EDIT: The article notes that they are reaching a point of diminishing returns with the distributed nature of the SETI@HOME tasks, but I can't help wondering if things like crypto had an impact on participation with this and other @HOME-style academic projects[0].

[0]: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/projects.php

I always wondered what came out of it and how cool it felt to feel like you could, as an individual, help support something massive by doing something so small.

> "It's a lot of work for us to manage the distributed processing of data. We need to focus on completing the back-end analysis of the results we already have, and writing this up in a scientific journal paper," their news announcement stated.

Maybe it's PR speak, but it does make sense to me that there'd be a point of diminishing returns where enough data has been processed.

Installations and updates were automated. After getting the company logo and xplanet in the background, I got permission to put SETI@Home and FOLDING@Home on the machines (I think I did half and half). After all the machines were barely doing anything other than terminals and rendering TIFFs. Our company name was listed as the team.

Looks like the stats are off line for SETI@Home teams .. wonder how much that cluster kept contributing after I left.

... no

The argument is basically this:

1. Within 1000 years (and maybe a lot less) we will have the engineering capability to build space habitats, powered by solar power. This last part is important because this thought experiment isn't gated on commercial viability of nuclear fusion power, which I'm not yet convinced is possible.

2. These space habitats are far more efficient at creating living area than planets. I forget the exact numbers but something like 1% of the mass of Mercury is enough to create enough living area for something like 10^16 to 10^18 people.

3. Space habitats are more convenient and cheaper to move between than leaving or even entering a gravity well like Earth's.

4. Roughly one billionth of the Sun's energy hits the Earth.

5. Once you have the ability to create one of these things, each becomes progressively easier.

This, of course, is the classic Dyson Swarm. Originally this was called a Dyson Sphere but this has led some to think it's a solid shell around a star. That was never the intent. Even if it was, no known or currently theorized material could support this.

Dyson Swarms are not subtle. Even a partial Dyson Swarm should be detectable as a large IR source compared to how much visible light is produced. This is because the only way for something in space to cool down is to radiate that heat away and physics determines the wavelength of that based on the temperature of the object.

Standard objection: what if you can recycle that heat? Well, you can't do that perfectly (as this would violate Thermodynamics) and even if you reduce IR emissions by 90%, you've simply reduced the IR emissions by one order of magnitude. For comparison, the Sun produces roughly 4x10^26 Watts of power.

So if you accept the above premises the gap between stabbing each other with swords and having this technology, at least for us, is 1000-2000 years, a cosmic blink of an eye to produce signals without the above IR signature. Those are long odds.

Personally I subscribe to the view that technological life is, at least within a billion light years of us, is likely quite rare.

The above is a very superficial summary of a topic that Isaac Arthur's channel goes into great depth about. I guarantee you any objection you have has at least one video that goes into that in great depth.

Even at the time, the prize seemed a little unearned, since all you had to do was click through an installer. But it was still an incentive. Probably the greatest lottery prize that's ever been offered.

For a while we were in the top 10, until much bigger companies got in on it.

Kinda sad to see it shut down, but to be fair, I haven't run it in years.

https://boinc.berkeley.edu/projects.php

I loved the concept of SETI@home and ran it on a bunch of computers at my university when I was a student.

It made me wonder about the possibility of an alien species discovering them. Probably infinitesimal, barring divine intervention. I mean, what are the chances of us stumbling upon similar probes sent out by another species who had no idea we were here? Do we even have the tech to detect something so small entering our solar system, even if it were to pass close to Earth?

[0] https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_objects_lea...

We were like 5 boys getting into overclocking. For our SETI team, the "Bücki crunching connection", from my small hometown in Germany.

I just tried to find an old screenshot from back in the day, and wow I found one, from 2002:

https://imgur.com/a/L5Q5PMR

So funny, it is all there: ICQ, mIRC; an icon to launch Quake III. And some SETI crunching stats. In Internet Explorer.

Seemingly we were actually crunching under one account for the team OC-CARD.de (http://www.setiatwork.com/team/teamstats.cgi?teamid=30308)

You might have done the same, but I am still sharing this because this has influenced me a lot:

I bought an AMD Duron, some arctic silver heat paste. I took a lead pencil to connect some dots on the CPU to unlock the multiplier freely, got a freaking heat sink, and overclocked the hell out of the Duron. I needed to hide this from my parents, but of course the plan was to crunch 24/7.

I found another screenshot, the file is called "[email protected]". Looks like I knew what I was doing:

https://imgur.com/a/eG9nmdO

Edit: looks like our team (OC-CARD.de) was actually among the top 200 of all SETI teams. Wow, yeah there were some serious people in the team, like "Butcho", ranking in the top 1000 of individuals. No idea who that guy was and where he got the compute resources from. That's the romantic part of that Internet era.

Edit2: turned this into a very quick blog post to properly archive my own memory here: https://gehrcke.de/2020/03/setihome-hibernation/

Now there's a name I haven't heard in a while. Duron, the poorerer man's Celeron.

Surprised you didn’t just use TACC credits for UT students.

I was way up there in the rankings for a while, until the sysadmins started investigating the strange traffic patterns...

Perhaps "they" (the committee) were afraid that computers were getting powerful enough that we might just find something. Better pull the plug.

I personally suspect the engineering challenges might pale next to the challenges of political organization.

Quite simply, the continued human expertise and organization necessary to manage and sustain such a system is far, far beyond anything we have today.

We can't even manage to globally reduce CO2, and the recent government responses to coronavirus have led a lot to be desired, to say the least.

Just because you put people up in space habitats doesn't mean they become any less power-hungry, any more cooperative, or any more peaceful.

You say we'll have the engineering in 1,000 years, and I could buy that. But read Aristotle's Politics from 2,400 years ago, which is concerned mainly with political stability and revolution, and he might as well be describing people today.

I'd like to see us manage "spaceship earth" a helluva lot better before I have even the remotest faith we could manage space habitats politically. Heck, we couldn't even manage Biosphere 2, remember?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2

I have always thought that this would be a much more efficient way of living off Earth. Sci-fi wants us to believe that we can teraform planets. All they ever talk about are the atmosphere generators. However, they never address the reason the planet didn't have an atmosphere to begin with. To me, the research into generating artificial magnetic shields is the place to be. Generating those fields the size of a planet will be orders of magnitude more difficult than for smaller sized ships.

Sad to see they're shutting down.

Then using your Drake equation variables calculate how many are within those couple decades at any given point that you can see.

~5% of the universe is made of the stuff that you, I, a cloud, and the sun are made of. We understand this stuff very well, in terms of cosmic scale stuff.

~20% of the universe if made of dark matter. We know that this stuff falls down and really doesn't do anything else. Does it interact with itself, with us, can we make sandwiches out of it? No clue.

~75% of the universe is made out of dark energy. We know that this stuff makes other things ... fall up (?). Well, kinda, maybe? We're totally at a loss as to what the super-majority of the universe is, let alone what it is doing, or what we can do with it.

Presumably, if there are other intelligences out there, they may know if they can do anything with the other ~95% of the universe and they may be making it into burritos or something. We're a long way away from concluding anything about anything.

Modern encrypted spread-spectrum digital radio would have looked like random noise until quite recently. I'm not sure if you'd pointed all the technology and all the brilliant minds that existed in 1930, at a modern cellular tower, that they'd have recognized the signals to be coming from a technological civilization.

In another century we'll no doubt be hugging the noise floor even more closely. It's not hard to imagine that even if alien civilizations are broadcasting omnidirectionally all around us, that we're simply too primitive to bother targeting with a message. Why waste the effort when you'd be able to communicate so much more information, and more efficiently, by targeting just a slightly higher baseline of receiving technology?

I looked through a dozen or so BOINC projects, but they all seem dead. The amicable pairs project had some 2020 results and activity in its forum, but I couldn’t draw a line to any practical goal.

That said, maybe the sorts of projects that have practical outcomes don’t need to rely on the computing power of strangers.

You can still participate in Folding@Home, which in my opinion is a far more worthy pursuit - actual medical science came out of it and more is still being produced.

Impressive that they survived for so long!

Well... We haven't found anyone we can talk to yet so, in a sense, we are still failing.

Eventually we will.

Saying that as the lead Solaris SysAdmin for a large telco project a few decades ago, with one manager in particular who repeatedly kept on firing it up on the main (high end SunFire) billing cluster servers. Even when expressly told not to. That guy was a f*cking moron. :(