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posted by janrinok on Tuesday March 03 2020, @07:34PM   Printer-friendly
from the how-many-green-men-have-we-found? dept.

[Editor's note: We have been unable to corroborate this story from GHacks. A search on Google has found there are other reports of this, but they all refer to a forum that no longer corroborates this report. It seems there was — something — but that it is not now visible on their site. See, too, the "Previously" section at the bottom which suggests this story may be in error. Can any Soylentil shed some light on this? --martyb]

SETI@Home's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence comes to an end - gHacks Tech News:

SETI@Home will go into hibernation on March 31, 2020. The distributed computing project was launched in 1999 to analyze data provided by the radio telescope Arecibo in Puerto Rico. Later on, data from the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and Parkes Observatory in Australia were added.

SETI@Home -- SETI stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence -- broke down the signals into packets which it then distributed to connected computer systems. These computer systems, often operated by volunteers from around the world, would then be used to analyze the data and transfer results back to the project.

[...] The project maintainers at UC Berkeley provide two reasons for the decision:

  1. The project is "at a point of diminishing returns" as it has "analyzed all the data" that is needed "for now".
  2. Managing the distributed processing of data is a lot of work and time is required to complete the "back-end analysis of the results" that have been obtained already.

Hibernation means that the project is not disappearing from the face of the earth. The project website and forums remain open and the distributed computing resources of SETI@Home may be used by other scientific research projects to focus on areas such as "cosmology or pulsar research". Seti@Home may start distributing work again if that happens and the project team will make an announcement if a new research project has been found.

Previously:
New Technologies, Strategies Expanding Search for Extraterrestrial Life


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 03 2020, @10:42PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 03 2020, @10:42PM (#966200)

    Wait, we destroy the environment, kill off so many other species on Earth, kill each other (wars), have corrupt politicians, yet we're somehow the best the universe has to offer? One can argue that animals and other life forms here on Earth are better than we are.

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