SETI@Home Expanding Goals With Sun's Help 133
GabeK writes "The Register is reporting that the SETI@home project is going to be expanding the scope of their project with the help of Sun. Sun is donating a fleet of servers to the SETI@home project for use in its new BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) project. This project will use Sun's new JXTA peer-to-peer protocol for distributed computing, and will add other functions to the project other than looking for little green men. Users will now be able to dedicate slices of their idle time to projects other than SETI, like cancer research and climate mapping." We previously mentioned early word of BOINC a couple of months back.
BOINK? (Score:4, Funny)
Well, see it from our side.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Well, see it from our side.. (Score:1)
Re:BOINK? (Score:1, Funny)
Re:BOINK? (Score:3, Informative)
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UT
Can't for the life of me remember where the term came from, but I wonder if that was in their minds.
(yes, I know it's boinc).
Re:BOINK? (Score:2)
I hope the screensaver program opens with the noise made by the power droids of the original *Star Wars* movie (Episode IV - A New Hope)...the power droids would walk around and say "bonk!"
http://www.starwars.com/databank/droid/powerdro
Upgrade time? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Upgrade time? (Score:5, Informative)
Status
BOINC is under development. The source code and bug-tracking database are available. We are currently conducting a beta test of BOINC using the SETI@home and Astropulse applications. The public release will be announced on the SETI@home web site. Several other distributed computing projects are evaluating BOINC.
Guess it will be some time yet.
Re:Hmmm.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Hmmm.... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Hmmm.... (Score:2, Informative)
"For its part, Sun is donating some of its midrange Solaris servers and some workstations. In addition, the SETI@home crew is dabbling with Sun's JXTA peer-to-peer protocols for future versions of BOINC."
Who ever said it was going to be in java should kick themselves in the ass. Not pointed at the OP of this thread, but at the OP of the article.
Re:Hmmm.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Should they open their client's specs, they'd get a lot of coders who'd port it to any platform.
Using Java because it's open is a bad idea, especially when there's no patent involved.
Re:Hmmm.... (Score:1)
Should they open their client's specs
IIRC, the reason they dont want to open their client code is because that opens the way to cheating. apparently a lot of assholes out there willing to screw up the scientific data in order to falsely claim improved crunch work-hours.
imagine if a genuine alien signal was not found because the bastards who were handed those work units were running "fake" clients that returned false "nothing found" data?
Re:Hmmm.... (Score:1)
Hmm... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hmm... (Score:2)
By the aid of world computers, Dr. Nick can figure out whether to cut the blue or purple vein.
Re:I doubt they'd find anything (Score:5, Insightful)
The S in SETI stands for search, not for Speak.
The finding of a signal with non-natural origins, such as broadcasts would be on of the major scientific breakthroughs of the century. Communicating with any -if existant- "aliens" is an other story altogether.
Besides that - How many people play along in lotteries even their chances of winning are slim to none? People have a tendency to romatisize things, give 'em a break...
Re:I doubt they'd find anything (Score:1)
Right up there with eBay and the Segway? s/the century/all time/
Every imaginable aspect of human existence would be instantly changed. Religion is the obvious first example.
Re:I doubt they'd find anything (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I doubt they'd find anything (Score:2, Interesting)
Ofcourse, distances between galaxies are so large we can only reasonably search within our own galaxy, the milky way. The guesses here go from 3 billion stars to 100 billion stars [hypertextbook.com]. With the previously mentioned 1 intelligent species homeworld per billion st
Re:I doubt they'd find anything (Score:1)
Re:I doubt they'd find anything (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe the search for meaning within one's self and with one's God (wow, not only do you assume everyone has a god, but you mean THE god with a capital G) is just a nice bush to hide your head in instead of facing up to mortality and a universe without clear meaning.
Basically you are sayin
Re:I doubt they'd find anything (Score:2, Insightful)
That's because they start them out when they are very young. Gives them plenty of time to screw them up so that we have to deal with them later in life.
This guy reminds me of a
"Religion is a crutch for the weak minded"
I knew, when I saw a thread about SETI, that it wouldn't take m
Re:I doubt they'd find anything (Score:3, Interesting)
Some remote civilization might be broadcasting a sort of Open Source encyclopedia which gives a leg up to emerging space civilizations. Very very far-fetched, but wha
Re:I doubt they'd find anything (Score:1)
If you want to donate your spare cycles only to a project with a high probability of actually finding something, you should
Re:I doubt they'd find anything (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I doubt they'd find anything (Score:1)
ok time to spend some of that karma (Score:5, Insightful)
What a typical fundamentalist christian statement you have there. "The search for extra-terrestrial life is only a substitute for the search for meaning within one's self and with one's God."
Translation: Dont be searching for ET you sinners, cause if you do find proof of intelligent life out there, it shoots giant fucking holes in our dogma. Thats why the catholic church, ever an institution thats quick to condemn anything that crosses their ideology, burnt
Giordano Bruno [wsws.org] at the stake for even suggesting the possibility of intelligent life [setileague.org] that was not on earth.
As far as your assertions that ET would of already heard us and visited us if they existed, there are MANY possibilities that can include intelligent life not traveling here for any number of reasons. But that goes into the realm of speculation. Seti is about hard science, and the seti project is extremely cautious about making any sort of claim.
Re:ok time to spend some of that karma (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem of why ET would not have visited us is a serious one (the Fermi Paradox), and is a compelling argument for SETI being a waste of time. Lack of visits
Re:ok time to spend some of that karma (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:ok time to spend some of that karma (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:ok time to spend some of that karma (Score:3, Interesting)
So, then, there is no possibility that they came by, saw us, decided that either we weren't ready for a visit (w
Re:ok time to spend some of that karma (Score:2)
So where are the probes? Where are the space stations? You have to
Re:ok time to spend some of that karma (Score:2)
To qute Lord Vader, "all too easy." Ever heard of a *cloaking device*? Perhaps outer space is just as dangerous as here on Earth with various factions fighting one another. We encrypt data all the time on this planet and go to great lengths to make aircraft undetectable to our own devices, let alone the devices of beings not of our species.
Re:ok time to spend some of that karma (Score:2)
Re:ok time to spend some of that karma (Score:2, Interesting)
As for probes and space stations... You're joking, right? Only recently have we even been able to detect Earth sized planets around other stars, and we still can't observe them vi
Re:ok time to spend some of that karma (Score:4, Interesting)
Wait a sec. Your comment about "lack of visits" should be clarified. It is quite conceivable that extra terrestrials have visited Earth without one being labeled as a "tin foil hat" brigade. Just because no aliens have landed in New York City near the U.N. and asked to be *taken to our leader* does not mean they haven't been here. It is not hard to believe that aliens would conduct themselves like our own Special Ops does; sneak in and sneak out with as little detection as possible. This is highly probable since a single alien ship landing on our planet would be outnumbered greatly by the amount of humans (5 billion?) and any one of us could be labeled as "hostile."
From what I gather, you are from the school of thought that complains about not having any tangible evidence in your hand of a visitation to our planet. But let's use a *real world* example to show how foolish that is. There are numerous items that our Department of Defense builds each year that have no real paper trail due to being part of the "black projects" (and I'm not talking about flying UFOs at Area 51 but *actual* classified weapons). Just because you don't have access to those records does not mean that they don't exist.
And as for the Fermi Paradox, that's nice to try to explain extra terrestrials with, but you are judging alleged advanced beings by our own scientific knowledge. If you rely upon that, in 100 years you might look as foolish as the people who claimed if a human drove a car faster than 35 mph they'd die, or even better, a Biblical passage where Joshua commands the sun to stand still...
Re:ok time to spend some of that karma (Score:2)
Think of it this way, if we watch a planet destroy themselves one alien newscast at a time, it might help us to keep us from destroying ours...
???
You be silly: Pointing out stupidity isn't hatred (Score:3, Insightful)
Your attempt at persecution sympathy is noted, but ultimately fails. I occasionally browse at -1, and I've seen tons of anti-religious posts modded down, sometimes justly, sometimes not. The post you are replying to was no more full of hate than any other energetic critique of a dogma.
Hate: "All Christians should die."
Not: "Christians perform symbolic ritualistic cannibalism. That's freaking weird, man."
I know Christians in America love to tell each other that they are a persecuted minority, but it doe
Re:I doubt they'd find anything (Score:5, Interesting)
The whole premise behind SETI is that there are intelligent beings 'out there' in the universe that are broadcasting their signals into space. Even if there were beings doing just that, they would be hundreds if not thousands if not millions or billions of light years away from us making any sort of coherent response to a signal meaningless.
Communication does not have to be two way to get anything meaningful from it. Simply eavesdropping on the signals produced by an alien civilization could produce enormous benefits to mankind including but not limited to advances in the physical sciences, mathematics, and engineering.
If there were beings out there who had the capacity for interstellar travel (and that's the only kind that would matter because anything less than that would make communication impossible) they would have already found this noisy planet and if not made contact at least monitored us from a safe distance.
This is so flawed I don't even know where to start. First, interstellar travel is not a prerequisite for interstellar communication. All you need to communicate between stars is a sufficiently powerful EM wave, well within the capabilities of our current technology. Why would you have to be able to travel the stars to send an EM signal? "impossible" pfffffft whatever
Second, just because beings have mastered interstellar travel doesn't mean they have found us. I guess you think "building very fast spaceship" == "finding earth". I don't think this is the case.
So either way SETI is unlikely to find anything meaningful. I'm with the Christians on this one. The search for extra-terrestrial life is only a substitute for the search for meaning within one's self and with one's God.
Seti is great testbed for distributed computing technology, worst case. Best case it is relatively low cost R&D that could pay massive technological dividends if anything is ever found. Leave god to the preachers, this is science.
Re:I doubt they'd find anything (Score:2)
Yes it does, eventually. Any culture that travels in space, even at sublight speed, and builds colonies and expands exponentially and could have explored the galaxy in its entirety in a few tens of millions of years at most, according to most models of growth. The Earth is thousands of millions of years old.
Re:I doubt they'd find anything (Score:1)
Re:I doubt they'd find anything (Score:1)
But your assuming that they actually lasted a few tens of millions of years.
Re:I doubt they'd find anything (Score:1)
Re:I doubt they'd find anything (Score:2, Insightful)
You, Sir, are ignorant and obviously haven't talked to many Christians. Most of us are as excited about the possibility of alien life as you are.
And I really like the idea of the Open-Source encyclopedia being broadcast for beginning or non-interstellar races (as posted below).
Re:I doubt they'd find anything (Score:1)
Re:I doubt they'd find anything (Score:3, Insightful)
Some people consider the search for extraterrestrial life to be an integral part of the search for meaning within one's self and with one's deity.
Re:I doubt they'd find anything (Score:5, Insightful)
But space is big and time is, well, long. We have been pouring significant amounts of artificial EM into the universe for under a century. We have been actually listening in any sort of organized way for under half a century. The universe could be teeming with life - just not life that happens to be a) within 50 light-years of Earth b) in the EM-broadcasting phase of its development 50 years ago. If there was a culture at a Victorian-equivalent technological stage under a hundred light-years away, it would be completely invisible to us, and vice versa!
Remember that lots of our broadcasting was entirely accidental; a culture that is running short of bandwidth and concerned about energy consumption won't want to tie up huge chunks of it with powerful broadcasts, but will want to use it much more efficiently with short-range signals, line-of-sight, fixed lines, etc etc. It's safe to make that assumption because it's grounded in the laws of physics.
It's wise to keep an ear out, just in case.
Re:I doubt they'd find anything (Score:4, Insightful)
Thankfully, we don't all think like you, and sometimes allow far-reaching ideas with no definite goal to lead us to scientific discovery. If nothing else, SETI has already undeniably advanced distributed computing.
Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't understand your post at all. There is no "whole premise" as you describe it. Science has found no reason why sentient life on Earth should be unique. Rare, maybe (maybe not), but not unique. So, the hugely interesting and important question arises of just how rare it is. SETI is one of the best sets of investigations we can undertake now to try to answer that question. Astrobiology is the other area where we hope to make progress, and which could help us constrain some of the terms in the Drak
Re:I doubt they'd find anything (Score:3, Insightful)
SETI, to my knowledge, was the first large scale, public domain, distributed computing effort to do something interesting in the name of science. The fact that it's looking for alien communications worked great with the "geek" community, a large number of which happen to like computers as wel
Re:I doubt they'd find anything (Score:2, Informative)
SETI@Home has definitely done a lot to popularize distributed computing, and has influenced many later projects, including protein folding projects like Distributed Folding [distributedfolding.org] and Folding@ [stanford.edu]
here's a thought (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:here's a thought (Score:5, Funny)
You mean share our music with the aliens?
Re:here's a thought (Score:1)
Direct Connect
http://dcplusplus.sourceforge.net
They have several hubs whose members share work units for SETI. Check out the UKS hub (uks.no-ip.com)for their figures!
Apologies for not supplying a working hyperlink, I'm not very good with this HTML stuff yet.
Scientific progress goes... (Score:4, Funny)
(extremely obvious)
Re:Scientific progress goes... (Score:2, Interesting)
Stuff to read... (Score:5, Informative)
Bill, shamelessly plugging.
Ambiguous subject (Score:1)
Slashdot users worldwide now conflicted (Score:2, Insightful)
Sun
Oh no, Ug says make pain stop!
Re:Slashdot users worldwide now conflicted (Score:2)
Bandwith? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Bandwith? (Score:1)
Re:Bandwith? (Score:2)
Scattering the servers across the P2P network is a possibility, of course, and it would reduce the bandwith requirements for each server, so that could very well be the solution...
Re:Bandwith? (Score:1)
Re:Bandwith? (Score:4, Informative)
JXTA has improved greatly (Score:5, Interesting)
or looked at JXTA recently,
it just got a *lot* better.
Check out the main website [jxta.org]
and this review of JXTA 2 by DeveloperWorks [ibm.com]
Cheers, Joel
BOINC is great (Score:5, Interesting)
BOINC prevents this. S@H will now able to verify iof returned result is real or cheated.
Re:DRM cracking (Score:1)
Large prime factorization would be cool, though.
Re:DRM cracking (Score:1)
Similar but different (Score:4, Interesting)
The Sun (Score:4, Funny)
Considering that SETI = Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, the context was rather amusing...
Re:The Sun (Score:2)
When i got to the line "Sun is donating a fleet of servers" it got REALLY confusing.
Ah... but this is the age old debate (Score:3, Interesting)
That I've had with friends - why the hell are you using your computer to look for little green men (who, even if they contact us, are near enough to come to us, and do so, will probably make us into gourmet ready-meals for their home planet, or smething) when they could be running something like the UD Cancer Project
This gives SETI more legitimacy IMO... as a fun project attatched to one with real value. Of course, I suppose Sun probably couldn't stomach donating to a commercial venture like UD, so I won't criticize them for choosing SETI.
Re:Ah... but this is the age old debate (Score:1)
Re:Ah... but this is the age old debate (Score:2)
Re:Ah... but this is the age old debate (Score:1)
Hardly any resources are devoted towards space exploration, even planet based exploration such as SETI.
Not only is SETI dilluting its user base with these non-space-exploration projects, but some folks are apparently going to crow about it.
A sad day for SETI indeed.
Re:Ah... but this is the age old debate (Score:2)
I've encountered the same thing, but unfortunately for UD (United Devices), they limited themselves by only centering on the WinTel platform. For the longest, their website referred to the x86 platform as "Intel." They wouldn't say "Intel-compatible" or even mention AMD. So sure, I could've went ahead and downloaded their client and tried
SSDI ... (Score:1, Flamebait)
Still looking
i don't understand (Score:2)
for one, anything in it's part of the sky is blocked or drowned out by the suns electromagenetic emissions
additionally...
oh wait, nevermind
SETI (Score:1)
How sexist, only little green men?! (Score:4, Funny)
Seti@home causes global warming (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Seti@home causes global warming (Score:1)
Re:Seti@home causes global warming (Score:1)
Re:Seti@home causes global warming (Score:2)
Are you really complaining on Slashdot about increased wear and tear on your computer purchases? Are you really going to use your same hardware for more than 5 years? Because if not, then all you are doing is increasing your computer's efficiency by making it do work even when you yourself have nothing to give your own computer to do. You'd be better to complain about higher utility bill costs instead
Who gets access to the data developed by BOINC? (Score:1)
I won't be donating any of my spare CPU time until I can get an answer...
Sean
Re:Who gets access to the data developed by BOINC? (Score:1)
Re:Disappointing marketing (Score:4, Funny)
Hint #1: Don't spray apostrophes everywhere. Pretend there's a worldwide shortage and use them sparingly.
Re:Disappointing marketing (Score:2)
Re:Disappointing marketing (Score:2)
Re:Disappointing marketing (Score:2, Interesting)
People are only fooling themselves if they think that by running these that they'll see prompt effects.
Research needs experiments to validate/invalidate it. Successful research experiments can lead to experimental treatments, which can become standard treatments.
So coming from someone who has family members who were cured by things that were at one point just "an experiment", I say learn what you're talking ab
Re:Shame on sun (Score:2, Insightful)