For a long time I would periodically check on the screen saver in case there would be some big message saying my computer found aliens or something. Never did though :)
If you tried to submit it would spend a while with a really slow progress bar, and then say it failed to submit and asked you to contact SETI directly. I wonder if anyone actually did....
The truth is still out there.
I've (thankfully) moved on past that, but I look back at that with nostalgia.
And now that we have mass-produced hyper-maneuverable quad-copter drones, the whole "it moved backward in a way that no aircraft ever could!" doesn't really hit as hard.
Anyone else collect The X-Factor partworks magazine? I used to love reading it.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_black_bear
The US South has bears.
The trend is pretty clear.
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.
They'd found some promising results, and were working with a pharmaceutical company to manufacture the first compounds that could then be tested. Unfortunately that company's facility was located in eastern Ukraine. =(
But that aside, they've still been going strong.
I've recently decided to end my own participation, mainly because I've run three systems into the ground, and we're now in the "save what you can" era. There's one motherboard I want to get refurbished, since it became unstable when idle but loved 24x7 crunching. It would make a great NAS if I could find some DDR4 at a price I could stomach, or I could lay it in as a spare if the new motherboard goes south in the future.
https://foldingathome.org/2024/05/02/alphafold-opens-new-opp...
Some of these projects could occupy entire regions of cloud compute in some cases for awhile, some even more depending on the problem. But running that for even a short time or decades needed would cost more money than anyone has to do.
Academic HPCs existed long before cloud compute options and for certain problem spaces could also be used even in non-distributed memory cases to handle this stuff. But you still needed allocation time and sometimes even funding to use them, competing against other cases like drug design, cancer research, nuclear testing… whatever. So searching for ET could be crowdsourced and the cost distributed which is something that made it alluring and tractable.
I used to run a small academic cluster that was underutilized but essentially fully paid for. I’d often put some of these projects running as background throttled processes outside scheduler space so the 90% of the time no one was using them, the hardware would at least be doing some useful scientific research since it’s after-all funded largely from federal scientific research funding. There was of course some bias introduced by which projects I chose to support whereas someone else may have made a more equitable choice.
You can run on a spare Raspberry Pi. I remember doing that. Performance isn’t great but every little bit helps
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
At the time of SETI@home, a typical CPU used maybe 20W at full load, fans usually ran at constant speed, and power management was much more primitive. So you barely noticed the difference between idle and full load, both on your electricity bill and on the noise the PC made.
Now hundreds of watts is not uncommon if you also use the GPU, and people are much more conscious about how much power computers use. And at full power, fans spin up loudly, laptops get uncomfortably hot, etc... It means you are not going to do it as easily. It probably didn't help the "@home" projects.
Edit: I have a heat pump, which is more efficient for heating of course
I don't know how it worked out, but the idea was there.
However, that's only a measure of efficiency. It could still be that the throughput isn't enough. A 30 kW resistive heater can ALWAYS output 30 kW of heat. But my 7 kW heat pump could produce anywhere from 14 to 30 kW depending on outside temperature.
The original site is down, but jump to November 5, 1999 to see the screenshot. https://web.archive.org/web/20030404093458/http://www.monzy....
Was it all for nothing?
So I wouldn’t say it was all for nothing, but it’s main benefit was the idea, and not the results it generated
Did it though?
I won't claim it was "the" most important or it was critical in that, but it's not to be dismissed.
Even humanity’s (weak) radio emissions would be detectable from tens of light years away, and stronger emissions from much further. So the idea that intelligent life is absolutely everywhere that was liberally tossed around a few decades ago is pretty much on life support now.
That's not true. Non-directional radio transmissions (e.g. TV, broadcast radio) would not be distinguishable from cosmic background radiation at more than a light year or two away [0]. Highly directional radio emissions (e.g. Arecibo message) an order of magnitude more powerful than the strongest transmitters on Earth would only be visible at approximately 1000 light years away [1], and would only be perceptible if the detector were perfectly aligned with the transmission at the exact time it arrived.
20 light years is about the farthest useful communication can be established. The farther out things are the longer the round trip and thus the more likely we have already figured things out by the time we get their answer. It would still be interesting to get a response, but our (and we assume their) civilization is moving too fast for much knowledge sharing. Eventually with knowledge sharing you assume something is obvious that isn't and so you get another round trip. Watching an alien movie no matter who far away they are will be interesting (even if it is more a smell based or something that we don't think of)
There is no reason to think we will ever visit them, but we can do other things when they are close.
There are not many stars within 20 light years though. The Femi paradox doesn't exist at that distance, there just not enough stars to expect to find life that close.
if this is a real situation I wouldn't be asked. So use salt
When you say perfectly aligned, what kind of precision are we talking about? If we aimed a receiver at a nearby star, would we be able to achieve this kind of precision?
"Dissolving the Fermi Paradox": https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404
Have to say that would be a fun puzzle to try and optimize for, but network latency would always be a hard physical constraint no matter how fast. Maybe some niche use cases, but then multi-core CPUs and GPU processing really took off and I guess it just got even less useful.
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/search-for-life/this...
Update: looks like there is a Wikipedia list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volunteer_computing_pr...
Would still be nice to know for the applicable ones if any success have come out of these or if they're just fun toys
I checked the wayback machine and the download pages are still findable, but the client downloads are all FTP links and don't seem retrievable.
:)
Wasnt this the original wording?
I remember setting up SETI on my first computer on dial-up when I was 17 years old! It was such an exciting thing to participate in!
You know of this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal
SETI at Home was a screensaver that was looking for signals like that via distributed searching and they didn't find anything (but they do have telescope time for tackling the 92 highest priority follow-up scans).
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.
SETI Home Flags 100 Signals After Sorting 12B Others
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.