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It 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 an

It 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 ago
Yeah. 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 ago
  I'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 ago
    The psyops around UFOs must rank as one the most effective ever launched for prejudicing people against the subject.
    - SkyMarshal 4y ago
      Are people really prejudiced against aliens and UFO’s though? Aside from the fringe conspiracy theorists fretting about lizard people, and the few claiming to have been abducted, most people seem ambivalent. Largely because whatever the UFOs/UAPs are, they’ve been around for almost a century now, and for all that time almost entirely benign. No invasion, no conquering, no stripping the Earth of resources, no enslaving people, etc. They don’t even shoot down our planes when we spot, track, and record them. It seems most people are withholding judgement for now.
      - Izkata 4y ago
        "UAP" became a term because officers stopped reporting them because of the stigma against UFOs. I think I remember there even being another new term to replace UAP.
      - astronads 4y ago
        There was a large thread on HN with almost 1000 comments a month ago on this topic and a ton of comments are hugely dismissive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34665738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34665738
        SkyMarshal 4y ago
        I don’t see prejudice against potential aliens there, just healthy skepticism that the reports actually represent some extra-terrestrial activity instead of some natural or manmade phenomena.
    - andyjohnson0 4y ago
      > The psyops around UFOs must rank as one the most effective ever launched for prejudicing people against the subject. I struggle to believe that UFOs are objectively real because I have a basic grasp of the size of the universe, how much of it is just empty, how hard it is to travel between the bits that aren't, how inhospitable almost all of it is to organic life, and because everywhere we look it seems primordial and uninhabited. I don't think that is prejudice.
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
  This guy is a scientist, not military personnel. When a scientist says "it's possible" it just means "it's not impossible", that's it. Remove the tinfoil hat.
pepa65 4y ago
SETI is now advocating people join https://scienceunited.org/ https://scienceunited.org/ if they want to contribute their computing power.
SiempreViernes 4y ago
That post is talking about the effort to quantify the upper limits SETI@home can set, the actual reason stated is more like that they just scanned everything they could think of and it wouldn't be very cost effective to go over things again given the probabilities involved: > Posted Mar 2020, 21:16:23 UTC > On March 31, the volunteer computing part of SETI@home will stop distributing work and will go into hibernation. > We're doing this for two reasons: > 1) Scientifically, we're at the point of diminishing returns; basically, we've analyzed all the data we need for now. > 2) It's a lot of work for us to manage the distributed processing of data. We need to focus on completing the back-end analysis of the results we already have, and writing this up in a scientific journal paper. https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=85267 https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=85267 Description of the final job remaining: > The final output of Nebula is a bunch of score-ranked lists of multiplets. We already know that some fraction of these will be RFI of the sort that's apparent to a human observer, but hard to identify algorithmically. That's OK. The goal our RFI algorithms is not to remove 100% of RFI; doing so would probably remove ET signals too. The goal is to remove enough RFI that a good fraction (say, at least half) of the top-ranking multiplets are not obvious RFI. The final (post-Nebula) stages of SETI@home are > Manually examine the top few thousand multiplets, in all the various categories and score variants, and remove the ones that are obvious RFI. At least initially we'll do this as a group, on Zoom, to make sure we agree on what constitutes obvious RFI. > Make a list of the multiplets that remain; re-observe those spots in the sky (hopefully using FAST), analyze the resulting data (probably using the SETI@home client running on a cluster) and see if we find detections consistent with the multiplets. If we do, maybe that's ET. https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=85756 https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=85756

cbozeman 4y ago

Yeah. 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 ago
I'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 ago
  The psyops around UFOs must rank as one the most effective ever launched for prejudicing people against the subject.
  - SkyMarshal 4y ago
    Are people really prejudiced against aliens and UFO’s though? Aside from the fringe conspiracy theorists fretting about lizard people, and the few claiming to have been abducted, most people seem ambivalent. Largely because whatever the UFOs/UAPs are, they’ve been around for almost a century now, and for all that time almost entirely benign. No invasion, no conquering, no stripping the Earth of resources, no enslaving people, etc. They don’t even shoot down our planes when we spot, track, and record them. It seems most people are withholding judgement for now.
    - Izkata 4y ago
      "UAP" became a term because officers stopped reporting them because of the stigma against UFOs. I think I remember there even being another new term to replace UAP.
    - astronads 4y ago
      There was a large thread on HN with almost 1000 comments a month ago on this topic and a ton of comments are hugely dismissive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34665738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34665738
      - SkyMarshal 4y ago
        I don’t see prejudice against potential aliens there, just healthy skepticism that the reports actually represent some extra-terrestrial activity instead of some natural or manmade phenomena.
  - andyjohnson0 4y ago
    > The psyops around UFOs must rank as one the most effective ever launched for prejudicing people against the subject. I struggle to believe that UFOs are objectively real because I have a basic grasp of the size of the universe, how much of it is just empty, how hard it is to travel between the bits that aren't, how inhospitable almost all of it is to organic life, and because everywhere we look it seems primordial and uninhabited. I don't think that is prejudice.
iLoveOncall 4y ago
This guy is a scientist, not military personnel. When a scientist says "it's possible" it just means "it's not impossible", that's it. Remove the tinfoil hat.

pepa65 4y ago

SETI is now advocating people join https://scienceunited.org/ https://scienceunited.org/ if they want to contribute their computing power.

SiempreViernes 4y ago

That post is talking about the effort to quantify the upper limits SETI@home can set, the actual reason stated is more like that they just scanned everything they could think of and it wouldn't be very cost effective to go over things again given the probabilities involved: > Posted Mar 2020, 21:16:23 UTC > On March 31, the volunteer computing part of SETI@home will stop distributing work and will go into hibernation. > We're doing this for two reasons: > 1) Scientifically, we're at the point of diminishing returns; basically, we've analyzed all the data we need for now. > 2) It's a lot of work for us to manage the distributed processing of data. We need to focus on completing the back-end analysis of the results we already have, and writing this up in a scientific journal paper. https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=85267 https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=85267 Description of the final job remaining: > The final output of Nebula is a bunch of score-ranked lists of multiplets. We already know that some fraction of these will be RFI of the sort that's apparent to a human observer, but hard to identify algorithmically. That's OK. The goal our RFI algorithms is not to remove 100% of RFI; doing so would probably remove ET signals too. The goal is to remove enough RFI that a good fraction (say, at least half) of the top-ranking multiplets are not obvious RFI. The final (post-Nebula) stages of SETI@home are > Manually examine the top few thousand multiplets, in all the various categories and score variants, and remove the ones that are obvious RFI. At least initially we'll do this as a group, on Zoom, to make sure we agree on what constitutes obvious RFI. > Make a list of the multiplets that remain; re-observe those spots in the sky (hopefully using FAST), analyze the resulting data (probably using the SETI@home client running on a cluster) and see if we find detections consistent with the multiplets. If we do, maybe that's ET. https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=85756 https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=85756