money to helping children?
Inoculating third world children? What a fucking waste of time. Most of them won't accomplish anything. You're better off donating money to schools for gifted children.
Schools for gifted children? If they're that smart, they don't need help.
The reason humanity is as wide, diverse and advanced as it is is that every one of us, in more ways than we can count, is standing on the shoulders of not just giants, but minnows (if you'll pardon the mixed metaphor). For every Newton, there are thousands of people whose names aren't recorded, but whose work has been passed down orally for generations, and is now taken as part of common sense instead of ground-breaking research.
Who gives a shit about how dinosaurs walked? Who cares about whether phlogiston is fixed air or carbon dioxide? Throughout history, people have spent time, money and effort on what those around them considered to be a criminal waste of talent. If they hadn't, we'd still be in the dark ages.
Will seti@home find anything? Maybe. Is my contribution likely to further mankind? Probably not. Is it more important than folding proteins? Depends on whether we find aliens or a cure for pancreatic cancer.
Remember: there are no stupid questions. And 'does the noise from Epislon Eridani contain an artifical signal' is as valid a question as any you can think of.
SETI@Home meet AI@Home (Score:4, Informative)
If there are not enough celestial data for the SETI@Home project, then let's turn some of that enormous Beowolfian processing power over to a categorically related AI@Home sub-project in the form of the First AI at http://sourceforge.net/projects/mind [sourceforge.net] -- whjere we are creating the artificial intelligence that we may need (or may encounter) in the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI).
Just as the otherwise idle computers crunch data in the search for ET intelligence, the AI@Home project may become a contest to see whose computer will have the longest-running, gradually most ancient AI running as an uninterrupted artificial life (alife) form since Star-Date 200X.
A few hard-core AI@Homers may provide the algorithmic advances while the masses of participating SETI+AI enthusiasts provide the PC's, workstations and supercomputers.
When the AI@Home technology is sufficiently mature, then we turn the AI entities loose on the quest for their starborne brethren and sistren.
Logic dictates: lim --> *** (The stars are the limit.)
Re:SETI@Home meet AI@Home (Score:2)
great! but what about broadcasting??? (Score:2, Interesting)
Does anyone know of technology that could do this?
I have heard of the possility of using lasers to refine the broadcast of messages to other solar systems. I would be very intrigued to see if a community of global researchers uniting to provide strong signals outbound. Seti users have already displayed the commitment to listening, i am sure i am not the only one out there who would actively participate in this endeavour.
Next stop radio shack!
Re:great! but what about broadcasting??? (Score:2)
Also do we necersarily want to deliberatly give away our position? OK, voyager and pioneer had a "map" to get to us, but any civilisation discovering them before we become extinct will be within a few light years of us anyway - how long will it take the fastest one of them to get far enough away to have an ambiguous starting point?
Re:great! but what about broadcasting??? (Score:2)
Does anyone know where a picture of this message is?
Re:great! but what about broadcasting??? (Score:3, Interesting)
"The Arecibo message, which was designed by Frank Drake (who was then Director of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, and is now Chairman of the Board of the SETI Institute) together with his Observatory staff, was a simple graphic consisting of 73 rows of 23 "bits" per row. This number of rows and columns was chosen because each is a prime number. Prime numbers could be easily guessed by any recipients, and that would help them to decode the graphic. The message was sent by simple shifting of the signal between two frequencies in the 2,380 MHz band. It took three minutes to send the message.
The message itself gives the kind of information that any culture would want to learn about us: where we are located (at least within our solar system), what we look like (a crude stick figure), a simple drawing of the telescope used to send the message, and something about our biological construction (DNA and some of the building blocks of our biochemistry.) This message was sent as a "demonstration" to commemorate the upgrading of the 1,000 foot diameter Arecibo telescope with a new, more accurate reflector surface."
(http://www.seti-inst.edu/general/ao_message_cr
Yan
We already broadcast (Score:2, Informative)
And it many ways, at that.
Consider the fact that we've had radios for a hundred years now, and TVs for quite a while now. Add to that cell phones and satellite communications, and you've got a nice big EM bubble around Earth, of radius 100 light-years (since EM travels at light speed, and we've been sending them out for a century).
Granted, a hundred light-years isn't much, but if aliens within that distance are looking out for signals in the same way that we are, they've got quite a large source of incoming info.
But there's more! On March 15, 1999, a 400 000 bit-long transmission was sent out to four "local" star systems suspected of harbouring life. Take a look at the fascinating Encounter 2001 transmission [matessa.org]. It's absolutely worth a look. Try to figure some of it out too, just for fun =) IMO, it's brilliant.
So we are, after all, broadcasting quite a lot, whether it be specific targetting or general.
Cheers.
Encounter 2001 (Score:2)
I definately see some recognizable stuff there. Hydrogen molecule, of course, coordinates in realation to the galaxy, etc. Pretty smart stuff.
How does that compare to what was sent out on the laserdisc on Voyager?
Re:great! but what about broadcasting??? (Score:1)
Some problems that occur to me with trying to broadcast messages. The number one problem of course is that all of our broadcasts (and the signals we are trying to receive with SETI) are travelling at the speed of light. That means that for all but nearby star systems, the messages will not arrive until the senders are long dead. For even the very closest couple of star systems, we are talking 5 or 6 years to receive a response to a message we send. And while it is not certain, there is a reasonably good chance that if any "civilization" existed on a nearby star system, we would have detected them by now.
The problem with targetting star systems is figuring out which ones to target. So far we have not found one single system outside our own with "planets in a temperate climate that can harbor life", simply because we do not yet have the technology capable of finding such a thing. The best we can do currently is select systems with a single sun like star, but that number is probably still in the billions in our galaxy.
And finally, there is the problem of the alien civilization detecting our signals. Unless our laser is putting out a beam that will exceed the brightness of the sun, the other system will have to have an ongoing program to search for lasers, that has continued uninterrupted for millions of years (since it is unlikely they will be at the same stage of evolution as us). That system would have to be comprehensive, scanning the entire sky, if they don't already know where we are. And if they do already know where we are, then it is pretty clear they do not want to talk to us yet.
Make a difference (Score:2, Interesting)
You can download the (Windows only, sigh) clients from http://members.ud.com/vypc/ [ud.com].
Re:Make a difference (Score:2)
Interesting (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm amazed that they have even been able to do that! That's a lot of bandwidth.
If only the southern hemisphere (say down in Australia) could be in the equation, and the SETI data team get more than 'part time' priority when it comes to collecting data from the dish.
Re:Interesting (Score:3, Informative)
SETI@home is a very fortunate science program. It utilizes 70% of the Arecibo telescope time. The other 30% is time used for repair, maintenance, or radar observations (Arecibo's powerful radar transmitters create too much interference for SETI@home's sensitive receiver).
This is an extraordinary amount of telescope time! Most astronomers are lucky to get even a day a year on the telescope for their research. Since SETI@home doesn't need to point to any specific point in the sky, it just "goes along for the ride" while other astronomers use the giant antenna. If SETI@home could take data full time we would collect about 50 GB of data every day. It takes us about eight months to "cover" the Arecibo sky. This isn't 100% of the sky that is visible to the telescope since we don't control pointing, but it's close. SETi@Home's goal is to collect and analyze at least two years worth of data. This would allow us to cover the sky seen from Arecibo about three times.
Re:Interesting (Score:1)
The roots... (Score:4, Insightful)
"You are going to cut our funds?? Big deal. We'll find another way.
Guess what? Now we have the biggest computer power in the world, all by volunteers!"
It was one of the first glimpses of the Internet as a tool for "light civil disobedience", followed (?) by PGP, MP3, etc...
maybe they should also consider... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:maybe they should also consider... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:maybe they should also consider... (Score:1)
Re:maybe they should also consider... (Score:1)
SETI@home has enough volunteers such that we can process each piece of data more than once and compare the potential signals detected by different computers to one another.
And: There are also many work units that were processed by more than one version of the SETI@home client.
This picture shows what has been scanned, and how many times. [berkeley.edu]
Re:maybe they should also consider... (Score:1)
The problem with this is that they would still eventually run out of data (at the current rate) because they would be just postponing the date until later. They need to collect the data faster or they will just run out in another year (or so).
Better than the lotto! (Score:3, Funny)
__
Don't sweat the petty stuff but do pet the sweaty stuff.
Try something useful. (Score:2, Informative)
How about a project which needs cycles? (Score:2, Informative)
There's even a $100,000 prize for the first 10,000,000 digit prime number. I encourage others to consider this project -- RC5 is close to pointless now (RC5/56 proved limited encryption is of no value), and SETI@Home already have more cycles than they can use.
Impact of being chosen by SETI (Score:1)
Maybe we should give up and make a The Next Generation distribution - "boldly going where no user has had to go since 1981".
Just kidding
Wicked old atheists (Score:3, Informative)
I seriously question the science of SETI@home. I left them after one of the first debacles where they kept sending out the same packet of data to most everyone.
genome [standford.edu] and folding@home [stanford.edu] just seems so much more likely to be useful.
If you're an atheist (or even if you aren't) you're welcome to join our genome@home team [stanford.edu], Wicked Old Atheists [localhostc...heistshtml]. We're currently placed #24 in the world.
Patience required for Great projects (Score:2)
If you abandon every free-thinking project the first time a bug is exposed, well, you're probably a very frustrated guy. Especially in the Open Source, Free Software, or Linux camps! Have some patience. (News flash: They fixed that bug you think of as a "debacle".)
Some additional information... (Score:3, Informative)
Thats nothing (Score:1)
Perhaps it's just as well (Score:2, Funny)
After connecting to IntStelNet, please listen for a thousand years before posting...
For the socially retarded (Score:3, Funny)
Re:For the socially retarded (Score:1)
Trust me, she's not.
Meanwhile, Closer To Home ... (Score:1)
I got a lot of fascination and fun out of SETI for a couple of years, and even burned my fingers a couple of times on the vent of my laptop (I swear you could fry eggs on that thing when it was looking for green men in SETI packets). There came a point, however, when it dawned that SETI had enough momentum to continue without me should I wish to look at other distributed processing projects.
Then I came across the Olson laboratory's FightAIDS@home [fightaidsathome.org] project, and decided to take a look. And now I'm crunching HIV Research units, something which though arguably less spectacular/glamorous than looking for aliens, certainly deserves our more immediate (collective) attention.
So if you're casting around for something worthy to occupy your idle CPU, or even if you're just curious, why not take a look [fightaidsathome.org]?
So where are the aliens? (Score:1)
SETI@Home is looking for obsolete radio signals. (Score:5, Informative)
All newer transmissions systems, from SSB to spread-spectrum to GPS to HDTV, don't use carriers. The FCC wouldn't license a transmission system today that used a carrier. In time, all radio will be carrierless, to save spectrum space. That date is probably about 20 years away, after the transition to HDTV and digital audio broadcasting. So for less than a century will our civilization have broadcast carriers. That's a narrow window to hit when looing for another civilization.
There's some redundancy in all carrierless systems, but it may be only a few percent, and it's hard to find if you don't know how to look for it. Typically, detecting a spread-spectrum signal involves trying to synchronize a psuedorandom number generator at the receiving end with the signal. This is hard when you have no idea what the psuedorandom number generator looks like. It's not impossible; it's a cryptographic problem. But it's hard to detect a signal so weak you can't read the bits.
You can look for the presence of a carrier so weak that you can't detect the modulation, by averaging over many cycles. That's what SETI@Home actually does. So if there are carriers out there, SETI@Home should find them. But unless someone is deliberately beaming carriers at us, there's nothing to find.
I've met some of the SETI@Home people, and they admit this problem. By now, if anybody in our stellar neighborhood was aiming high-power continuous carriers at us, we'd know it. But there could be signals encoded in more efficient ways and thus look like noise. SETI@Home will never find them.
I think that the SETI@Home effort should be devoting more resources to finding non-carrier signals. Maybe long-period autocorrelation, looking for repeats of bit patterns, would be more appropriate than the present carrier search. Something that sounds like stellar hiss might turn out to have data in it.
Seti is looking for a CONTACT signal (Score:1)
I think that the point, however, is that seti@home is looking for signals that extraterrestrials would send *in order to be found*, as earth itself did in the past. These signals are deliberately simple, just a sort of "hello, we are out there".
Do your own analysis of the SETI work_unit.sah fil (Score:1)
So true. The signal could come in some other form than the "spikes, gaussians, or triplets" that SET@home searchs for. That is why I save all of my work_unit.sah files and analyze them manually with www.baudline.com [baudline.com]. (note: baudline only runs on x86 Linux)
In the 1000+ WU's I've collected and analyzed I have found many interesting signals that didn't match the S@H "spike, gaussian, triplet" profile. Some had the drift rate of a non-terrestrial origin but they didn't match Arecibo's beam width. Were they SETI? Probably not. But hey, it is a lot of fun to keep searching.
You can look for the presence of a carrier so weak that you can't detect the modulation, by averaging over many cycles. That's what SETI@Home actually does.
Baudline can also do this type of averaging with it's drift integrator tool. Coupled with baudline's color aperture window I've found that the human eye is very sensitive at finding signals in noise. What would be really great is if the SETI@home project had a way for users to manually search for signals and send in feedback. Sigh, they probably would hate the flood of message they'd receive. Maybe I should start the SETI@home@baudline project?
Greater analysis (Score:1)
Maybe they could do even more processing?
Calvin and Hobbes (Score:2, Informative)
I prefer projects with a higher probability to make an actual differene to how people live, like the (already named) Folding@Home [stanford.edu], Genome@Home [stanford.edu], or FightAIDSatHome [fightaidsathome.org]. The last one may not appeal to many here as Entropia, the distributed computing network behind it, apparantly insists in throwing in some commercial work packets to the clients. Finding a cure for AIDS sounds like a splendid idea, otoh.
My personal favorite is GIMPS [mersenne.org], the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, discoverers of the four largest explicitly known prime numbers. I like them because you actually have a chance to understand what the program is doing (if number theory is for you, that is). IMHO better than looking at some blinking lights of a screen saver that looks for ET.
Alex
All about the screen saver (Score:3, Funny)
A cool screen saver and a spiffy website is all I need to get people to do my genetic programming runs for me. hehe...
OPEN THEM UP!!! (Score:1)
Re:OPEN THEM UP!!! (Score:1)
Why oh why are they not *OPEN SOURCEING* these distributed projects?
The Seti@home FAQ [berkeley.edu] says about this:
"We decided not to make source code available for security reasons and for science reasons as well. We have to have everyone do the exact same analysis, or we can't have any control over our research and be confident in our results. We were also worried that there may be a few people that want to deliberately try to screw up our database and server."
dmca@home? (Score:4, Funny)
It's time to write a distributed program that will grok all legalese in the world, and use massive seti@home-style processing to figure out every possible way to repeal the DMCA and other defective copyright laws. The distributed program would itself be protected by the DMCA, and any attempts by the MPAA/RIAA to stop the processing would be "circumvention."
A better source of data... (Score:1)
Truly a waste of time (Score:1, Interesting)
1) The odds of finding something based on our current methods are dismal at best.
2) To date there has never been a single tangible form of evidence that this is even worthwhile.
3) There is no use to receiving an alien signal as we will not be able to respond
Now, you may all hear they have "little" funding... well Ill garantee you they have more funding than I make in a year! To me, thats too much, for some 6th grade science experiement.
The folks that run SETI@Home have done nothing but give their PC something to chew on while doing nothing else. So what? Thats fine - couldnt care less if it were calculating PI to the gazillion'th place. But its still as much a waste of time, money, and power.
commercial profit (Score:1)
how much will you pay not to get cancer or Aids ?. hmm lucrative business egh
Allready we have had drug companies in the global courts over not allowing 3rd world poor companies (who we put in debt) who wanted to give these products to their people dying of aids and these wernt even cures !, just temp fixes, these drug companies didnt care wether 3rd world africa's people lived or died all they cared about was their profit margin
if we have this much trouble with drug companies who dont have a cure, imagine how much trouble we will have when they find a cure and the ensuing patents,trademarks etc another case of "pay up or die" and "the rich live, the poor die" even if they got the answer to their problems for free by using YOUR computer!
Something to think about while crunching data for that "cure to everything" for a major billion dollar drug company
Re:but wait a second... (Score:1)
Seriously, though, this donation is good publicity, and undoubtedly good value for money for HP (otherwise they wouldn't have done it)
-roy