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I remember feeling like a right scientific benefactor running the SETI@Home screensaver on my Pentium II, looking at the fancy graphs. Was it all for nothing?
by leokennis 9mo ago
I remember feeling like a right scientific benefactor running the SETI@Home screensaver on my Pentium II, looking at the fancy graphs.
Was it all for nothing?
- Waterluvian 9mo agoIt’s all mostly all for nothing.
- keepamovin 9mo agoWell, except for Vogon poetry
- blitzar 9mo agoIt’s all mostly all for REDACTED
- keepamovin 9mo agoNo, they just published two papers in 2025. You can watch a video about it or link to paper in my other comment on this thread: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt07R_amRT8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt07R_amRT8
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- p-e-w 9mo agoThe fact that all SETI endeavors haven’t really found anything is actually a very valuable result, because it constrains “they’re everywhere, we just haven’t been looking” arguments quite a bit. 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.
- netsharc 9mo agoProbably due to the Great Filter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjtOGPJ0URM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjtOGPJ0URM
- floxy 9mo agoor not: "Dissolving the Fermi Paradox": https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404 https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404
- MontyCarloHall 9mo ago>Even humanity’s (weak) radio emissions would be detectable from tens of light years away, and stronger emissions from much further. 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. [0] https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/245562 https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/245562 [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0610377.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0610377.pdf
- isolli 9mo agoThanks, these rules of thumb are very useful. 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?
- voidUpdate 9mo agoThis is my biggest issues with all of the messages we keep sending out to space. By the time it gets to its destination, it will basically be indistinguishable from noise
- bluGill 9mo ago
- gamer191 9mo agoWell it led to the creation of BOINC, a distributed computing system that probably has led to scientific advances in other fields So I wouldn’t say it was all for nothing, but it’s main benefit was the idea, and not the results it generated
- andsoitis 9mo ago> system that probably has led to scientific advances in other fields Did it though?
- nicbn 9mo agoWikipedia has a table for how many papers each project produced: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Open_Infrastructure_for_Network_Computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Open_Infrastructure_f... According to this, Rosetta@home (which is like Folding@home that runs on BOINC) produced 234 papers.
- Izkata 9mo agoExcept as a kid back then, the screensaver was trivial to install and neat to look at, and BOINC was a pain. I dropped it when they switched. I imagine some less-technical adults who were interested did as well.
- wongarsu 9mo ago(Re)search is still valuable, even if the result turns out to be negative.
- Cthulhu_ 9mo agoThat's pretty dismissive outright; consider uh. All forms of distributed computing, from cloud computers to bittorrent to bitcoin / cryptocurrency. Seti@home was one of, if not the first distributed projects, the predecessor of cloud computing and spreading a workload over many computers, years before Hadoop and map/reduce became popular (which at least in my head was the start of "big data" and cloud computing). I won't claim it was "the" most important or it was critical in that, but it's not to be dismissed.