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View Full Version : Is SETI@Home a waste of time?



blueshiftoverwatch
February 3rd, 2010, 03:47 AM
I've been running SETI@Home on my computers for many years now, almost religiously. Unfortunately, after reading this article (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/7077464/Earth-becoming-invisible-to-aliens.html) I'm starting to think that it's all a waste of time.

Our planet has only been broadcasting radio waves into space for about the last 60 years and already it's going by the wayside due to a combination of wired landlines replacing radio waves, waves being shot at Earth by satellites instead of broadcast in all directions (and therefore, signals escaping into space) by radio towers, and probably less powerful radio waves even being needed in the first place to transmit the signals from point A to B because more sensitive equipment is being developed that can pick up signals from weaker transmitters.

Assuming that there are aliens close enough to Earth that are broadcasting their signals and assuming that they advanced technologically at about the same rate as we are on Earth. They probably went through the phase of broadcasting massive amounts of radio frequency "pollution" into space like we did in about the same timespan, around 60 years.

So, not only would Earth's radio telescopes need to be looking in exactly the right place on exactly the right frequencies. But they would also have a extraordinarily short window to do so. For all we know there could be aliens closer by than we think and we missed our 60 year window of opportunity to pick up their radio signals only several years before the first radio signals from distant stars were first scanned in 1960.

SoFl W
February 3rd, 2010, 03:53 AM
Who says other life forms use any type of radio waves to communicate? It might all just be plant and microbe life.

The WOW (http://www.damninteresting.com/the-wow-signal) signal!

yester64
February 3rd, 2010, 03:53 AM
Hard to tell. I would not judge it on 'waste of time'.
There will be no quick results and i don't think even in our lifetime. Perhaps the next generation will have the joy of making contact or the other way around.
How high are the chances of making contact? Slim perhaps, but the truth is nobody knows for sure. There is no fact since we do not visit these places and have no hard evidence.
So, keep it up. :)

Sporkman
February 3rd, 2010, 03:56 AM
The scientific benefit may not be worth the extra energy expended by all the client machines. Do the calculated results serve any purpose other than yea or nay to alien signals?

imag1narynumber
February 3rd, 2010, 04:00 AM
Yes.

freebeer
February 3rd, 2010, 05:03 AM
I prefer folding@home. There's already benefits emerging from the efforts, and there's an Ubuntu folding team.;)

jrusso2
February 3rd, 2010, 05:11 AM
Lets see seti@home started in 1999 ten years later what has been found from it?


With over 5.2 million participants worldwide, the project is the distributed computing project with the most participants to date. The original intent of SETI@home was to utilize 50,000-100,000 home computers.[citation needed] Since its launch on May 17, 1999, the project has logged over two million years of aggregate computing time. On September 26, 2001, SETI@home had performed a total of 1021 floating point operations. It is acknowledged by the Guinness World Records as the largest computation in history.[

Draw your own conclusions.

Firestem4
February 3rd, 2010, 06:20 AM
SETI@Home is impressive, but ultimately I find it useless because if we find aliens, GREAT! What are we gonna do? It'll be another millenia till we can fly out there and do something about it lol.

I'm thinking short term. Thats why I prefer Folding@Home. Information from this program can be applied immediately and within years (assuming each milestone brings practical results that can be utilized and are more than just a peice of the puzzle until a so many folds are completed).

=)

Cuddles McKitten
February 3rd, 2010, 06:32 AM
Yes.

Someone stole my shtick before I got to it, so I'll go one minor step further: even if we did find convincing evidence of intelligent life elsewhere (say a series of prime numbers repeating over and over again), we would have no way to interact with said life. No visits or even communication. The lag time between a message being sent and a response received would, at a minimum, decades. Finding hard evidence of another civilization would be like discovering what Caesar ate for breakfast before he was assassinated: neat but completely useless. Until someone figures out how to ignore the cosmic speed limit set up by that dastardly Einstein, the attempt is beyond pointless.

lisati
February 3rd, 2010, 06:47 AM
If we did manage to find intelligent life somewhere (even on earth), communication might be a problem. Even if someone manages to come up with somethine like Star Trek's universal translator, the alien's form of language might be sufficiently different to what we know to be a pain in the posterior.

arnab_das
February 3rd, 2010, 06:59 AM
i think i have used SETI @ home but that was when i had windows.

SETI is now saying that the abudance of radio signals/electromagnetic waves and other waves are making it difficult for them to communicate with the aliens and vice versa. seriously, so what now? stop using our mobiles and mobile devices so that we can stay in touch with aliens (as if there were any, at least nothing concrete has been found out even after decades of research :P)?

KIAaze
February 3rd, 2010, 08:35 AM
Someone stole my shtick before I got to it, so I'll go one minor step further: even if we did find convincing evidence of intelligent life elsewhere (say a series of prime numbers repeating over and over again), we would have no way to interact with said life. No visits or even communication. The lag time between a message being sent and a response received would, at a minimum, decades. Finding hard evidence of another civilization would be like discovering what Caesar ate for breakfast before he was assassinated: neat but completely useless. Until someone figures out how to ignore the cosmic speed limit set up by that dastardly Einstein, the attempt is beyond pointless.

From Futurama:

CUBERT
That's impossible. You can't go faster than the speed of light.
FARNSWORTH
Of course not. That's why scientists increased the speed of light in 2208.

:)

Anyway, I think the idea is that once we are sure we got a significant message, we keep sending one towards the source and eventually (decades later), we get an answer.
Possibility 1:
They come to us or we go to them. Instant communication possible.
Hopefully, they'll have mastered fast interplanetary travel and will come first.
Possibility 2:
They send us a message explaining to us how to build a faster than light communication device. Instant/fast enough communication OK.
Possibility 3:
We have fun sending questions before getting answers to our first question and vice-versa (at least once we are able to encode/decode messages).

However considering energy usage, I think it's indeed a better idea to run folding@home or turn off the PC.

Another idea would be to constantly send messages into space, like the Arecibo message (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message).
(so that the destination is still there when the message arrives this time...)

But there's probably a reason they're not doing that. Maybe it costs too much energy. Or we can't listen and broadcast at the same time?

LightB
February 3rd, 2010, 08:41 AM
Nah, it's fun. It would probably be better suited on a space station though. Who knows, maybe our descendants are the ones who gets to make first contact, no Earth visitors. Give it a couple tens of thousands of years.

KIAaze
February 3rd, 2010, 08:47 AM
I didn't even know there were so many:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_projects#Berkeley_Op en_Infrastructure_for_Network_Computing_.28BOINC.2 9

matthew.ball
February 3rd, 2010, 09:19 AM
It takes 15 hours to send a message to Voyager 1, which is at a distance of 0.0017 light years away - just starting to leave our solar system.

The nearest neighbouring solar system to our own is 4.3 light years away.

Edit: That's actually not that bad, I was kinda worried it would be huge.

What I did was divide 4.3 by 0.0017 (2529.411764706) and then times that by 15 to get a total of 37941.176470588 hours. Divide that by 24 to get an amount of days (1580.882352941), and then divide by 365 to get the amount of years (4.331184529), which perfectly corresponds to a distance of 4.3 light years away with the message travelling at the speed of light. I could be wrong, please someone who knows more correct me.

Grenage
February 3rd, 2010, 09:48 AM
Seems sound to me; although not too bad, it makes VoIP lag seem pretty good.

In reality, advanced life is more likely to be many, many solar systems away.

KIAaze
February 3rd, 2010, 09:51 AM
What I did was divide 4.3 by 0.0017 (2529.411764706) and then times that by 15 to get a total of 37941.176470588 hours. Divide that by 24 to get an amount of days (1580.882352941), and then divide by 365 to get the amount of years (4.331184529), which perfectly corresponds to a distance of 4.3 light years away with the message travelling at the speed of light. I could be wrong, please someone who knows more correct me.

Well, there's nothing wrong with your calculation (except maybe that 1 year = 365.25 days (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year#Summary_of_various_kinds_of_year) is more precise), but it was kind of pointless since 4.3 light-years means it takes 4.3 years for light to get there... (Or did I misunderstand and you calculated the 0.0017 years = 15 hours conversion?)

edit: Mmh, if the messages didn't travel at the speed of light, the calculations make sense. Sorry.
But I'm pretty sure electromagnetic wave messages travel at the speed of light. ;)

matthew.ball
February 3rd, 2010, 09:53 AM
Well, there's nothing wrong with your calculation (except maybe that 1 year = 365.25 days (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year#Summary_of_various_kinds_of_year) is more precise), but it was kind of pointless since 4.3 light-years means it takes 4.3 years for light to get there...
Yeah, kinda felt like that exactly after finishing it.

I just thought it was kinda fun I was able to pull that one out.

Paqman
February 3rd, 2010, 10:04 AM
Unfortunately, after reading this article (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/7077464/Earth-becoming-invisible-to-aliens.html) I'm starting to think that it's all a waste of time.


Not at all. SETI are well aware of the issue, and are expanding their efforts beyond RF search, there's already been optical searches for a little while now, and they'll need their data crunched as much as the RF searches do.

Besides, the RF searches have only scratched the surface so far, so there's no reason we couldn't still detect something in those wavelengths.

Sceiron
February 3rd, 2010, 01:10 PM
From the article i understand that the signals are getting weaker due to use of digital communication instead of analog signaling.

However, analogue signals, RF-transmissions, eventually also dies out over time because of solar storms, magnetic field influens, particle obstruction. So the result will over time become just noice that is already present in space, and not possible to interpret.
If you ask me I would say it's waste of time.
Have some :popcorn:

Paqman
February 3rd, 2010, 01:23 PM
From the article i understand that the signals are getting weaker due to use of digital communication instead of analog signaling.


It's not really a digital/analogue thing. It's more about the fact that we're sending a lot more stuff down wires instead of transmitting it.


However, analogue signals, RF-transmissions, eventually also dies out over time because of solar storms, magnetic field influens, particle obstruction. So the result will over time become just noice that is already present in space, and not possible to interpret.

Another related issue that touches on this is the question of how to identify an artificial signal. The more advanced communication gets, the more compressed it is. You're unlikely to be able to spot obviously artificial things like repetition in a signal, because the compression will deliberately remove it.

Nobody ever said finding another civilisation was going to be easy, after all.

texpat
February 3rd, 2010, 01:45 PM
I had my machine crunching SETI packets for a few years, but now I've switched to more prosaic stuff like cancer research, protein folding and so on.

I was doing SETI until they dropped their client software and went BOINC I don't know how many years ago. That's when I saw all the other stuff going on with distributed computing and that's when I decided that I was chasing phantasms and that it was more worth while to help solve the very real and known problems right here in the one and only place we know life to exist.

[sorry for that last sentence - I couldn't resist ;)]

leandromartinez98
February 3rd, 2010, 01:49 PM
Yes, it is a waste of time. Switch to folding@home, which is more useful and will actually advance science in some way.

http://folding.stanford.edu/

Grenage
February 3rd, 2010, 01:54 PM
I also think that there are move valuable distributed computing projects, but we don't all have the same priorities. If we did, the world wouldn't be as wonderfully diverse as it is.

Paqman
February 3rd, 2010, 06:53 PM
folding@home, which is more useful and will actually advance science in some way.


Hmm, which is better? Definitely contributing to a small but concrete scientific advance, or a slim chance of contributing to the biggest scientific breakthrough of all time?

;)

leandromartinez98
February 3rd, 2010, 07:17 PM
Hmm, which is better? Definitely contributing to a small but concrete scientific advance, or a slim chance of contributing to the biggest scientific breakthrough of all time?

;)

That of course depends on how slim. In this case the slimness is such that the former is better. Furthermore, except for Hollywood and end-of-the-world fanatics, the discovery of the mechanisms of protein folding is probably a greater discovery. Unless, of course, that the other civilization is much more developed than ours and is sending very smart pieces of knowledge to help us solve our problems, but in that case probably they will find us first.

speedwell68
February 3rd, 2010, 07:47 PM
I have been doing Seti@Home almost since it began. I have a firm belief that is intelligent life on other plants and whilst the Seti project continues I will continue to process their data packets.

Paqman
February 3rd, 2010, 07:49 PM
In this case the slimness is such that the former is better.

I'd say that in the light of the lack of hard data on that one, it's really just a matter of opinion. The Drake equation still contains a lot of guesstimates (although we're starting to see some really interesting data about the relative ubiquity of exoplanets)

leandromartinez98
February 3rd, 2010, 11:53 PM
I'd say that in the light of the lack of hard data on that one, it's really just a matter of opinion.

Yeah, this is the kind of opinion that in science is called good sense. If I was to chose (actually I do) to research one thing or the other, my choice would be clear. Of course everybody can choose which science to help using these tools. But, really, if your wiliness to help knowledge and science development is greater than your science-fiction curiosity, help the projects on the folding@home site, there are various. Just check the publications of both sites to see which one is doing real research progress.

By the way, I'm not involved on either project.