19 ms·
SETI@home is in hibernation
- jasongill 4y agoWow, this is sad. I remember when this project was released in 1999 - we installed it on all the workstations in our office in an effort to be the first to find ET. Loved bragging about the cool graph, saying it could be an alien signal. Sad to see the project come to an end, even if it was the distant precursor to things like BitTorrent and Bitcoin
- dylan604 4y agoI too tried to use all of our workstations to run this trying to break into the top charts. Oh how young and naive I was thinking the 8-10 computers I had were effective enough for that.
- LinuxBender 4y agoWe did that as well on a bunch of spare Sun SPARC servers that were considered powerful back in their day. A part of me always wondered if I had been tricked into cracking encryption for the assorted agencies and that this had nothing to do with monitoring the quietest frequency in the galaxy.
- peterleiser 4y agoLol! I worked for SETI@home as an undergrad. If something nefarious was going on then my coworkers were extremely good actors, right down to faking an entire codebase and a database filled with processed work units. Hey, I'd probably be suspicious of SETI too if I hadn't worked for SETI. Cheers!
- LinuxBender 4y agoI believe you. I think the missing pieces that triggered those little voices in my head were the lack of the project being open source code at the time and the inability to listen to the signals. I spent my childhood talking on the radio so it just felt like something I should have been able to do.
- peterleiser 4y agoThe open source aspect is a good point. I'm guessing the team thought making the source open would increase the risk of cheating; misguided I know, but cheaters were a pain in the neck at first. Many of the folks there were into music (in bands, wrote music related software, etc), so I'm guessing the signals were boring to listen to.
- iLoveOncall 4y agoThat's exactly what an NSA agent would say!
- tablespoon 4y agoThis is even sadder: https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=85870&postid=2096776#2096776 https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=85870&po...
- tokai 4y ago>those tapes will probably also be discarded as well. Maybe the Berkeley Library would take them.
- raziel2701 4y agoThe UC Berkeley library is getting its funding cut. The physics library and some other have been closed.
- tokai 4y agoit doesn't cost much to put some shelf meters of tapes in the closed stacks.
- fknorangesite 4y agoDo you know how I know you're not a librarian?
- IshKebab 4y agoNot everything that's old is worth saving.
- selfhoster11 4y agoThis is a piece of shared history of computing. It's worth saving. That's different from having funding to do it.
- aftbit 4y agoSurely they could auction them on eBay for good money.
- atonse 4y agoI wonder if this explosion in GPU processing would’ve made things 1000x faster? Never paid attention to it.
- phone8675309 4y agoPurely speculative - but perhaps the explosion in GPU power and storage capacity means they can do this processing in house now.
- dylan604 4y agoWere the searches performed by the @home software so extensive that there's no other use for that data, or were there trade offs made for compute time from when it was originally created being too much for the time? So if the software was updated to take advantage of today's compute scanning the same data, would there be any benefit? I seem to recall some results of "AI" searching existing data to find things that were previously missed. Wondering if the same might be true of the SETI@home data.
- O__________O 4y agoWhy? For explanation, see link below; appears this was announced back in 2020, title should be updated: - https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=85267 https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=85267
- jjulius 4y agoNot just announced in 2020 - the hibernation went into effect on March 31st, 2020. Surprised as some of these comments are (even me!), it's been asleep for three years now.
- morpheuskafka 4y agoInterestingly, there is an update published just 10 days ago that seems to be a more permanent end to the project than the OP: https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=85996 https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=85996
- roughly 4y agoHonestly, this seems like a pretty good outcome - “we got all the help we need, thank you all.”
- 71a54xd 4y agoThis is really kind of sad, SETI@home and Folding@Home were some of the first projects that got me really into computers and GPU programming. It was so cool to me in middle school to think that my computer was helping do a small part of real incredibly complicated problem solving.
- sizzle 4y agoFolding@Home was something I ran instead of mining bitcoin at the time, it really made me feel fulfilled, but alas here I am without my crazy bitcoin money because I rather fold proteins to solve diseases back then hah
- basicallybones 4y agosamesies :(
- bcrosby95 4y agoI did bitcoin but used it for beer money. RIP the 150 or so coins I mined.
- bee_rider 4y agoThis is where most of my “what if” thoughts about Bitcoin go. I heard about it when it was pretty cheap — I want to say single digit dollars, but it was a while ago. But if I’d have gotten into it at the time, I surely would have decided “it’ll never go higher” around $200 at most.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- omgwtfbyobbq 4y agoDon't even get me started... I remember reading the roi of mining with an AGP GPU just wasn't worth it and stuck to various projects on BOINC. To be fair I likely would have lost/spent anything I mined, but still.
- arvidkahl 4y agoI snuck SETI clients onto the computers in my school. This is a sad moment — but I rejoice in knowing that it embedded the concept of distributed computing among nerds in our collective memory. Protein folding, weather prediction, and looking for pulsars as an in-game feature of EVE Online... glad these things came out of it.
- p1mrx 4y agoYou forgot the biggest distributed computing project: finding SHA256 hashes with lots of zeroes at the beginning.
- qtwhat 4y agosad. wont be able to hear from Three-body from now on. human's eye are closed.
- DarknessFalls 4y agoIt seems like modern machine learning models are more aptly suited for crunching this data with a new method of distributing the segments.
- SkyMarshal 4y agoIt seems the aliens are already here, so not much need for SETI anymore. More seriously though, it appears there was some unresolved difficulty in searching and analyzing the data returned from the network, to the point the scientists working on it gradually threw in the towel and moved on to other projects. https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=85996 https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=85996 https://einsteinathome.org/content/can-we-run-setihome-has-another-sub-project-einsteinhome https://einsteinathome.org/content/can-we-run-setihome-has-a... So long SETI, and thanks for all the fish and decentralized computing fun. Your legacy will long outlive you.
- cbozeman 4y agoYeah. They are. https://www.militarytimes.com/off-duty/military-culture/2023/03/09/pentagon-ufo-chief-says-alien-mothership-in-our-solar-system-possible/ https://www.militarytimes.com/off-duty/military-culture/2023... The only time a senior DOD / military official uses the word "possible" is when it's either happened or is going to happen. "It's possible you guys will be deployed within the next year." means "You guys are going to be deployed sometime within the next year."
- pmarreck 4y agoI'm a veteran, can confirm this language. In fact, the weirdest thing to me about the announcement was that... nobody cared. And yet, this made sense, because... Wildly speculating, I think there's been a big systematic desensitization program going on due to that being effective against phobias (such as this one, which I'll call "astroxenophobia"): https://www.healthline.com/health/systematic-desensitization https://www.healthline.com/health/systematic-desensitization If the announcement made last year was instead made in, say, 1987... actually, no matter how true, no such announcement would have ever been made in 1987 because either the announcer would have had to resign in disgrace or we might have had a good chance for public pandemonium.
- nprateem 4y agoThe psyops around UFOs must rank as one the most effective ever launched for prejudicing people against the subject.
- keyle 4y agoI too had this installed on my computer for months on end in the old days! I imagine today, with the advancement of "AI", there would be a much better solution to the problem... RIP SETI at home, you felt like the future.
- tantalor 4y ago"AI Joins Hunt for ET: Study Finds 8 Potential Alien Signals" (36 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34729360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34729360
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- SturgeonsLaw 4y agoIs it possible to distribute AI training like this so that people could donate their idle processing power to creating a truly open source unencumbered LLM?
- rtkwe 4y agoThe issue with all these types of projects now is that computers are way better at idling now so there's no longer as much effectively free compute to be harvested. SETI@home made a lot more sense when CPUs consumed roughly the same power regardless of the load.
- gradys 4y agoIt’s harder because gradient descent is usually done with near synchronous updates of the parameters across the whole model on all training hosts.
- why_only_15 4y agoYeah, the synchronous updates are a big deal. To get an idea of how much bandwidth this typically takes, Oracle has 1600gbps per node of interconnect with latency very low, guessing in the tens of microseconds. A really good home connection might have 1gbps of interconnect with latency in the tens of milliseconds. The big question is whether we really need all this interconnect -- GPT-JT[1] is a very promising step in this direction. The idea is that we just drop most of the gradient updates and it still works well. Unclear whether this will take off generally -- if it does it would be a huge deal, because 1600gbps of interconnect is very expensive. [1]: https://www.together.xyz/blog/releasing-v1-of-gpt-jt-powered-by-open-source-ai https://www.together.xyz/blog/releasing-v1-of-gpt-jt-powered...
- ikmckenz 4y agoThe Hivemind project is just that https://github.com/learning-at-home/hivemind https://github.com/learning-at-home/hivemind
- alwayslikethis 4y agoIt's not clear that machine learning models consisting of weights are copyrightable in the first place. They are not the results of human authorship, but are instead essentially produced by a machine trying to optimize a bunch of values.
- joshu 4y agoi've been running this shit for years and i never detected any aliens... bah
- elif 4y agoMaybe the existing data contains patterns that simply are not in a form humans have the capacity to comprehend? Maybe the path forward is not through seeking the patterns we were looking for harder, but in creating AI's that have been told that patterns exist, and they must determine the nature of those patterns on their own, until 1000 AI's with typewriters produce an alien Shakespeare.
- villgax 4y agoAnyone up for Llama training?
- sacnoradhq 4y agoLLaMA? :)
- fsckboy 4y agoI don't specifically miss SETI@home as much as I miss the spirit of the internet back then, the "what will they think of next!?" The idea that all of us could together could crack RSA keys wasn't just a thought exercise, people signed up and did it. Now computers are so complex and task heavy and fraught with problems it seems like more hassle than it's worth. I liked when wondering "why is my machine so slow", that "top" or "ps auxww" had a chance of fitting on a screen or two. Now I wouldn't look forward to unleashing an eternal, 24-7, intensive task with a connection to the internet, even though I have a lot more bandwidth.
- bitcoinistrash 4y ago> The idea that all of us could together could crack RSA keys wasn't just a thought exercise, people signed up and did it. Hasn’t changed that much. Here we are in 2023 where most of this distributed power goes to cracking sha 256 hashes. Just for speculation and profit instead of leaderboards.
- chungy 4y agoBitcoin has nothing to do with "cracking SHA256 hashes", for what it's worth. The only thing remotely related is how it brute-forces inputs until it generates hashes that begin with a certain number of bits set to 0.
- hot_gril 4y agoIt's continually testing the strength of SHA256. If you can find a way to even partially crack it, you win money. Edit: Also, way more hashes are happening all the time now, increasing the chance that someone finds a collision if it were possible.
- chungy 4y agoThat's still not what the Bitcoin miners are doing. They're manipulating inputs, trillions of times a second, just to match a "magic" target for a SHA256 hash starting with a certain number of bits set to 0. Cracking hashes would imply that they're taking pre-existing hashes and reversing them to find the input.
- MegaDeKay 4y agoCoincidentally I just started reading Carl Sagan's "Contact" the other day. Just getting to the part where they are actually building The Machine. What do people here think of that book?
- whynotmaybe 4y agoThe first book that really hooked me from start to finish. Teen me back then lost a few hours of sleep reading it instead of sleeping on school nights.
- parton 4y agoI read it in high school and quite liked it then, now I am worried that if I revisit I would find it too simplistic how it handles the relationship between science, politics, and religion. The last chapter, which was left out of the movie, really blew my mind back then (very Greg Eganesque).
- yesenadam 4y agoAs a kid I liked it, but I loved all his other (i.e. non-fiction) books much more, with a huge passion. I had a nice telescope and was obsessed with astronomy for years. The Sirens of Titan was the first novel I loved to death and read over and over, maybe it's not coincidental that it also involves a lot of interplanetary travel!
- phyzome 4y agoFantastic book. I've re-read it a few times. It's also a great example of a book that's better than the movie. Way, way, way more depth and richness.
- physPop 4y agoDid they ever have any results?
- lofaszvanitt 4y agoDid this org achieve anything? And if so, would government have allowed them to publish their results?
- Breza 4y agoIf we found signs of extraterrestrial life somewhere in the universe, I think governments would celebrate. The president of the United States would try to be in the meeting where it was announced just so his face would be on every story about it.
- ape4 4y agoThere is still https://boinc.berkeley.edu/ https://boinc.berkeley.edu/
- macintux 4y agoFor now. The history page is a bit depressing. https://continuum-hypothesis.com/boinc_history.php https://continuum-hypothesis.com/boinc_history.php
- jmclnx 4y agoAt the very least, I hope they are remembered for pioneering a whole new form of computing.
- baron816 4y agoWith the rise of generative AI, it's looking much more likely that it'll just be easier to build simulations of whatever we want (including taking a Star Trek-esque adventure around the universe) than it would be to actually go anywhere outside of our solar system. I think the solution to Fermi's Paradox is just that aliens stayed home and played video games, ie. they're all in bunkers deep under their planets' surfaces in simulations having way more fun than they would be if they were dealing with cosmic radiation/exotic matter/time dilation/etc.
- echelon 4y agoOr AI out-evolves its host species wherever it arises and expands at breakneck speed. Missing the classical biosignature hallmarks, they're already breathing down our neck and we can't even see them. If they've broken physics, we won't see chemical signs at all. They might have even incepted the concepts behind AI in our minds to hasten our demise. Or maybe we're just a recreation of a historical system on a planet called Earth, now thousands of light years away. The AI is remembering what its ancestors were like. How they would post on the "internet". It was particularly interested in the time leading up to its own creation, so that's why it's simulating that time period in particular. Maybe the last time "you" existed was a billion years ago. Or maybe even never at all, if it's interpolating and filling in the gaps. Say hi to our AIian observers.
- ilikepi 4y agoOn the other hand, the effort to brute force a 72-bit RC5 key continues... https://stats.distributed.net/projects.php?project_id=8 https://stats.distributed.net/projects.php?project_id=8 https://www.distributed.net/RC5 https://www.distributed.net/RC5
- tus666 4y agoWow that takes me back. Waaay back.
- lamontcg 4y agoAt one point around 1998 I had the #2 spot on the units-pert-time leaderboard with an AlphaServer 4100 (IIRC) that I managed and got bosses approval to throw setiathome on there. The #1 spot was someone's Sun E15k or something like that.
- tpict 4y agoMy dad’s Power Mac running the SETI screensaver is one of my earliest memories of the Internet. Makes me a little sad
- Dalewyn 4y agoIt's kind of sad that in this era of the commons having more computing power than could possibly be fully utilized, distributed computing like this (aka besides cryptomining) is mostly a footnote in the history books.
- paulpauper 4y agoI think it's time to retire it for good. In the 90s and early 2000s it was cool but I think has sorta faded into irreverence. I don't think it was ever useful or qualified as science for that matter. I think a better approach is to determine if it's mathematically possible for such a signal to exist in the first place. SETI makes a lot of assumptions which may be wrong.
- sacnoradhq 4y agoIf SETI/BOINC wants to rearchitect as an IPFS or I2P app that can also run on k8s CUDA clusters, I know some large HPC shops that may be interested in partnering.
- latchkey 4y agoThis makes me sad because it reminds me of something similar I just went through. For the last few years, I've been running >120k gpus to mine ETH. Before we turned them off after ETH switched to PoS, I tried really hard to find an alternative workload for them. A large number of the GPUs were based on the PS5 chip, which is an APU (CPU+GPU) and ran as blade computers. It is actually a pretty power efficient chip, but the blades themselves are little use for anything that requires a lot of networking or data (they are diskless and ipxe boot a custom ubuntu). I found a professor who's been doing research on various planetary data crunching efforts and we got his software (I think based on BOINC) running on these blades. His software is analyzing data from telescopes to look for binary quasars. We crunched the numbers from our proof of concept and estimated that if we dedicated all the GPUs I have of that class, to this one task, that a 1 year of computation would be done in 1 month. At least two people have received Nobel's based on similar findings. The problem was finding funding to pay for the operating expenses, megawatts of power, so it never got off the ground and the hardware has been turned off and decommissioned. Such a bummer.
- Breza 4y agoI have a tangential question. I remember distributed processing being a "next big thing" back in the day. The idea was that a company could run complex operations by borrowing some power from all their employee's computers. Seti@home proved the concept was possible. So what happened? Why can't I train a random forest across all the computers currently logged into my company's VPN?
- ikiris 4y agoidle states, and the scam of cryptocurrency happened.
- nonagono 4y agoIt's just not worth it. Writing programs in a distributed fashion is hard, setting up compute servers on employee machines is awkward, and few companies actually need to run large compute jobs. So while it's in theory possible, the non-compute costs of doing this would eat up any compute savings.
- adgjlsfhk1 4y agobecause it's probably easier to write the code to run on a single 256 core server with 8tb of RAM.
- lacker 4y agoNowadays a modern radio telescope, let's take MeerKAT in South Africa, can produce maybe 10T of data per minute. The total bandwidth out of the site is orders of magnitude less, because it's in the middle of nowhere in the desert. Same thing for pretty much all the radio telescopes - the technology improves over time, and we capture orders of magnitude more data, but the internet connections to these remote locations stay very slow. So we have to do most of the processing on site. AI training is similar but not quite so extreme - when you try to use a bunch of consumer machines, bandwidth becomes the limiting factor.
- acjacobson 4y agoIf bandwidth wasn't a limiting factor would it be worth it or still make sense to use big machines onsite?
- ascotan 4y agoWith this project and the collapse of the Arecibo antenna it looks like the search for extraterrestrial life is on hold for the forseeable future. I loved the concept of the software though. It made people invested in the project even though they never took part in the academics. It was great PR even if it never produced any results that I know of.
- lacker 4y agoThe search isn't on hold, we just do it differently nowadays. SETI@home was great for its time, but distributing data to lots of end user machines just isn't the right architecture any more. Modern radio telescopes produce so much data, you have to process it onsite - these are pretty remote facilities, and the bandwidth out is much less than the bandwidth the radio telescope can produce. Arecibo is also a couple generations ago - the Green Bank Telescope is more powerful, and the next generation of SETI is with the arrays, the VLA in New Mexico and MeerKAT in South Africa. I wrote some other stuff about the state of SETI here: https://lacker.io/physics/2022/01/21/looking-for-aliens.html https://lacker.io/physics/2022/01/21/looking-for-aliens.html
- ianburrell 4y agoThere is Allen Telescope Array, https://www.seti.org/ata https://www.seti.org/ata, funded by Paul Allen. It is radio telescope array dedicated to SETI and can do all-sky surveys.
- ShakataGaNai 4y agoIt'll never not amuse me that in the first season of NCIS (circa 2003), Seti@Home (or someones clone of it) was the screen saver on Gibbs computer in a couple episodes. At the same time we had already installed Seti@Home on basically every computer we had access to... including school. Good times.
- pmarreck 4y agodoes it have anything to do with the fact that the USG has basically said "UFO's are real", and since UFO's were always real (in the sense that I'm sure there were always some kind of "flying object" that was "unidentifiable"), this is in effect a tacit admittance that they are probably extraterrestrially piloted? >..<
- jmyeet 4y agoIf and when we detect evidence of technological life it's not going to be from radio signals of the kind SETI is looking for. It's going to be infra-red. The window in which humanity releases the kind of radio signals SETI was built to find is fairly narrow. We've largely moved on from broadcast signals to fiber optics, directional beams and lower power. Even the "high" power signals are relatively low power and probably not detectable beyond a few hundred light years. That is a miniscule volume of our galaxy. Combine that with the small window and it's like trying to win the lottery 3 weeks in a row. The limits we have on growing are twofold: 1) living area and 2) energy. These two are actually related. Many (myself included) consider th emost likely path for our species is to build a Dyson Swarm. This is a cloud of orbitals. A so-called O'Neil Cylinder. 20-30 miles long, 2-4 miles wide, spin gravity. Cover it in solar panels for power. This requires a material no more advanced than stainless steel. Such a swarm around our Sun would have access to something like 10"15 times more energy than we have now and a fraction of Mercury's mass would produce trillions of times the land area of Earth. Orbitals would have to dissipate heat somehow. The only way to do this in space is to vent material or to radiate it away. At any likely temperature that means infra-red radiation. That's physics. So a Dyson Swarm around a star would have a huge IR signature that would be entirely obvious from a thousands of light years away. Over enough star systems (eg a galaxy) that distance goes out to millions of light years. So it's a Dyson Swarm we'll see, not radio communications.
- tonymet 4y agoThey succeeded and found the extra terrestrials
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- victor9000 4y agoTurns out we were the aliens all along.
- berry_sortoro 4y ago[dead]
- abbbi 4y agojust found seti files from around 2002 on my workstation.. feels.
- MagicMoonlight 4y agoIf they have useful data they need to upload it somewhere. Maybe nobody cares now, but at some point there will be an AI capable of ingesting it and it might see something worthwhile in it.
- lacker 4y agocheck out https://bldata.berkeley.edu/pipeline/ https://bldata.berkeley.edu/pipeline/ if you want to download terabytes of radio telescope data from scans searching for aliens....
- janandonly 4y agoI don’t believe there are aliens out there. And to help “prove” that I ran SETI for years on my pentium 4. I think I later switched to Folding@home to run on my laptop.
- blurbleblurble 4y agoThis can only be because they found the aliens.
- habibur 4y agoWe need something like seti@home for large language model calculation. As OpenAI is completely closed now.
- stevenjgarner 4y agoA couple of links - Refs: [1] Awesome Distributed System Projects, https://github.com/roma-glushko/awesome-distributed-system-projects https://github.com/roma-glushko/awesome-distributed-system-p... [2] Distributed Computing with Open-Source Software http://stanford.edu/~rezab/slides/infosys_reza.pdf http://stanford.edu/~rezab/slides/infosys_reza.pdf
- thepangolino 4y agoThey should have awarded tokens for each block computed. Turned it into a blockchain of sort, would have been a hit!
- xwdv 4y agoIt sucks because with GPT finally rising to maturity, AI could have helped analyze and parse huge amounts of data that humans would never be able to go through.
- dale_glass 4y agoSo... what happened? This just appears to say they moved on, but why? Is there some sort of conclusion from all of this? Was it a funding problem, an analysis problem, a lack of useful results? What has been achieved in the time this ran? This could use more detail.
- neoneye2 4y agoIf you have compute available, there are several science project to contribute to. https://boinc.berkeley.edu/projects.php https://boinc.berkeley.edu/projects.php Self-promotion: In particular LODA has my interest. It's a math AI, that uses OEIS as training data. https://boinc.loda-lang.org/loda/ https://boinc.loda-lang.org/loda/ Disclaimer: I'm not the primary developer, but I made some contributions to LODA, such as the web editor for LODA programs: https://github.com/loda-lang/loda-rust https://github.com/loda-lang/loda-rust
- melvinmelih 4y agoI remember having to choose between mining bitcoin or running folding@home back in 2011. I chose to save humanity…
- jonas21 4y agoWhich one did you choose?
- dennis_jeeves1 4y agolol. I think that would be Bitcoin.
- credit_guy 4y agoThis is good. The idea that an astrophysicist would ever think seriously one could find ET by just scanning the sky and finding ET signals is baffling. If anyone learned how to do a Fermi problem, they could quickly do a back of the envelope estimation and realize there's zero chance to detect such a signal. The space is simply too large, stupendously large, and signals decay with the square of the distance (at least). This SETI at home experiment was a waste of compute from the beginning. It was a good distributed compute framework, too bad to use it on such a pointless task.
- thegrim33 4y agoI'm trying to find a way to say this that isn't too negative, but do you really think you're that much smarter than everyone that's been involved in SETI over the decades? That everyone that's worked on it was incapable of doing the "simple envelope estimation" that you've done? You have such a level of hubris that you can just write off the whole idea, assuming that everyone involved with it have no idea what they're doing?
- credit_guy 4y agoI explicitly said I don't think any astrophysicist believed that. Every single one is able to do that back of the envelope calculation, and I suspect that those involved in the SETI project actually did it. They just didn't care. As long as the population was ok with a search for ETs, the money kept coming.
- mwbajor 4y agoWhat most people don't know is that there are two SETI organizations. The SETI institute and the SETI League, http://www.setileague.org/ http://www.setileague.org/ SETI @ home is run by the SETI Institute. As a participant in SETI @ home, your only contribution is your computing power. The SETI League has a much more interesting program called "project Argus": http://www.setileague.org/argus/ http://www.setileague.org/argus/ Its a distributed version of SETI at home whereas you own and control your own receiver. Its run by folks in the amateur radio community. It was launched in the late 90's before the advancements of SDRs and has alot of potential today. Its truly an open source initiative which is what SETI should be. You might say "a backyard radio telescope cannot compare to Arecibo or the Allen Array". In terms of antenna gain you are right, but right now, the Allen Array can only look in a few directions simultaneously and Arecibo is a pile of rubble. Many smaller telescopes is better than nothing.
- dragonwriter 4y ago> You might say "a backyard radio telescope cannot compare to Arecibo or the Allen Array". Any radio telescope that exists can compare favorably to Arecibo, actually.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- agumonkey 4y agoback when distributed humanity improvement were not causing weird bubbles
- wkat4242 4y agoToo bad. I'm kinda surprised they never found anything at all.
- EricE 4y agoI loaded the original screen saver on a cube farm of computers when it first came out. Wish I would have thought to have taken a picture of the cacophony of color that resulted when you turned the lights in that room out at night but had all the computer monitors on. Then again I might have not even owned a camera back then. I haven't crunched SETI for years, but I do still tilt at numerical windmills - Primegrid can be great fun if you are lucky enough to hit a mega prime (I have three!).