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by Only a few months ago, the Allen Telescope was activated as a dedicated SETI instrument. More recently, the Arecibo Radio Telescope located in Puerto Rico was upgraded with new receivers capable of capturing 500 times more data with greater frequency granularity than ever before. The SETI@home project is actively seeking additional volunteers to donate CPU cycles via BOINC to help process the data, despite already being the largest distributed computer with an estimated 370,000 live computers connected continuously.
The SETI quest has been underway for decades, but only tapped into the collective processing power of distributed computing in the past eight years. No signals have been discovered yet, however, prompting many to question both SETI's future and approach. Proposed improvement ideas have ranged from looking for probes instead of civilizations to being more active about broadcasting in case others are looking.
In the case of advertising Earth's presence, what nation should be allowed and what message would be transmitted? Is there danger to advertising Earth to more advanced civilizations (i.e., galactic enslavement, annihilation, etc.)?
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3 Nerd-Its
SETI@home is cool
SETSETI@home is cool. I used to use it on all of my systems when I was a network admin to monitor performance. The Linux boxes seemed to have been better performers.
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2 Nerd-Its
PS3
I forgot to mention, another, totally independent distributed computing project (much to my chagrin) is the Folding@home project. Folding@home is much like the Rosetta@Home project I mentioned in another post, in that it simulates proteins (including DNA), to examine different ways that they could fold and the implications (like malformed prions lead to Mad Cow disease for example). Folding@Home runs on the Playstation3. It also looks like Folding@Home is testing a client that will run on your GPU. Talk about using unused processor cycles!
I was a member of this one since inception as well, but have not stuck with it. Back before BOINC, I had to manually shut down SETI to run Folding@home and vice versa, or let them both fight over the spare processor cycles by letting them run at the same time.
Then BOINC came along, and SETI forced us to play along or quit. With BOINC came all the other cool projects, and BOINC automatically allocates each a block of time in serial based on the percentage you want to dedicate to each. So, if you are running four projects, and don't set anything, each will get 25% of your spare processor cycles. If you, say, prefer to donate to bio-medical research more than you care about looking for ET, you can set your priorities accordingly and you may give, say, Rosetta a larger percentage of your spare processor capacity accordingly.
Alas, Folding@Home is not a part of the BOINC pantheon... The website says they are working on it, but the last entry on the updates are from 2006 and I still don't see the client available. I'd also be very happy to donate my spare GPU cycles if they get around to that as well.
So if you have a PS3 or are looking for an easy way to donate some computing power to bio-medical research, Folding@Home is easy, and the client looks really cool too. (I also highly recommend using other BOINC projects on your real computer).
2 Nerd-Its
Fricking Lasers
There's also an initiative called Optical SETI which looks for laser flashes, hypothesizing that civilizations might signal us by some means other than radio transmissions. Laser is great, because lasers don't diverge like radio beams so they retain signal/noise ratio to carry a message or just get attention. The bad thing about lasers are the same. They have to be pointed right at us for us to see them. Radio SETI isn't just looking for aliens TRYING to contact us, but their signal leakage, like radio and TV broadcasts.
Why do I get the feeling our first contact will be some alien version of a Mork and Mindy rerun?
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Questions from the movie Contact by VnutZ :: NR8 :: Show
The notion of "what to do in the event of contact" has always interested me and the movie Contact really touched on just about every pertinent point.
I personally think first contact would remain a secret if it were made via the military/government. Which in turn would create a huge scandal if it were ever discovered by the public.
The religion thing I think would really tear at people. You're either going to have a lot of converts to whatever the aliens believe or a radical upheaval at what the current dogma's are preaching. Could you imagine an alien getting blown up for landing in a holy city and disrupting some mujahideen ceremony or rite?
There's an equally likely chance the aliens want to have nothing to do with us and might actually use our signals to avoid us. After all, why should they be "enlightened" and want to share technology and well-being?