UC Berkeley is ending the SETI@Home project after 21 years

[Cal Jeffrey]

Fun facts: SETI@Home launched on May 17, 1999 and gathered millions of participants from hundreds of countries to concentrate their computing power on crunching data obtained from radio telescopes. In 2011, the network it ran on (BOINC) was listed by Guinness as the world's largest computing grid. At last count, it had "approximately 527,880 active hosts providing a massive average 5.428 petaFLOPS of computational power."

The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence announced it is ending SETI@Home on March 31. The project was started in 1999 by the University of California at Berkeley. It was a crowd-sourced public effort to comb through data collected by radio telescopes looking for anomalous signals or patterns.

The way it worked is, users would download and install the SETI@Home software. The client acted as a screensaver only running while the computer was idle, but could be set to run continuously. Chunks of data were sent out from Berkeley's BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) network to project members. The program would crunch the data, then send back the results and retrieve another work unit. It essentially created a massive supercomputer with over 5 million users at its height.

The reason for the "hibernation" of the project is that it has come to a "point of diminishing returns."

"Scientifically, we're at the point of diminishing returns; basically, we've analyzed all the data we need for now," said project heads in the SETI@Home forum. "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."

They are calling the closure hibernation instead of cancelation because it is not completely shutting things down. The forum and website will remain open, and they will allow researchers to use the software for other things such as cosmology and pulsar research. Additionally, home users of the client can continue using it to help other BOINC-based projects. Berkeley has a listing of these on its website.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/84260-uc-berkeley-hibernate-setihome-project-month-end.html

 

[fps4ever]

LOL we're done, no aliens but we have a lot of data to analyze and a paper to write!

 

[hahahanoobs]

Last thing I read about this was how much of a waste of time and energy it was.

 

[Squid Surprise]

While it may not have found aliens, it wasn't a complete waste of time.... research for research's sake is never a bad thing. You never know what discoveries or inventions can come from things like this...

Hey, we got VELCRO from NASA's early work...

 

[wiyosaya]

While it may not have found aliens, it wasn't a complete waste of time.... research for research's sake is never a bad thing. You never know what discoveries or inventions can come from things like this...

Hey, we got VELCRO from NASA's early work...

Absolutely!

As someone who participated from the very beginning, the BOINC program came together maybe about two years or so after the project started, and it is, perhaps, the most significant part that the project has contributed to the advancement of science. This assumes, of course, that they do not announce that they discovered signals that cannot be explained. AFAIK, they never said that they would announce a discovery before publishing the results, and they did say that they would make the results public.

Literally anyone can write a crunching program for BOINC. That's significant.

And, for the "this is a waste of time and money crowd," the project was never funded by the the government. In fact, in the early days, few exoplanets were known to exist. As a result of the lack of evidence of exoplanets, the project was widely panned in the scientific community. Now, with estimates of 100 billion planets in the Milky Way alone, https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_2233.html the possibility that life evolved elsewhere is considered to be substantially higher than it was in those days.

 

[p51d007]

I remember this back in the days of DIAL UP and DSL. Then, they tried to make it "more fair" because they said it wasn't fair that some people had high speed internet and others did not. LOL.

 

[mbk34]

Apparently the new project is to now start searching for intelligent life on Earth.

 

[Jeff Re]

The false clickbait headline is not okay.

 

[psycros]

The cynical trolls should probably take the two minutes to research other BOINC projects like protein folding.

 

[Ean Mogg]

Why just use a Smartphone and phone them, they've been here for years duh ..lol in below ground bases all over the world ...need anything more I'm the three to ask or four ,,,

 

[wiyosaya]

The cynical trolls should probably take the two minutes to research other BOINC projects like protein folding.

Like GPUGRID, World Community Grid, or even a similarly worthy (IMO) project like the project that is searching for Earth Crossing (killer) Asteroids - asteroids@home.

Or perhaps science projects like MilkyWay@home or Einstein@home.

Lots of worthy projects out there, IMO.

 

[BigRedPDX]

Apparently the new project is to now start searching for intelligent life on Earth.

We may never find that, unfortunately.

 

[PurpleYoda]

Oe they did find what they were looking for and now can point their telescopes at one point in space and ‘eavesdrop’ and don’t need publics help anymore.. ;->

 

[ypsylon]

Great shame. Was actively involved for many, many years. Just stopped when I got into rendering work and could no longer spare power for S@H.

 

[Gus Fring]

[QUOTE="hahahanoobs, post: 1803520, member: 28839]
Last thing I read about this was how much of a waste of time and energy it was.
[/QUOTE]
Unless ALL the energy is obtained thru renewable or non-polluting means , then it was contributing to the GreenHouse effect.
Which is exactly as our soon to be Overlords want it (see docu "starship troopers").
great vector for the CIA to crack paaswords too.

 

[wiyosaya]

Last thing I read about this was how much of a waste of time and energy it was.

Unless ALL the energy is obtained thru renewable or non-polluting means , then it was contributing to the GreenHouse effect.
Which is exactly as our soon to be Overlords want it (see docu "starship troopers").
great vector for the CIA to crack paaswords too.

Somewhat like cyrpto mining - though I'd argue that crypto mining has no use where distributed computing has many, many benefits. The BOINC framework came out of S@H, and there are many projects that have, immediate, useful value. Therefore, the scientist in me does not think that S@H was totally worthless or a waste of time or energy.

 

[sauri]

The aliens suggested that decision to decrease the expenses on the signal blocking fields.

 

[That Dude There]

The timing of this is fishy considering what deception is about to be revealed to the world in the relatively near future.

 

[hk2000]

It's amazing how the smarter people get, the dumber they really are!!! Billions of dollars spent on a frivolous task instead of worrying about the millions of suffering lives here on earth! And I'm not onlty talking about SETI, but all space related crap in the name of science.

 

[learninmypc]

https://www.seti.org/artists-imagine-trappist-1-seti-institutes-art-imaginarium