
SETI@home shuts down after 21 years - ingve
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/seti-home-search-for-alien-life-project-shuts-down-after-21-years/
======
jgehrcke
Back then, I was quite young. Around 2002.

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](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](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 "duri@fsb133.jpg". Looks like I
knew what I was doing:

[https://imgur.com/a/eG9nmdO](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/](https://gehrcke.de/2020/03/setihome-hibernation/)

~~~
mstade
Oh man those screenshots really are a throwback:

\- [x] Quake <3

\- [x] Classic windows UI; custom scheme

\- [x] Double height task bar

\- [x] ICQ & mIRC for all your communications needs; I'll give you a pass for
Outlook when there were clearly "better" alternatives like Pegasus ;o)

\- [x] Broken icon in taskbar launcher area

I'm loving it, thanks for sharing!

~~~
geniium
Was about to write the same :)

------
mixmastamyk
I ran it on the weekend once on the queue at Disney animation, maybe a hundred
CPUs on SGI Origins. Went from zero to top ten-ish percentile in a half hour
or so. Good times until I got a stern talking to by some systems guy.

~~~
justinclift
Yeah. You wouldn't believe the number of idiots that went around covertly
attempting to run this (and similar) on the production Unix servers of their
employer.

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. :(

~~~
nojvek
Prolly he really wanted to find out that we’re not alone in the universe.

Sucks to know we’re alone and no one has reached out.

~~~
rtkwe
SETI was probably only ever going to catch an intentional transmission it's
far from proof we're alone.

------
ravenstine
In case anyone reads the headline and thinks that the SETI research center
itself is shutting down, or that the project failed in some way:

> "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.

~~~
jessaustin
They've already completed construction of the ansible, the design of which was
decoded several years ago.

~~~
funnybeam
Thank you for making me laugh at loud while making breakfast

------
dpcx
I remember being a younger pup and building fleets of machines (including
overclocking, etc) for the sole purpose of running S@H, and all of the amazing
software the spun up around it... SetiSpy, SetiDriver, SetiQ. I often wonder
how machines of today would compare in work production to my old Duron 800,
but alas.

~~~
cptskippy
> Duron

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

~~~
alliao
Celeron 300A, the relative poorer man's Pentium

~~~
wtallis
Weren't they also supported by the Abit BP6 motherboard, letting you use two
of them as poorer man's Xeons?

~~~
rootusrootus
Indeed they were. I had that exact setup. Overclocked the hell out of them.
Unlike the 550 MHz someone else suggested, I'm 97.6% sure I only had them
clocked at 450 MHz.

~~~
milesward
Yup, dual 450 celery was my gaaaangster setup at my silly startup :)

~~~
dusted
Dual celery story: Me being around 14, not allowed to build my own PC, but I
got to spec it, I ordered dual CPU's. The company put in a dual slot 1
motherboard, and then two celerons in slot1 adapters.. that didn't support
SMP. After complaining for a while, they traded the two celerons and adapters
for a single P3 (I think I was being had). It took a year or two before I was
able to afford the second P3. I still hold a grudge towards that particular
computer shop, or I would, hadn't they gone out of biz. I did run a lot of
SETI@home on that P3, it earned me my first two certificates :D

------
cletus
Not to sound like a broken record (I and others have said this or similar on
these kinds of threads) but... I, personally, have become convinced that
looking for signals this way is actually pointless.

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.

~~~
crazygringo
That's a fascinating comment, thank you.

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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2)

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

I get your concern but the differences are significant.

1\. Habitats are mobile. If you don't like the neighbours you can up and move,
something not possible with geography on Earth;

2\. Land area is essentially infinite, not so on Earth.

> We can't even manage to globally reduce CO2

On the contrary, excessive CO2 is, at least in some context, a remarkably
simple problem. We can extract CO2 from the atmosphere and make fuel. It just
doesn't make any sense to do it because we need to burn fossil fuels to power
the process.

So all we really need is a power source that's cheaper than fossil fuels.
There are two obvious contenders for this:

1\. Solar power. Estimates I've seen are that an orbital collector can be
about 7 times as efficient as current Earth-based solar collectors.

2\. Fusion power. Personally I'm not yet convinced if hydrogen fusion is
viable. There are of course other proposals. We shall see.

You'll note that I don't include fission. It's an unpopular opinion on HN but
until we have a good story for fuel and waste processing then this is a
nonstarter.

~~~
dorgo
> but until we have a good story for fuel and waste processing then this is a
> nonstarter.

Waste processing in space? Just give it a slight push in the direction of the
sun (or whatever the right direction is taking in consideration gravity) and
forget about it.

~~~
flopunctro
> a slight push in the direction of the sun

That's not how orbital dynamics work; a slight push in any direction won't
change the orbit enough for that thing to not be a problem anymore.

To make something fall into the sun, one needs quite a bit of delta-vee, which
means energy. However, if the thing isn't in any hurry (and I imagine waste
isn't), one can simply attach a solar sail with a tiny computer for steering
it, and let it brake for the next few thousand years.

(Kerbal Space Program should be part of school curricula)

------
Aaronstotle
Seems a bit misleading, they're not distributing more work units, not closing
the research center. Nonetheless, this is sad news to me. My entire career
path in the tech world was because I got a campus job working for SETI@home.

~~~
ryanburk
agreed - I think the title should be updated to call out the "app" shuts down.

------
ldayley
Anectdata: I set up an old computer with this in 2009, but a few months later
I heard about this thing called cryptocurrency mining...

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](https://boinc.berkeley.edu/projects.php)

~~~
slg
I'm not an expert in either this or cryptocurrency, but it always seemed like
these two would be a good marriage of technologies rather than having crypto
mining rigs waste resources on unproductive proof of work algorithms. Does
anyone know why that wasn't feasible or didn't catch on?

~~~
sjburt
Proof of work relies on computations that are hard to do but easy to check
that someone has done. The entire network has to check someone's proposed
result. There are very few computations that have sufficient asymmetry to the
degree needed to make bitcoin work, and the types of things that SETI@home
needs don't fit that bill.

~~~
thaumasiotes
Isn't Folding@Home trying to run an asymmetrical computation, though? The
broad strokes as I understand them are that you have a sequence of amines, you
arrange them into a three-dimensional protein (the hard part) by whatever
method, and then you evaluate the energy bound within your structure (the
easier part?). Lower energy is better.

The obvious problem is that there's no judgment of "correct" or "incorrect".
Analogizing to a bitcoin proof-of-work, it would be as if a hash beginning
with more zeroes always outranked a hash beginning with fewer zeroes, but
there was no way to know whether your hash started with "enough" zeroes or
not.

~~~
wongarsu
Protein folding might work as a proof-of-work algorithm. One big problem is of
course that it's useful work that could conceivably be monetized.

Proof-of-work works because a theoretical attacker would have to invest huge
resources into an attack. For bitcoin it's trivial to say "for attack scenario
X an attack has to spend at least Y", and as long as the expected reward is
lower than Y the network is safe (that's for example one factor you use to
determine how many confirmations you wait before accepting a payment). If the
attacker could conceivably gain money outside the cryptocurrency for
performing the proof-of-work, that makes the whole calculation less
predictable, and likely exposes you to more situations where an attack is
actually profitable.

~~~
andai
Isn't "maybe I can monetize this protein" less of a sure bet than "I can
rewrite these transactions" ?

~~~
nybble41
An attack on proof-of-work wouldn't let you rewrite arbitrary transactions. At
most an attacker could exclude certain recent transactions—most likely their
own—reverting payments which were previously deemed "complete" and replacing
them with conflicting transactions. All transactions still need to be signed
with the proper keys, however, so the attacker can't just lay claim to others'
coins.

------
Razengan
Just the other day I saw a post about the current status [0] of the Voyager
probes, the farthest man-made objects that we have sent out so far. [1]

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/](https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/)

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

------
jseliger
I have wondered about folding@home as well, another distributed project begun
in another age that seems not, from the outside, to have lived up to its early
hype. In the meantime, it seems that Alphafold has surpassed conventional
efforts at understanding protein folding, including folding@home's.
[https://moalquraishi.wordpress.com/2018/12/09/alphafold-
casp...](https://moalquraishi.wordpress.com/2018/12/09/alphafold-casp13-what-
just-happened/)

~~~
dekhn
The two approaches aren't directly comparable. Alphafold predicts the optimum
structure for a sequence, while folding@home explores protein dynamics (how a
protein's structure changes over time).

------
shartshooter
I can remember my high school science teacher sometime between 2001-2002
telling us about this project and you'd see this running on his computer any
time he wasn't using it.

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.

~~~
gambiting
>>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.

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.

------
jzelinskie
I had the brilliant experience of visiting the Allen Telescope Array and
meeting Jill and her husband before the announcement of their $100MM donation
a few years ago. I have to say that it is an incredibly lean operation ran by
the smartest people I've ever met. The @HOME project was more about being able
to help handle throughput they would've otherwise just had to dump. I think it
makes sense to sit back and spend time reevaluating what's been collected such
that the filters can be evolved into something more efficient. I don't think
they've spent time seriously trying to apply AI, yet. I'd be eager to hear
their opinions on the subject.

------
ringshall
There was a promise at the time (still active, I'm sure) that if your computer
discovered a signal from ET, you would be listed as co-discoverer of alien
life. I still remember watching the screensaver crunch through work units with
the tiny but real hope that the data on my computer had that signal.

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.

~~~
dylan604
I don't think the discovery was required to be ET. I think that if the blip
your system discovered was anything significant (pulsar or something), you'd
get the credit. It was after all your machine and electricity that you paid
for to do the discovery. It was the precursor to crypto proof of work.

------
djsumdog
I worked in a debt collection center where all the call center people used
Linux workstations running wy60 terminals and a custom check viewer I wrote in
Java (had to reverse engineer our vendors that I did get working in Wine, but
it crashed a lot).

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.

------
coupdejarnac
Ah, good memories of being temporarily banned in the EE labs at UT Austin for
running set@home on a bunch of the unix boxes. Must have been around 2000.

~~~
deepspace
I got chewed out at my workplace around 1999 or so. We had a couple hundred
SUN workstations on the network and anyone could run commands remotely on any
workstation. So I set up a cron job to spawn SETI@home jobs on every
workstation every night at 9pm, shutting them down at 6am the next morning.

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

------
kearneyandy
I'm a little sad about this. My dad works in computer storage and had access
to lots of computers doing nothing. He's now at "just about 11 quintillion
flops, 99.12% ranking vs all other users"

------
jedberg
I had just left Berkeley when this was released. I remember installing it on
every computer I had access to, which was a lot, because I was in IT at a
startup so I could put it on every desktop we had. And every server we had
(but of course at nice 19, until management found out).

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.

------
adamneilson
End of an era for sure. But then there is this I guess: Something in Deep
Space Is Sending Signals to Earth in Steady 16-Day Cycles:
[https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wxexwz/something-in-
deep-...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wxexwz/something-in-deep-space-
is-sending-signals-to-earth-in-steady-16-day-cycles)

------
wiggler00m
_" For those who wish to donate their CPU resources, SETI@home suggests users
select another BOINC project that also supports distributed computing."_

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

~~~
Hnrobert42
I just bought a powerful mac mini, but due to other projects arising, it sits
idle. I am curious if anyone has suggestions.

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.

~~~
wiether
Rosetta@Home seems pretty alive :
[https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum_thread.php?id=13533](https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum_thread.php?id=13533)

~~~
christopherbalz
"Distributed computing project, Rosetta@Home, is using the BOINC
infrastructure to model covid-19 proteins that may be drug targets. " \-
[https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/f5as77/distributed...](https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/f5as77/distributed_computing_project_rosettahome_is/)

I have run BOINC on my own computers for about 20 years. I really like it
because it always properly steps out of the way whenever the computer is being
used for something else (including config to do that when simply other
processes need more resource), and because it's cross-platform.

------
neop1x
"The owner of this website (www.bleepingcomputer.com) has banned the
autonomous system number (ASN) your IP address is in (20473) from accessing
this website." \- thanks, owner...

------
Angostura
Ah the excitement of seeing those lines trace across my old Mac’s screen in
the 1990s. Would _I_ be the one to find the pulse?

... no

------
CriticalCathed
Did SETI@home accomplish anything useful with its 21 years of computing?
Outside of the general "it's always good to do science, even with negative
results" which I agree with.

I ran a large cluster of university machines surreptitiously for this project
many years ago.

~~~
mavhc
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHGb02%2B14a](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHGb02%2B14a)

~~~
mekster
So, is this all they did in 21 years? Funny people don't criticize it for
wasting electricity when people complain about how Bitcoin wastes so much
which seems like a far more practical utility than SETI.

------
projektfu
I figured it was basically killed by improved power management. When it
started, a lot of computers didn’t sleep because they might not wake up.

------
ambivalents
Memories of SETI activity on my family's first desktop computer screensaver
and my dad's work laptop.

I don't have much to add other than that this is one of my first memories of
computers being useful for the world outside my own.

------
numlock86
Oh, sad to hear. I remember having SETI@home running on a couple of systems
when in idle. Heck, my PS3 had some SETI@home background-task running when not
in active use. Good times.

------
walrus01
Does anyone remember about 18 years ago when some well meaning, but ignorant
people got charged with electricity theft crimes for installing
distributed.net on their work's PCs?

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2002-01-23/plea-
agre...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2002-01-23/plea-agreement-in-
distributed-computing-case)

------
killjoywashere
We had a well-intended kid at a military facility in the early 2000s who
loaded this on every computer he could log into. He genuinely thought he was
doing a good thing for the world. Maybe he did. But the military network
admins were none to pleased and he got somewhat more than a stern talking-to.
Felt genuinely bad for him.

------
partiallypro
Does that mean folding@home is next? I think the screensaver dying out
eventually killed it. Also cloud computing.

~~~
krick
Honestly, I never cared much about SETI@home, always felt like an empty waste
of resources. But folding@home or even just training LeelaChess by community
really feels like a noble cause I am willing to spend some electricity for.

~~~
rconti
Well, SETI@home would have predated folding@home, so people stuck with what
they knew.

------
ilyagr
This reminded me of Dreamlab, which is an interesting adaptation of the same
idea to mobile phones.
[https://www.vodafone.com.au/foundation/dreamlab](https://www.vodafone.com.au/foundation/dreamlab)

------
okonomiyaki3000
A lot of nostalgia in this thread but don't be too sad to see it go. It was
only ever a waste of energy for everyone involved. If you want to put your
extra processor cycles to a good cause, there are much more worthy projects
like Folding@home

------
dirtyid
I wonder how much $/co2 of power was spent during the lifetime of the project.

~~~
radec
This is why I never did it. I remember thinking it was really cool back when I
was in high school, but could never justify the electricity use.

~~~
progval
I ran BOINC in winter; as it's not wasting if you're already using heaters.

------
3pt14159
Man alive. I first ran some SETI@home stuff on my gaming rig in 2001. After a
year or two I figured it was wasted energy. Surely they had more efficient
rigs helping out than my lowly Unreal 2004 machine, right?

------
downerending
If they were smart, they'd just quietly switch to bitcoin mining units.

~~~
WantonQuantum
Ahh but we did switch to mining bitcoin. We're just not allowed to tell you
about it.

~~~
iszomer
Or mining BLE beacons with Nodle.io

------
jajag
Back in 2000, I was working for a small dotcom startup and I remember we came
into work one day to discover that our production servers were all running at
a crawl & unable to serve traffic. Turned out that one of the devs had
installed seti@home on _all_ our servers (this was before devops was a thing)
and it was hogging 90%+ of the cpu. I think he'd installed seti on every
machine in the office that he could get access to, even other people's
workstations. He was utterly obsessed with the thing.

------
jschulenklopper
So, what about the hypothesis that aliens 'released' the concept of crypto
currencies on Earth, resulting in that idling computers and whole data centers
would start mining bitcoins instead of investigating signals from extra-
terrestrial life forms? It'd be a nice plot, trying to hide themselves a bit
longer from our search...

------
AdmiralAsshat
Back when HTC still made cool things, they had an Android app that would let
you contribute your phone's idle cycles towards various projects, of which _I
think_ SETI was an option.[0] I remember running it my HTC One M7 for awhile.

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.htc.ptg&hl...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.htc.ptg&hl=en_US)

------
surge
Considering how much carbon footprint it creates, I'm not sure the trade off
was worth it. I'm happy they're shutting it down for now. Maybe once everyone
is on renewables/cleaner energy sources it'd be a project worth restarting for
using idle capacity.

------
thedance
I wonder what fraction of the work was done in the final year. BOINC capacity
has expanded 600% in the last 5 years, and it's still not even all that large
(fewer than a million hosts, average resources per host similar to a desktop
computer). The raw idle capacity of the world's computers is far larger.

------
tanelg
My high school physics teacher offered one point of extra credit per n work
units. I had a fairly beefy computer, for a high school kid, and since he
never put a ceiling on the number of points offered, I ended up accumulating
up enough extra credit to bump my grade up a whole letter.

------
fergie
I remember everybody at my work (Software Engineering) setting this up in
2002. The idea was kind of obvious, but at the same time so far ahead of its
time.

It would be great if a similar project was set up to provide everyday, real
world services like, say, internet search, or a distributed S3 clone.

------
throaway1990
No Aliens found unfortunately :(

~~~
dyingkneepad
None of the type that they're allowed to tell you about :)

------
justlexi93
Bummer. I have my laptop set to not sleep while plugged into power so it can
do work while I’m not using it.

I guess I’ll switch over to another space or environmental project.

------
redis_mlc
I always told people to do mersenne prime search instead of s@h.

[https://www.mersenne.org/](https://www.mersenne.org/)

~~~
6nf
Why is this better than SETI? What's the purpose of finding mersenne primes

~~~
redis_mlc
> Why is this better than SETI? What's the purpose of finding mersenne primes

I hope you're kidding ...

We will probably never find or communicate with ET, so the effort is a waste
of time and resources. Space is just too big.

But interesting numbers are already known to be valuable in group theory,
encryption, and other areas. Golomb numbers are used today, for example:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golomb_ruler](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golomb_ruler)

And my standard disclaimer for technological illiterates: "It's not all about
you."

~~~
Hnrobert42
I think you are getting downvoted for your tone. I wondered the same thing as
the parent post. I genuinely don’t about mersenne primes.

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ctingom
I take a lot of screenshots for work requests, and I tend to save them...
hoping that 20 years on, they are as interesting as these screenshots.

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amelius
Isn't it a bit early given that we've just entered the era of machine learning
which could be a big help for the project?

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alexhutcheson
I wonder what the aggregate carbon footprint and electricity bill was over the
project's life. It has to be a lot, right?

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lightlyused
Got to see the Seti Burst computer rack at Arecibo in December along with a
lot of other stuff. Glad to have that memory.

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snvzz
If you're looking for alternatives besides the BOINC stuff, there is
distributed.net.

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kingkawn
Loved seti as a teenager and in my college years, always felt cool when it was
running.

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NetOpWibby
Wow, end of an era. I remember asking my mom to install it on her computer.

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armaye
I ran it on my android and had contributed from almost past 3 years.

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butterisgood
Ah man... it's just old enough to get a legal drink in the USA.

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fareesh
I am sure there will be no conspiracy theories from this news

~~~
speedplane
> I am sure there will be no conspiracy theories from this news

Well, yeah, because the government and military industrial complex censored
all of it. But don't worry, Q Anon will figure it out for us.

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steve1977
Soooo, probably a lot of energy wasted for nothing?

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ngcc_hk
Is it the best way to use such a famous brand name? Not just sad but also feel
abandon for those in.

Anyway may be they have found the alien and not telling us directly. Otherwise
why stop? Just strange.

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ryanmercer
Wow, I've been using it for 21 years?!

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sigzero
I remember running it back in the day. Sad.

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sjg007
And how many aliens did they discover?

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mysterEFrank
ALIENS ON THE BLOCKCHAIN

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macawfish
2020 is one messy year

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avallark
or they have already found em aliens

 _twiddles thumbs_

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andy
I guess they found what they were looking for.

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imranrojen
why is it?

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wilg
did they find anything?

------
Commodore_64
F

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benevol
I find it quite funny that people still think that we'll "find" ETs by looking
for them.

ETs gave us their DNA. They are our ancestors. Which is why "contact" has been
a reality since "our beginning" on Earth.

Physical contact will (officially) happen when humanity is ready for it,
measured by the maturity of our shared consciousness.

Marina Jacobi is among those who currently are in direct and constant
telepathic contact with various groups of ETs. She often channels them (there
are many others who do this too). Check out her Quantum Manifestation Series
to learn about what's going on:
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKaW-6KuhVvEIX-
oRG7cBZQ](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKaW-6KuhVvEIX-oRG7cBZQ)

~~~
s_dev
...

This is HN -- you post unscientific crap and it will be called out -- that
lady seems like a crackpot.

She does not channel or contact ET life.

~~~
benevol
It's unfortunate that you are so close minded. You will be surprised in a
couple of years, at most.

