I was watching Horizon a few days ago, about the search of extraterrestrial life. The SETI programme was mentioned. One point of the programme was that now we are starting to discover Earth like planets we can focus the search on just those star systems. It got me thinking about all the time people had spent chewing through SETI data in the past, was this time wasted?
Perhaps more interesting is the impact on increased computer power. Just playing with some numbers here:
Say SETI at home has been running 15 years and say computer power doubles every 18 months. That gives us 10 doublings of computer power.
The interesting thing about the exponential function and such doublings is that with each doubling more work can be done in the last period than in all-time before that period. What this means in reality is that during the next 18 months, all the SETI at home work units ever analysed in the past could be analysed. Given the time, effort, energy etc that when into all that computation in the past it looks terribly bad value. We could have just waited around, done other stuff – then caught up when computers got faster.
Further complicating this is that the science now means we can be more focused and the economics also means computers are cheaper (even after counting for the doubling in performance).
Perhaps more interesting is the impact on increased computer power. Just playing with some numbers here:
Say SETI at home has been running 15 years and say computer power doubles every 18 months. That gives us 10 doublings of computer power.
The interesting thing about the exponential function and such doublings is that with each doubling more work can be done in the last period than in all-time before that period. What this means in reality is that during the next 18 months, all the SETI at home work units ever analysed in the past could be analysed. Given the time, effort, energy etc that when into all that computation in the past it looks terribly bad value. We could have just waited around, done other stuff – then caught up when computers got faster.
Further complicating this is that the science now means we can be more focused and the economics also means computers are cheaper (even after counting for the doubling in performance).
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