5 ms·

Although I think the seti@home project was one of the groundbreaking distributed/crowdworking projects, my personal opinion is that the actual search for ETI is

Although I think the seti@home project was one of the groundbreaking distributed/crowdworking projects, my personal opinion is that the actual search for ETI is a waste of time (not factoring in any advances in science/engineering that have been derived from the project). I'm a firm believer in the most common solution to the Fermi Paradox (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox) - ie there's nothing else out there - because for any civilisation that's even slightly more advanced than us (for galactic values of slightly), the effort to make a noticeable impact on galaxy is reasonably trivial.

barisme 16y ago
Agree with your 1st paragraph. As for whether there's anything out there, I don't know. But if there is, it's optimistic to assume their technology would be related to ours in such a way that we could detect it with a few dishes plunked down in a valley. Besides that, the news would be at least 2.5 million year old. ;)
- iwwr 16y ago
  An alternative solution to the Fermi paradox would be that radio signals fade into the background fairly quickly. SETI only has the ability to pick up signals coming just few light-years away (if emitted by an Earth-like radio culture). It would be expected that a more advanced civilization would prefer to use highly focused directional beams (perhaps lasers), signals which won't (easily) get picked up by those to whom they're not intended. Even now, as communication bandwidth is increasing, it's mostly as ground-based fiber optics.
  - barisme 16y ago
    Yes or 'they' might use a form of energy that is totally foreign to us. Maybe it's not even a beam or a ray. Maybe it's micro-black-hole-oscillation (yeah, made that up). I mean, who knows? It's all hypothetical anyway. And here we are spending money on a bunch of dishes that pick up a specific range of radio frequency. Stick the same dishes on top of a sports bar and at least we can all watch football.
    - iwwr 16y ago
      The advantage of SETI is that the radio equipment can be used for radio astronomy just as well. So the money spent has dual use (almost complementary).
wladimir 16y ago
We might be seeing their impact on the galaxy all around us. How would we know? They might work on different (time)scales. Edit: I agree that SETI makes no sense to contact such entities though.
- khafra 16y ago
  Assuming such beings work on the same physics we do, they need massive amounts of energy to run a galactic civilization; and they have the same sources available that we do: Stars; and for extra credit black holes. Putting a dyson sphere around a star changes its energy output, shifting it far into the infrared. Putting a matrioshka brain around a star is even more dramatic a change--but it still has the same gravitational effect on other stars. But no, unfortunately that doesn't explain the effects of "dark matter."
thangalin 16y ago
I ran Seti@Home for years; after I found out about Folding@Home, I switched over; disease research yields short- and long-term benefits. http://folding.stanford.edu/ http://folding.stanford.edu/
- dkersten 16y ago
  Exactly, using that computing power for folding@home would have been much more beneficial, IMHO.
  - crocowhile 16y ago
    BOINC was actually developed to support SETI@HOME. Without the pulling power of SETI who knows if you had all the others spinoffs. As for many other kind of research, space research often brings very unexpected innovations.
    - dkersten 16y ago
      That is very true. I didn't mean to imply that nothing good came out of it at all - obviously they developed some great tech to help their search for alien life, which can be reapplied elsewhere.
- michaelcampbell 16y ago
  I have multi multi-core machines, so I run seti@home as well as a (much larger timeshare of) rosetta@home. I agree that disease research has a much more probable impact, but the implications of a successful SETI search are not trivial either. I also run Einstein@home, and world community grid.
- gwern 16y ago
  Does Folding@Home really yield a lot? I did some quick figuring (http://www.gwern.net/Notes.html#charitable-supercomputing http://www.gwern.net/Notes.html#charitable-supercomputing) and that project costs a lot, while, as far as I can tell, delivering little especially compared to alternate charities.

barisme 16y ago

Agree with your 1st paragraph. As for whether there's anything out there, I don't know. But if there is, it's optimistic to assume their technology would be related to ours in such a way that we could detect it with a few dishes plunked down in a valley. Besides that, the news would be at least 2.5 million year old. ;)

iwwr 16y ago
An alternative solution to the Fermi paradox would be that radio signals fade into the background fairly quickly. SETI only has the ability to pick up signals coming just few light-years away (if emitted by an Earth-like radio culture). It would be expected that a more advanced civilization would prefer to use highly focused directional beams (perhaps lasers), signals which won't (easily) get picked up by those to whom they're not intended. Even now, as communication bandwidth is increasing, it's mostly as ground-based fiber optics.
- barisme 16y ago
  Yes or 'they' might use a form of energy that is totally foreign to us. Maybe it's not even a beam or a ray. Maybe it's micro-black-hole-oscillation (yeah, made that up). I mean, who knows? It's all hypothetical anyway. And here we are spending money on a bunch of dishes that pick up a specific range of radio frequency. Stick the same dishes on top of a sports bar and at least we can all watch football.
  - iwwr 16y ago
    The advantage of SETI is that the radio equipment can be used for radio astronomy just as well. So the money spent has dual use (almost complementary).

wladimir 16y ago

We might be seeing their impact on the galaxy all around us. How would we know? They might work on different (time)scales. Edit: I agree that SETI makes no sense to contact such entities though.

khafra 16y ago
Assuming such beings work on the same physics we do, they need massive amounts of energy to run a galactic civilization; and they have the same sources available that we do: Stars; and for extra credit black holes. Putting a dyson sphere around a star changes its energy output, shifting it far into the infrared. Putting a matrioshka brain around a star is even more dramatic a change--but it still has the same gravitational effect on other stars. But no, unfortunately that doesn't explain the effects of "dark matter."

thangalin 16y ago

I ran Seti@Home for years; after I found out about Folding@Home, I switched over; disease research yields short- and long-term benefits. http://folding.stanford.edu/ http://folding.stanford.edu/

dkersten 16y ago
Exactly, using that computing power for folding@home would have been much more beneficial, IMHO.
- crocowhile 16y ago
  BOINC was actually developed to support SETI@HOME. Without the pulling power of SETI who knows if you had all the others spinoffs. As for many other kind of research, space research often brings very unexpected innovations.
  - dkersten 16y ago
    That is very true. I didn't mean to imply that nothing good came out of it at all - obviously they developed some great tech to help their search for alien life, which can be reapplied elsewhere.
michaelcampbell 16y ago
I have multi multi-core machines, so I run seti@home as well as a (much larger timeshare of) rosetta@home. I agree that disease research has a much more probable impact, but the implications of a successful SETI search are not trivial either. I also run Einstein@home, and world community grid.
gwern 16y ago
Does Folding@Home really yield a lot? I did some quick figuring (http://www.gwern.net/Notes.html#charitable-supercomputing http://www.gwern.net/Notes.html#charitable-supercomputing) and that project costs a lot, while, as far as I can tell, delivering little especially compared to alternate charities.