SETI@home Turns Five Today 275
mfh writes "Five years ago today, SETI@home launched a comprehensive program to search for Extra Terrestrial life in the universe, using millions of home computers to help compile useful data that could some day lead to the discovery of advanced extra terrestrial life. Since inception, SETI@home has found 2,568 persistent Gaussians, possible radio transmissions from a distant planet. SETI began in 1960 with the efforts of Cornell University astronomer Frank Drake, whose Project Ozma became the first modern SETI experiment in history."
obligatory space balls quote (Score:5, Funny)
And - obligatory userfriendly (Score:5, Funny)
Re:obligatory space balls quote (Score:2, Interesting)
Strange coincidence in the number five.
Well I've found plenty of things (Score:5, Interesting)
I like noise. In fact I am fascinated by it.
My viewpoint of the seti@home project is that they are a great source of high quality Radio Telescope signals. I let their program do it's science and I get to keep the work units. Seems like a fair trade. So far I have archived 5762 work_unit.sah files (~1.5 GB). Why?
Because I am an amateur SETI enthusiast and I wasn't satisfied with just watching the screensaver. Gaussians, spikes, triplets, phooey! I wanted to do more. So I collect every work unit and I analyze them myself with the baudline signal analyzer [baudline.com]. It can read the
Despite the common mixing trough at 1.4200 GHz, and the stationary harmonic bleed-in interference, I have found a lot of interesting things in the data. Every now and then I run into a weak signal with a non-terrestrial Doppler drift rate. Sometimes they wiggle or pulse. Is it ET? Probably not, but it is exciting and fun. I should make a webpage of pictures.
[Disclaimer: Yes, I am an author of baudline and this is a blatant product plug.]
Just not on company PC's (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Just not on company PC's (Score:3, Insightful)
I hate to see CPU time being wasted. If you're worried about power consumption you might just as well turn the machine off entirely.
Re:Just not on company PC's (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's get it out of the way (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Let's get it out of the way (Score:2)
Five years, eh? (Score:5, Funny)
Defect (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Defect (Score:3, Interesting)
Anybody have any more info on this project?
Re:Defect (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Defect (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Defect (Score:3, Funny)
Anybody have any more info on this project?
Hell yeah, I'd install that in a heartbeat. Any software capable of using 120% of my CPU should be respected.
Not if... (Score:2)
Re:Defect (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Defect (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Defect (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Defect (Score:5, Interesting)
The signals we get from SETI, if we get any, will probably start out with dots and dashes, followed by audio and, about fifty years later, video of "Howdy Skwarklar" the puppet from Dontbotherus VII.
Re:Defect (Score:2, Insightful)
or... they're an alien species that has a hive-mind and no concept of inter-species warfare as we know it.
or... 100s of options that DON'T involve a concept of "aliens as humans".
or... 100s of options that don't assume that tech was driven by a "market".
Re:Defect (Score:2)
Hive mind is a possibility I hadn't thought of. Good job!
Re:Defect (Score:2, Insightful)
If I remember correctly the history of human space exploration, competition and not cooperation has always been the driving force.
If they are a space-faring species, they would have to have been able to keep enough of their GDP available for space flight for hundreds of years.
I don't know about that. Why could not a fascist, hive-minded alien society achieve the same?
Second, space flight involves high technology. This means that the
Re:Defect (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Defect (Score:2)
Re:Defect (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Defect (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Defect (Score:3, Insightful)
No luck so far but still searching (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No luck so far but still searching (Score:2, Funny)
then my overclocked p4 burned out so i stopped
Boring (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Boring (Score:2)
For a game with a point, you must try Progress Quest [progressquest.com]! Ah, the tales [progressquest.com] I could tell...
and.. (Score:5, Funny)
An still no sign of .... (Score:2, Funny)
1000 units (Score:2)
19638 Units and running strong (Score:5, Interesting)
When we find them (Score:2)
But, "The young ones do not always do as they are told."
A new project (Score:5, Funny)
Re:A new project (Score:5, Funny)
Re:A new project (Score:2)
No, as citizens we only have our self to blame, as voters we don't have a good choice to begin with. When offered a cat turd or a dog turd which am I suppose to vote for?
Politics doesn't attract intelligence on average. typically you don't have a good choice. As citizens intelligent people should be more active in politics.
Re:A new project (Score:3, Funny)
Re:A new project (Score:2)
No you don't. The election was pretty darn close to 50/50. That means that if Gore had been elected, the "looking for intelligent signs of life in Washington" joke would still be funny to half the people.
So, no, you don't have yourselves to blame. We didn't have an ideal candidate.
Re:A new project (Score:2)
Where are the results? (Score:5, Insightful)
Where are the results? IN YOUR PANTS! (Score:3, Insightful)
i hate to say it... (Score:5, Interesting)
wouldnt it be better to donate cycles to something like folding@home, parkinsons and alzheimers disease protein research?
i dont mean to belittle seti, i think its a wonderful project, and maybe this arguement falls deaf on geek ears (aliens vs disease- woh, war of the worlds:) but id like to see more terran problems solved, no?
ps i donate all my unused cycles to folding (over genome project, i personally feel that we're going to screw something up with the whole genetic genome geewiz junk)
Re:i hate to say it... (Score:3, Funny)
And here class, we have the makings of a luddite. Notice how the fear of the unknown leads to rash illogical actions? This effect, is known as the evolution effect. It regresses an otherwise intelligent person into the superstitious fearmongering ancestor of 10,000 years ago. Now imagine if this person had acess to religion to spread his
Re:i hate to say it... (Score:5, Funny)
DUH!
Re:i hate to say it... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's quite nice to hear somebody ask this question so tactfully. Every other time I've heard it, the context was what an idiot I am.
I chose Seti over the medical research SS's. Why? Because I believe in diversity. To the best of my understanding, SETI has very little in terms of funding and man power, in stark contrast to the medical field where there are lots and lots and lots of people + money trying to cure stuff. I think my time is worth more to Seti than it is to the other projects. (Friendly rebuttals welcome, I'm open to reconsideration...)
I don't like the idea of abandoning SETI altogether. (Note: You didn't say or imply that, but I've heard others want to take it that far...) We shouldn't totally ignore looking for intelligent life. A lot of interesting stuff happens if the "is there life out there" question turns out to be 'yes'.
Re:i hate to say it... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:i hate to say it... (Score:3, Funny)
(Just kidding... I used to be a rabid OS/2 user)
Re:i hate to say it... (Score:5, Interesting)
Why does society break up into researching different things? Why shouldn't we find the #1 killer disease, focus ALL of our money at it, solve that, and move on? Sure, it's not as simple as that, but it also goes down to drive.
We work with charities and groups that touch our lives, soul or imagination. When friends and family are stricken with a disease, we are more likely to donate to a group trying to cure that disease.
Ultimately it comes to this: SETI is a dream that I share with the founders of the project. It's something I could see myself persuing in some other life. It's a lottery that, if you win, you don't know what the prize will be. Maybe it will re-focus our community a bit more away from commercialism, and more towards exploration and discovery. Maybe we win nothing.
I'm in it for the journey, not the destination.
~D
Re:i hate to say it... (Score:3, Funny)
I haven't entirely given up on finding it on Earth...
(rimshot)
-WS
Re:i hate to say it... (Score:3, Informative)
When SETI@Home came out, it was one of the only games in town, and computer power management was rare and didn't work well. The computer was going to use 100 watts whether you were using it or not, so it made more sense to put it to use.
Today, there's a very good chance that if you leave your computer idle, it'll eventually go into some sort of reduced-power mode. Given the complicated nature of the world energy situation (Californai blackouts, war
Their anniversary date is wrong, slightly (Score:4, Interesting)
Was that really their first day?
Re:Their anniversary date is wrong, slightly (Score:2)
Aah, the memories... (Score:5, Funny)
Problem was that something went slightly wrong with the Solaris server resulting in a crash of the server. This was probably unrelated to my setiathome processes (?), but one of the memory dump files had my user ID on them. Nearly lost my privileges - luckily the university IT folks were kind enough to let me off with just a warning.
Re:Aah, the memories... (Score:3, Funny)
Back at my old U we had a pair of sun servers, on a 4 proc machine I'd throw 3-4 instances up and let em each have their own CPU for as long as they were running (no scripts to kill em involved).
Trying to be a lil more clever though (in a way), I changed the app names so they wouldn't appear as seti, and every now and then the admin would see what looked like run away procs and kill em... and a lil later I'd rerun em.
At a later date, a hardware memory error (ie one of the di
A little late, aren't we? (Score:3, Informative)
current progress ?? future directions ?? (Score:2, Interesting)
Why ? because i strongly suspect they'd waste CPU cycles on the same work units rather than say: hey, "5 MILLION user are enough" we have found this and that, and until new funding arrives you better move on to other projects.
The "current progress" page hasn't been updated in years, so the "future direction" page, look for yourself
The Problem of SETI (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The Problem of SETI (Score:2)
Re:The Problem of SETI (Score:2)
Absolutely! In fact, tons more effort has been put into discovering planets which could house lower forms of life.
There's just one problem we can't do it yet. It's *much* harder to do! The only way to do it would be by spectroscopy on light from the planet, and we can't do that yet, but it's being worked on. That's what the Terrestrial Planet Finder is for, and it will cost huge amounts more than SETI@home ever di
Opensource distributed computing (Score:2)
It sort of fits the spirit of what they're doing better.
Re:Opensource distributed computing (Score:2)
my best gag ever. (Score:5, Funny)
He was always forever installing bloody seti on every machine server in the building..
So i played a joke, installed a app on his machine which at random points (i controlled) ping up and say it had found a singnal etc etc etc.. i used the seti gfx etc etc.
He got really excited, so of course we went one stage further.. The seti app told him that the signals were getting sent off for analysis, and someone would contact him shortly.
We then (other had now joined in) continued to make him jump out of his seat and explain "its happened again." while the rest of tried to stop laughing.
So an spoofed email address was setup and we emailed him from seti.. told him they were getting looked at etc..
Over the period of a couple of weeks we got the noise off the film contact, and mixed it with white noies.. luckly he had not seen contact. it started off really quite quiet in the background, and each email it got better and more and more clearer.
It was genuis.. we couldn't stop laughing.. he was telling his friend family etc etc etc that hed discovered possible alien life contact..
Of course.. we then relised we had gone slighly too far and had to tell him..
he was not a happy bunny..
Re:my best gag ever. (Score:3, Funny)
I wrote and designed this application that perfectly simulated seti@home and it too popped up and informed him that he found a signal. Then I wrote a spoof email as if it was sent from seti@home telling him that they would be in contact with him.
I hired 5 actors and got Air Force uniforms for them to wear, making sure their hair cuts were just right, and then proceeded to go to his house and give him some garbage that I had written out as a script. They
Friends in space... (Score:4, Funny)
Let's hope we get a chance to think before someone opens the attachment.
5 years ... (Score:3, Informative)
CPU Time Used (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't get me wrong, I run SETI@home myself, I'm just wondering, say, how much of the 2048 bit keyspace needed for signing Xbox executables could have been searched? How far would the TivoCrack project have got if they'd had access to that amount of computing power? I'm just curious really.
Re:CPU Time Used (Score:2)
It'd be awesome if they had found a way to distribute 3D rendering that way. It'd be interesting to see just how much could have been done.
Re:CPU Time Used (Score:3, Informative)
2^512 possibilities
Assuming every PC can do a billion operations per second (~2^30) and there are about 16 million users (2^24). Lets say there are 2^17 seconds in a day (its somewhere between 2^17 and 2^16) and 2^9 days in a year. Lets say the program was 8 years old instead (2^3)
That gives you 2^(30+24+17+9+3)=2^83 operations so far
You've completed 1 part in 1386334847060407429789207092071541851718218537687 9 08287585
21,496 Work Units later... (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been running SETI clients for a while now, and I suppose if someone asked my why I do it, I would say that I do it now just because I did it before.
I don't have any illusions about actually finding intelligent, extraterrestrial communications with SETI anymore. (And if anyone does, I'm not holding out hope that it's me.) In fact, I think that we should seriously question whether the entire premise of SETI@home--that other life forms would transmit data at the radio frequency of water--is still valid. Is it reasonable to assume that two completely different creatures would logically arrive at the same conclusion for how to communicate? Considering the amount of diversity on our planet alone, maybe not.
Could a blind man and a deaf man put together in a giant, dark auditorium find a way to communicate? That would be the easy problem; the hard one is finding a way to communicate with any intelligent life that's light years away out there.
Assuming it's out there in the first place...
SETI@Home sounds like SCO... (Score:4, Funny)
Other categories? (Score:2)
Regulation (Score:2, Funny)
I still wonder... (Score:5, Insightful)
They have a control... (Score:2, Informative)
5,000,000 users! Not bad! (Score:3, Informative)
Number of users at the time of this writing: 5,000,769
~D
WOW signal (Score:2)
Complete, Depressing waste of cycles (Score:3, Interesting)
Okay, why the heck are we wasting so much processing power on something that will likely never yield anything useful for the human race. It's like a processing power lottery, where the probabilities of anything are so remote that the expected payoff is nil in the long run.
Now, there are distributed computing programs that have actually brought results and helped humanity. For example: http://folding.stanford.edu . IF these 5 million users all installed folding at home, could you imagine the advancements and help to medical science we'd see in the next 5 years. As opposed to absolutely nothing gained whatsoever by SETI@home? (Other than the fact that they were the first people to do distributed computing. afaik.)
And if folding doesn't work for you, there are dozens of other much more useful distributed computing projects which have given results and are more or less guaranteed to give more results than this complete and total waste of money, time and processing power.
Let's try to help the human race instead of wasting our time looking for someone else.
geez.
Re:Complete, Depressing waste of cycles (Score:4, Insightful)
This isn't a zero-sum game. People get into seti@home because it's intriguing - there is zero chance that if you could wish seti@home into the cornfield, those 5 million people would sign up for folding@home.
Not only that, but I don't feel like there's an ethical lapse in donating spare cycles to a longshot like seti@home. I can do plenty of socially useful things while my work computer is churning away on seti data.
BTW, I tried to do folding@home (I have a biochem background and find that really intriguing), but have had nothing but problems with the Mac client. There's another folding project, whose name I can't remember, that was also impractical on my Mac. I'll keep going back. But my point is that nobody can make everything they do socially significant - so I have a problem with your implied (false) dichotomy of "Do something else/Completely wasting your time."
"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time." - Bertrand Russell
the real value of SETI (Score:5, Insightful)
These are all noble goals, worth pursuing. But SETI has a noble goal that doesn't get talked about very much.
Most SETI research so far has been focused on the so-called "Water Hole", the quietest part of the radio spectrum which happens to fall between the radio spikes of hydrogen and hydroxyl, around 1.4 gigahertz. If there's another water-based civilization out there, it's easy to see that this is a logical place to broadcast or listen. (Projects like Danny Hillis' Clock of the Long Now [longnow.org] enable me to imagine a future in which we broadcast a message of our own, someday.)
"So what happens if you listen and you don't hear anything?" you ask. Well, even if we drain the Water Hole and find nothing, we'll still have learned a great deal from the process. We'll know there likely aren't any civilizations remotely like us in our galaxy. We'll know that previous civilizations, if there were any, were not able to sustain themselves. We'll know that intelligent life is fleeting and precious in the universe. And this should make us think hard about our own civilization.
If we're ever forced to acknowledge that there are no intelligent radio signals in the universe, then we must also acknowledge that the odds of our own survival just became much bleaker. Knowing that space is quiet means it's more important for us to be careful than we thought. The longer we search without finding any intelligent signals, the more likely it becomes that intelligent civilization isn't some pretty 4th of July sparkler; it's nitroglycerin, waiting to explode. This is incredibly valuable knowledge, life or death knowledge that's worth going after.
The biggest reason to look for a signal in the first place isn't to commune with E.T., but out of pure self-interest. Any number of systems failures could wipe us out as a species, from a single well-designed terrorist plague to GMOs with unforeseen environmental consequences. How do we as a society learn to play nice with technology? Has anyone else in the universe done it? If we found evidence that someone out there had, it would stand as a beacon, showing that we can probably do it, too. And if we don't find a signal, it means a bell is probably tolling our end somewhere, and we'd better think long and hard how to change that.
So feel good about SETI. It's not just about searching for aliens, it's about searching for a cure for extinction.
So what's the estimated wasted power at this point (Score:3, Insightful)
Linux support needed (Score:2)
and are mostly unnoticed - except that the load average never goes below 1.0 (for one project running) or 2.0 (for two projects running). Then, I have to tune lots of other daemons that stop working when the LA goes above some level - typically defaulting to 1.0. For instance, sendmail will only queue mail unless you tune QUEUE_LA and REFUSE_LA.
I would like to have explicit support for background processes like th
Other @home projects (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course there is only currently a limited number of telescopes that can collect such data but that should increase in the next 20 years. I hope to see enough of such data to let us start looking for actual planets and enough of it that an @home is required for that too. That will help us zero in on possible inhabited worlds far more effeciently than searching for random gaussians will.
Consider Folding@home instead of SETI (Score:3, Informative)
While most /.'ers will probably run the FAH client, even Google supports Folding@home - read more at their Google Compute FAQ [google.com] which allows you to run it as part of the Google Toolbar - heck, I even have my mother helping out this way since it is so super-easy to install.
And if you do decide to support Folding@home, consider joining a team - if you don't have one, you are welcome to sign up for my Google Compute team ;-) [powder2glass.com]
Drake's First Result (Score:3, Interesting)
Frank Drake did receive a message during Project Ozma. One night, he started picking up, of all things, Morse code. When decoded, the message read "Message received. Send more Chuck Berry." Nobody ever owned up to the gag.
5 years of wasting CPU resources (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Possible radio transmission? (Score:2)
We have yet to make contact though...
NeoThermic
Top Secret (Score:5, Interesting)
I bet if they found anything it's Top Secret and we won't hear anything about it for a long time. Either that or we just can't figure out what the transmissions are saying.
Re:Top Secret (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Top Secret (Score:2)
Have they tried looking for sequences of prime numbers?
GTRacer
- How many astronomers look like JF, anyway?
Re:Top Secret (Score:3, Funny)
Note, if anyone manages/bothers to do this, give me props.
Re:Possible radio transmission? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Possible radio transmission? (Score:5, Funny)
All they got so far was this:
"Dear sentient:
Having consulted with my colleagues and based on the information gathered from the Altair IV Chambers Of Commerce And Industry, I have the privilege to request for your assistance to transfer the sum of 47,500,000.00 (forty seven million, five hundred thousand Rigellian quatloos) into your accounts [...]"
Re:Possible radio transmission? (Score:5, Informative)
I didn't find a real answer to this in a quick scan of the replies, so I figure I'll give it a shot...
I assume you know that SETI@home is parsing a vast collection of radio transmissions and hoping to find one from off-planet. When you download it and run it, you get a batch of transmissions and your computer will try to find a specific pattern in the mess. It is looking a single signal that initially has a steep decline in frequency. Then it levels out at one frequency. Then it goes into another steep decline. Why?
If a signal is broadcast from Earth, it stays at about the same frequency all the time. If it is brodcast from, say, Uranus, the spin of the Earth will cause a doppler effect. Start with your antenna being on the 'dark side' of the Earth. That is the side opposite the transmission. As it spins around and starts to pick up the transmission, it will be travelling very fast into the signal - causing the frequency to be increased. The relative speed going into the frequency will decrease as the Earth continues to spin. When you start heading back to the dark side, you will move away from the signal, causing the frequency to drop.
So, all SETI@home is really doing is looking for a doppler effect that matches the speed of the spin of the Earth. Such signals have been found. When they are found, the SETI people hunt down the source. Sometimes it is domestic (a weird situation where a signal bounces just right off a mountain or two). Sometimes it is one of our distant space explorers. Sometimes it is a star. So far, none have been from possible intelligent life - especially those domestic ones.
Re:Possible radio transmission? (Score:3, Informative)
sometimes it is hard to tell the serious inquiries / responses from the jokes, but here is my attempt at a serious response. You may also be thinking of the "Wow" signal that was detected at Ohio State in the 70's. It is one of the most interesting signals detected by a radio SETI search so far, but it was never confirmed even after intensive efforts.
A good summary by Seth Shostak [space.com] (a SETI pioneer and really
Re:wrong frequency (Score:2)
Assuming that there is another civilization out there (a long shot itself) and that they developed along similar lines as ourselves (an even longer shot), then there would
Re:wrong frequency (Score:2)