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> As a means to get funding and interest in radioastronomy, by spinning more than a bit on the chances of it ever working, it made a lot of sense. This sent me
by lowmemcpu 6y ago
> As a means to get funding and interest in radioastronomy, by spinning more than a bit on the chances of it ever working, it made a lot of sense.
This sent me looking for the total half-century $ cost of SETI, but couldn't find it. Have any idea if that's been calculated?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- yyyk 6y agoI didn't find much, but I have an idea for calculation: * Most of their projects have a relatively static cost[0] year-by-year. * The big variable is SETI@home. From the SETI PoV it's zero-cost, but that's not the case for society (compute, electricity, pollution). It's not difficult to find TFLOPS estimates via BOINC or wiki. Translating that back to cost is rather difficult, for me at least. Most people did not buy computers for this. Network bandwidth cost is also difficult to estimate. I suspect main component is power for processing. But electricity estimates vary widely depending on hardware used, I dunno how to estimate the average consumption per TLOPS. [0] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-annual-cost-of-operating-SETI-Is-it-worth-the-money https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-annual-cost-of-operating-S...