This was my screensaver for several years starting in maybe 2001. It felt really cool as a 12 year old to be contributing to the project in some small way.
For a long time I would periodically check on the screen saver in case there would be some big message saying my computer found aliens or something. Never did though :)
I remember seeing a prank program years ago that showed the SETI@home screensaver for a bit, then popped up an alert box saying "Alien Life Found!" with options to submit or cancel(!).
If you tried to submit it would spend a while with a really slow progress bar, and then say it failed to submit and asked you to contact SETI directly. I wonder if anyone actually did....
My dad did a similar thing with a bunch of computers at his store. It made way more sense back when processors didn't clock down efficiently so there was such a thing as 'wasted/excess clock cycles' you could donate to a distributed computing project. Now though processors shut off cores, reduce their clock speed etc so there's a lot less spare processing power you can siphon off without increasing power draw.
True but it was much cheaper when a computer you might have on for other reasons wouldn't consume noticeably more power for your donation, eg computer lab admins which I think made up some of the top contenders of the leader boards. There were definitely groups that would run clusters of computers just for the donation (my dad was one of those too, there was no other reason to run those PCs other than Seti@Home) but for the average home user it was spare cycles that were low cost to free.
Oh, I feel this. As a pre-teen, I loved it. SETI@Home running on our family's Pentium 100, X-Files, and hanging out on the "Parascope" forum and chatroom on AOL for all things UFO related. An "I Want To Believe" poster on my wall.
I've (thankfully) moved on past that, but I look back at that with nostalgia.
Of all the current US conspiracy theories, the UFO/UAP conspiracy is still the most interesting and fully developed/ongoing conspiracy space. Just check out the recent 'Age of Disclosure' documentary from this year.
I'm not arguing a position on the theory, just saying it's very active and has the old-school qualities that were present in the 90's.
There's some genuinely weird shit unexplained, I'll give you that. Unlike Bigfoot, where you can look at a map of the historical range of bears and see it exactly matches where all the Bigfoot sightings are.
Pilots from the Eastern Bloc and NATO countries have had sightings. It's not just a US thing. People have been claiming to see them for longer than the USA has existed.
IMHO, the whole social/psychological aspect of the "conspiracy" or phenomenom or whatever you want to call it is at least as interesting as the phenomenon itself.
I'd really like to see it disclosed by a government that isn't panicking about epstein files/being impeached and trying to cover up other stories before I'm fully convinced
I would be more interested in the former USSR or China, maybe Iran and Latin America. The Eastern Bloc must have covered up a lot of stuff but would have wild stories.
I mean this is a meta-conspiracy in itself. I don't think you're incorrect/wrong, but using one conspiracy theory to hide a conspiracy with lots of evidence is interesting.
Folding@home got a boost recently from Pewdipie deploying his 12-stack 4090 build against it and then getting a bunch of his fanbase to also participate in his folding@home squad.
They saw a huge uptick in users during the COVID pandemic. As the corona virus is a protein shell, and their software folds protein molecules, they were able to apply it to look for targets for other molecules to attach to the virus where it would normally latch onto a cell, this could then lead to treatments.
They'd found some promising results, and were working with a pharmaceutical company to manufacture the first compounds that could then be tested. Unfortunately that company's facility was located in eastern Ukraine. =(
World Community Grid at https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/ is also running, though it has had struggles since moving datacenters, and it seems their external stats are still out of commission.
I've recently decided to end my own participation, mainly because I've run three systems into the ground, and we're now in the "save what you can" era. There's one motherboard I want to get refurbished, since it became unstable when idle but loved 24x7 crunching. It would make a great NAS if I could find some DDR4 at a price I could stomach, or I could lay it in as a spare if the new motherboard goes south in the future.
I think you’re missing the main limiting resource: money.
Some of these projects could occupy entire regions of cloud compute in some cases for awhile, some even more depending on the problem. But running that for even a short time or decades needed would cost more money than anyone has to do.
Academic HPCs existed long before cloud compute options and for certain problem spaces could also be used even in non-distributed memory cases to handle this stuff. But you still needed allocation time and sometimes even funding to use them, competing against other cases like drug design, cancer research, nuclear testing… whatever. So searching for ET could be crowdsourced and the cost distributed which is something that made it alluring and tractable.
I used to run a small academic cluster that was underutilized but essentially fully paid for. I’d often put some of these projects running as background throttled processes outside scheduler space so the 90% of the time no one was using them, the hardware would at least be doing some useful scientific research since it’s after-all funded largely from federal scientific research funding. There was of course some bias introduced by which projects I chose to support whereas someone else may have made a more equitable choice.
How many papers have been published as a result of this, and more pertinently, how many "real" things are now being made or used based on that? I'm hoping it's not all just perpetual "regrowing teeth" territory where nothing ever comes from it.
This is extremely far from any of my expertises, but I'll offer an answer while no one else did (please correct me!). Basically, all medicine (i.e. drugs) we have are proteins or certain compounds that fit within some of our cell's (or viruses) molecules and does funny stuff to them, like disabling certain parts, acting as a signal to regulate behavior, and so on. Doing funny stuff is basically about fitting into another molecule. So research about how proteins (most molecules (after water) in our body, I guess) interact is incredibly important in basically all medicine, specially in the discovery of medicine (like suggesting compounds (drug) that could fit in certain receptors or perform certain function), and understanding disease/pathologies (which give ideas on how to prevent and treat them).
If folding@home helps to understand and model this behavior of molecules (which I guess tends to be difficult and unreliable to do without the aid of computers), it is extremely helpful. Now I don't know other details like, perhaps molecular biology is the bottleneck and there is scant available molecules to analyze (reducing its impact/marginal sensitivity), or perhaps compute really is a bottleneck in this particular problem. But nonetheless it seems like a great project for which contributions do make a difference.
(Note: although, that said, if you were expecting something like 'compute->miracle drug comes out', I believe that's not quite how it works; research in general rarely works that way, I think because the constraint space and problem space that would require this approach is too large and complicated; and in fact I believe many if not most significant discoveries have resulted from playing around and investigating random molecules, often from (nonhuman) animals, plants and bacteria[1]; although molecular sciences (molecular biology) seem to enable a slightly more methodological approach)
I wasn't aware asking a question was FUD. That's also a list of achievements with no links without any information regarding how much if any volunteer contributed computing has contributed to them.
I remember at the time that donating CPU time was considered trivial. Not so much today.
At the time of SETI@home, a typical CPU used maybe 20W at full load, fans usually ran at constant speed, and power management was much more primitive. So you barely noticed the difference between idle and full load, both on your electricity bill and on the noise the PC made.
Now hundreds of watts is not uncommon if you also use the GPU, and people are much more conscious about how much power computers use. And at full power, fans spin up loudly, laptops get uncomfortably hot, etc... It means you are not going to do it as easily. It probably didn't help the "@home" projects.
My homelab is in a closet that has the water meter for my above-garage apartment. Before I put a heater in the garage itself, I needed to make sure that that closet didn't freeze. I rigged up a temperature sensor to start mprime on a server if the temperature got too low, but higher than the electric heater that's also in that closet. I figured I might as well contribute to research if I'm just burning watts for heat anyways.
I remember some startups trying to install cryptominers in people homes, the idea was to use the electricity that would be spent heating the space anyways. The company would pay for the mining hardware while the customer would provide the electricity, and the profits would be shared.
I don't know how it worked out, but the idea was there.
Wanted to share this funny SETI@home prank that Monzy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Maynes-Aminzade) did in 1999, where he created a fake VB app that tricked a coworker into believing that his computer successfully found an extraterrestrial signal.
Apparently they are not completely finished with the project - according to this article from five days ago, there are still some signal candidates currently in the process of being re-observed with the FAST radio telescope.
My first internship was at DEC / Compaq in 2000. I was on their C compiler team and my project was to build seti tools with their updated Alpha Linux C compiler and compare perf against the tools built with the GNU C compiler. It was a fun project.
Except as a kid back then, the screensaver was trivial to install and neat to look at, and BOINC was a pain. I dropped it when they switched. I imagine some less-technical adults who were interested did as well.
That's pretty dismissive outright; consider uh. All forms of distributed computing, from cloud computers to bittorrent to bitcoin / cryptocurrency. Seti@home was one of, if not the first distributed projects, the predecessor of cloud computing and spreading a workload over many computers, years before Hadoop and map/reduce became popular (which at least in my head was the start of "big data" and cloud computing).
I won't claim it was "the" most important or it was critical in that, but it's not to be dismissed.
The fact that all SETI endeavors haven’t really found anything is actually a very valuable result, because it constrains “they’re everywhere, we just haven’t been looking” arguments quite a bit.
Even humanity’s (weak) radio emissions would be detectable from tens of light years away, and stronger emissions from much further. So the idea that intelligent life is absolutely everywhere that was liberally tossed around a few decades ago is pretty much on life support now.
>Even humanity’s (weak) radio emissions would be detectable from tens of light years away, and stronger emissions from much further.
That's not true. Non-directional radio transmissions (e.g. TV, broadcast radio) would not be distinguishable from cosmic background radiation at more than a light year or two away [0]. Highly directional radio emissions (e.g. Arecibo message) an order of magnitude more powerful than the strongest transmitters on Earth would only be visible at approximately 1000 light years away [1], and would only be perceptible if the detector were perfectly aligned with the transmission at the exact time it arrived.
This is my biggest issues with all of the messages we keep sending out to space. By the time it gets to its destination, it will basically be indistinguishable from noise
That depends. If there is "someone" within 20 light years advanced enough to detect our signals we can establish communication and learn from each other - the 40 year round trip time means we can only ask long term questions, but just sending all of human knowledge, and them returning with their knowledge can be a big leg up for both (though sorting through all the things we already know will be a big effort). They may have solved fusion, while we are still 50 years away, meanwhile we have solved something else they are interested in but haven't solved yet.
20 light years is about the farthest useful communication can be established. The farther out things are the longer the round trip and thus the more likely we have already figured things out by the time we get their answer. It would still be interesting to get a response, but our (and we assume their) civilization is moving too fast for much knowledge sharing. Eventually with knowledge sharing you assume something is obvious that isn't and so you get another round trip. Watching an alien movie no matter who far away they are will be interesting (even if it is more a smell based or something that we don't think of)
There is no reason to think we will ever visit them, but we can do other things when they are close.
There are not many stars within 20 light years though. The Femi paradox doesn't exist at that distance, there just not enough stars to expect to find life that close.
Is there a reason we would need to coordinate on what to exchange rather than, say, beginning with encyclopedias and textbooks then moving to a constant stream of notable papers, news, discoveries, etc? What kind of bandwidth can you hit with a cooperating neighbour where improvements become civilisationally important? How many bytes (megabytes? Terabytes?) of meaningful new data does humanity produce per second? I suspect it's reasonably low.
Good question. My thought is similar to yours, but there is a lot of room for debate on what to send. They probably don't care about the roman empire like we do - but there are enough references in modern science that we need to send a summary just so they understand some things. We produce a lot of data, but most of it isn't meaningful.
if this is a real situation I wouldn't be asked. So use salt
When you say perfectly aligned, what kind of precision are we talking about? If we aimed a receiver at a nearby star, would we be able to achieve this kind of precision?
Used to have this running on all of our computers in the office back in 1999, or 2000. Such a satisfying screensaver! Then I went even further and put it on the servers too.
If i remember correctly, back then even some sysadmins were even fired over it because of the usage of resources. It also sprouted some weird projects on how to distribute all those unused cpu cycles for other things.
I rebuilt my PII system last year and really wanted to run SAH on it for old time's sake but sadly that hasn't been possible for a long time. I miss watching that old screensaver and optimising the system performance so I could get through a WU in less time, iirc at the time it took about 18 hours each.
I started running SETI back in 1999 when it first came out. I ran it on both my personal machines and even had it running on several servers I controlled at work. I probably ran it for several years before losing interest, pulling it off of everything. I guess I am a bit surprised to learn it was still running. It was quite unique back in the day. I wonder how many years of CPU time were burned running this thing.
Years ago I worked for another BOINC project, climateprediction.net and I'm pleased to see that they are still operating (see: https://main.cpdn.org/).
IIRC SETI@Home was well-known back then - I'd always mention it if people asked what I did, and they usually recognised it.
Oh man, SETI@home! That takes me back. That screensaver was a total vibe—my little gateway drug to distributed computing. It was wild feeling like my humble PC was out there, just a small cog in this massive cosmic search party. The thought that it might, against all odds, stumble on "the signal"... that was the magic of it. That specific kind of hopeful, nerdy optimism of the early 2000s is hard to find now.
You hit the nail on the head about missing projects like that. It wasn't just about the science; it was about the story, the shared dream. You felt like you were part of the crew on the starship, even if you were just scrubbing the decks. Modern BOINC projects are awesome, but they don't quite have that same "Holy cow, we're listening for E.T.!" mainstream charm. It was our generation's version of a barn raising, but for the galaxy.
Thanks for the nostalgia trip, my dude. Here's hoping the aliens are just shy and on dial-up.
I don’t believe extra terrestrial life will contact us through effort or negligence via radio. To help proof this I’ve run the SETI@HOME screensaver for years.
SETI at Home was a screensaver that was looking for signals like that via distributed searching and they didn't find anything (but they do have telescope time for tackling the 92 highest priority follow-up scans).
there's always folding@home if you like contributing idle cycles to projects like this. it's not quite alien hunting but it's kinda neat to try to brute force protein structures to beat various diseases.
Contributing resources to a scientific experiment aligns contributions with outcomes, since getting a hit is knowledge that everyone benefits from: the result (including a negative result) is in the public domain and benefits everyone to know. In this case, the result is that after 20 years of distributed search, no plausible ET signal was found and verified. That's good to know!
For a long time I would periodically check on the screen saver in case there would be some big message saying my computer found aliens or something. Never did though :)
If you tried to submit it would spend a while with a really slow progress bar, and then say it failed to submit and asked you to contact SETI directly. I wonder if anyone actually did....
The truth is still out there.
I've (thankfully) moved on past that, but I look back at that with nostalgia.
Anyone else collect The X-Factor partworks magazine? I used to love reading it.
I'm not arguing a position on the theory, just saying it's very active and has the old-school qualities that were present in the 90's.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_black_bear
The US South has bears.
I'm quite surprised these are still around as I hadn't seen them mentioned in so long.
I always assumed the phase out of screensavers (and introduction of CPU low power modes) were terminal for them.
They'd found some promising results, and were working with a pharmaceutical company to manufacture the first compounds that could then be tested. Unfortunately that company's facility was located in eastern Ukraine. =(
But that aside, they've still been going strong.
I've recently decided to end my own participation, mainly because I've run three systems into the ground, and we're now in the "save what you can" era. There's one motherboard I want to get refurbished, since it became unstable when idle but loved 24x7 crunching. It would make a great NAS if I could find some DDR4 at a price I could stomach, or I could lay it in as a spare if the new motherboard goes south in the future.
https://foldingathome.org/2024/05/02/alphafold-opens-new-opp...
Some of these projects could occupy entire regions of cloud compute in some cases for awhile, some even more depending on the problem. But running that for even a short time or decades needed would cost more money than anyone has to do.
Academic HPCs existed long before cloud compute options and for certain problem spaces could also be used even in non-distributed memory cases to handle this stuff. But you still needed allocation time and sometimes even funding to use them, competing against other cases like drug design, cancer research, nuclear testing… whatever. So searching for ET could be crowdsourced and the cost distributed which is something that made it alluring and tractable.
I used to run a small academic cluster that was underutilized but essentially fully paid for. I’d often put some of these projects running as background throttled processes outside scheduler space so the 90% of the time no one was using them, the hardware would at least be doing some useful scientific research since it’s after-all funded largely from federal scientific research funding. There was of course some bias introduced by which projects I chose to support whereas someone else may have made a more equitable choice.
You can run on a spare Raspberry Pi. I remember doing that. Performance isn’t great but every little bit helps
https://downey.io/blog/folding-at-home-raspberry-pi-arm/
If folding@home helps to understand and model this behavior of molecules (which I guess tends to be difficult and unreliable to do without the aid of computers), it is extremely helpful. Now I don't know other details like, perhaps molecular biology is the bottleneck and there is scant available molecules to analyze (reducing its impact/marginal sensitivity), or perhaps compute really is a bottleneck in this particular problem. But nonetheless it seems like a great project for which contributions do make a difference.
(Note: although, that said, if you were expecting something like 'compute->miracle drug comes out', I believe that's not quite how it works; research in general rarely works that way, I think because the constraint space and problem space that would require this approach is too large and complicated; and in fact I believe many if not most significant discoveries have resulted from playing around and investigating random molecules, often from (nonhuman) animals, plants and bacteria[1]; although molecular sciences (molecular biology) seem to enable a slightly more methodological approach)
[1] The GLP-1 based weight loss drugs for example came from investigating the Gila monster lizard venom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLP-1_receptor_agonist#History
> please have a look around before spreading FUD
Please don't turn HN into reddit.
At the time of SETI@home, a typical CPU used maybe 20W at full load, fans usually ran at constant speed, and power management was much more primitive. So you barely noticed the difference between idle and full load, both on your electricity bill and on the noise the PC made.
Now hundreds of watts is not uncommon if you also use the GPU, and people are much more conscious about how much power computers use. And at full power, fans spin up loudly, laptops get uncomfortably hot, etc... It means you are not going to do it as easily. It probably didn't help the "@home" projects.
Edit: I have a heat pump, which is more efficient for heating of course
I don't know how it worked out, but the idea was there.
The original site is down, but jump to November 5, 1999 to see the screenshot. https://web.archive.org/web/20030404093458/http://www.monzy....
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/search-for-life/this...
Was it all for nothing?
So I wouldn’t say it was all for nothing, but it’s main benefit was the idea, and not the results it generated
Did it though?
I won't claim it was "the" most important or it was critical in that, but it's not to be dismissed.
Even humanity’s (weak) radio emissions would be detectable from tens of light years away, and stronger emissions from much further. So the idea that intelligent life is absolutely everywhere that was liberally tossed around a few decades ago is pretty much on life support now.
That's not true. Non-directional radio transmissions (e.g. TV, broadcast radio) would not be distinguishable from cosmic background radiation at more than a light year or two away [0]. Highly directional radio emissions (e.g. Arecibo message) an order of magnitude more powerful than the strongest transmitters on Earth would only be visible at approximately 1000 light years away [1], and would only be perceptible if the detector were perfectly aligned with the transmission at the exact time it arrived.
[0] https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/245562
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0610377.pdf
20 light years is about the farthest useful communication can be established. The farther out things are the longer the round trip and thus the more likely we have already figured things out by the time we get their answer. It would still be interesting to get a response, but our (and we assume their) civilization is moving too fast for much knowledge sharing. Eventually with knowledge sharing you assume something is obvious that isn't and so you get another round trip. Watching an alien movie no matter who far away they are will be interesting (even if it is more a smell based or something that we don't think of)
There is no reason to think we will ever visit them, but we can do other things when they are close.
There are not many stars within 20 light years though. The Femi paradox doesn't exist at that distance, there just not enough stars to expect to find life that close.
if this is a real situation I wouldn't be asked. So use salt
When you say perfectly aligned, what kind of precision are we talking about? If we aimed a receiver at a nearby star, would we be able to achieve this kind of precision?
:)
Wasnt this the original wording?
http://weti-institute.org/
Update: looks like there is a Wikipedia list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volunteer_computing_pr...
Would still be nice to know for the applicable ones if any success have come out of these or if they're just fun toys
You hit the nail on the head about missing projects like that. It wasn't just about the science; it was about the story, the shared dream. You felt like you were part of the crew on the starship, even if you were just scrubbing the decks. Modern BOINC projects are awesome, but they don't quite have that same "Holy cow, we're listening for E.T.!" mainstream charm. It was our generation's version of a barn raising, but for the galaxy.
Thanks for the nostalgia trip, my dude. Here's hoping the aliens are just shy and on dial-up.
You know of this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal
SETI at Home was a screensaver that was looking for signals like that via distributed searching and they didn't find anything (but they do have telescope time for tackling the 92 highest priority follow-up scans).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45077654
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43979537
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43085967
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35210503
there's always folding@home if you like contributing idle cycles to projects like this. it's not quite alien hunting but it's kinda neat to try to brute force protein structures to beat various diseases.