Seti@Home Old Skool
- Thread starter KingDing
- Start date
Soldato
i remember the stomp monster
One problem with these kind of projects is that it's rarely worth working hard to do something today that can be done for much less effort in a few years time. Take the photo above as an example - 14 processors there, I assume there are single core 1 or 2GHz. I wouldn't be surprised if a single 3.5GHz i7 system couldn't outperform that pile. A few hundred quid today can match a few thousand quid best part of a decade ago.
Would have been better to invest the cash a decade ago - then build a far better rig today. It would only take a few weeks to catch up on the lost decade's output then fly ahead.
Anyway - the last decade has been rather interesting for Seti. We now know, what we didn't know a decade ago, than planets are really common. Big ones, small ones, close and far from their suns, rock and gas etc. However, the seem airwaves clean. The big question is 'where is everyone'?
Would have been better to invest the cash a decade ago - then build a far better rig today. It would only take a few weeks to catch up on the lost decade's output then fly ahead.
Anyway - the last decade has been rather interesting for Seti. We now know, what we didn't know a decade ago, than planets are really common. Big ones, small ones, close and far from their suns, rock and gas etc. However, the seem airwaves clean. The big question is 'where is everyone'?
Soldato
Simple, people wanted to know then not twenty years later. It was a question that greatly intrigued me as it did others and still does. For me the problem now is our knowledge of the Universe is such that the true scale of the problem is overwhelming, the vastness of all that space, which dont forget is continually expanding, so if there are others we are getting further and further away from each other and have been since the big bang.
I think there is lots of life out there, Europa is a prime candidate but it will probably be something like jelly fish swimming round in liquid gas, very primative life forms like that.
Lets not forget the other space related projects, all the data crunching is producing real science that is enhancing our knowledge of our future home - intersteller space
The question for me is not 'is anybody there', but rather will we ever meet?
Looking out thinking the same?
For sure, there's no sensible argument for there not being. However, what's changed recently is the discovery of just how common planets are. In light of that our failure of hearing anyone becomes a little more surprising.
It's possible that 'radio' is actually a really rubbish way to communicate and no intelligent life form actually uses it for more than a century or so before discovering 'subspace' or quantum entanglement or some other better form of communication. In which case the universe could be buzzing, we're just listening in the wrong way.
Soldato
Your only talking about the ones we know about, there are millions of them we have yet to discover.
I agree, this is why I put seti@home on hold for now, they need to totally change their approach in my opinion, then again when you have a budget of zero what can you do, they need to pitch a new approach and attract some funding. That would give Seti@home a real buzz like in the days of the Stomp Monster
I'm not talking about individual planets, but the fact that a decade ago we didn't know how common planets were - now we know they are common.
Soldato
Yes the rate of the discoveries is exiting stuff, I wish we could get a probe to make a flyby of Gliese 581, trouble is I would be dead and buried before it got there...sob