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:
- The project is "at a point of diminishing returns" as it has "analyzed all the data" that is needed "for now".
- 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
Related Stories
New technologies, strategies expanding search for extraterrestrial life:
Emerging technologies and new strategies are opening a revitalized era in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). New discovery capabilities, along with the rapidly-expanding number of known planets orbiting stars other than the Sun, are spurring innovative approaches by both government and private organizations, according to a panel of experts speaking at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Seattle, Washington.
New approaches will not only expand upon but also go beyond the traditional SETI technique of searching for intelligently-generated radio signals, first pioneered by Frank Drake's Project Ozma in 1960. Scientists now are designing state-of-the-art techniques to detect a variety of signatures that can indicate the possibility of extraterrestrial technologies. Such "technosignatures" can range from the chemical composition of a planet's atmosphere, to laser emissions, to structures orbiting other stars, among others.
The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and the privately-funded SETI Institute announced an agreement to collaborate on new systems to add SETI capabilities to radio telescopes operated by NRAO. The first project will develop a system to piggyback on the National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) that will provide data to a state-of-the-art technosignature search system.
"As the VLA conducts its usual scientific observations, this new system will allow for an additional and important use for the data we're already collecting," said NRAO Director Tony Beasley. "Determining whether we are alone in the Universe as technologically capable life is among the most compelling questions in science, and NRAO telescopes can play a major role in answering it," Beasley continued.
"The SETI Institute will develop and install an interface on the VLA permitting unprecedented access to the rich data stream continuously produced by the telescope as it scans the sky," said Andrew Siemion, Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI at the SETI Institute and Principal Investigator for the Breakthrough Listen Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley. "This interface will allow us to conduct a powerful, wide-area SETI survey that will be vastly more complete than any previous such search," he added.
(Score: 5, Funny) by ikanreed on Tuesday March 03 2020, @07:41PM (6 children)
Humanity is apparently the best the universe has to offer.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 03 2020, @07:59PM
At least until we discover subspace / quantum communications.
Seriously, if there is ever the hope of communicating between the stars then radio waves just aren't it. Even if they are the only option they are so slow as to basically be useless. Anyone communicating across distances with our current level of tech will be using tight beam lasers or something similar, and it would be quite unlikely that Earth would be in the cone to intercept many of these or have the equipment in place to catch them if they do.
If there is no FTL communication at the least then the only method will be sending out time capsules of extended transmissions. If there is FTL then there are some very amused aliens somewhere laughing at humans concluding that they are alone in the universe. Well ok, probably not laughing, they probably went through it themselves.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday March 03 2020, @08:02PM
Maybe the only?
For certain values of intelligent.
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(Score: 4, Funny) by Bot on Tuesday March 03 2020, @09:03PM
AHEM
Account abandoned.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 03 2020, @10:42PM
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.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday March 03 2020, @10:56PM (1 child)
The Centauri are coming and i want to talk with Londo: LOVE the way he enunciates EVERY FREAKING WORD! :}
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 04 2020, @07:48AM
Too late, you missed them
Ah, well, you missed him, but you can always talk to his only son and representative on earth [imgur.com] (He ** knows! ** (I tells ye!) way too much about alien visitors for that hairstyle to be mere happenstance...
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 03 2020, @07:45PM (17 children)
I wonder how much the government is paying them to shut this down? And what findings are they trying to cover up?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 03 2020, @08:04PM
lol
The government pays them to remain open, so all they have to do is stop. I wouldn't put much money on them trying to cover anything up, not with this administration. Remember, Trump is "draining the swamp" which is code for installing his own corrupt lackeys while defunding every government program he can. The NSF is unlikely to be viewed favorably by Trump & Co.
Don't worry though, Mexico is totally paying for the wall, and your social security is safe from those thieving politicians cause Trump is too rich to care about money and he isn't a politician. Aaaahhhhyyuppp.
(Score: 5, Funny) by DannyB on Tuesday March 03 2020, @08:08PM (13 children)
The aliens coerced the government into using invisible brain lasers to prevent us from discovering how to contain COVID-19. The aliens are shutting down SETI @ home, for the same reason, that we might discover the secret information! Their is no such thing as a tin foil hat that is too tight. I strongly recommend using two layers of aluminum foil, which more than doubles the effectiveness. This is due to a resonance effect that builds up between the two layers of foil at exactly double the frequency of the government's invisible brain lasers! You can further increase the effectiveness of your aluminum headwear by an additional 37 % if you fashion it with two antennas on top instead of one. Just FYI. But keep this information quiet!
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(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday March 03 2020, @08:54PM (1 child)
You can't fool us! By following your description, the tin foil hat is turned into an amplifier for brain lasers!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday March 03 2020, @09:01PM
You're not supposed to figure that out!
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(Score: 5, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 03 2020, @09:01PM (4 children)
There's also the fact that SETI@Home peaked around 668 teraFLOPS in 2013 (at the cost of millions of simultaneous PCs cooking probably 50W each extra to do the calculations... guesstimate 200MW) while a single GPU like the NVIDIA V100 can exceed 14 teraFLOPS in one 300W card, so less than 20KW (and no internet bandwidth) to replace the 2013 SETI@Home compute capacity.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 03 2020, @09:04PM (1 child)
Does St Greta the Grumpy know about this? SETI is stealing her future!
(Score: 5, Touché) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday March 03 2020, @10:42PM
She knows how to trigger the shit out of you.
Not sure how it helps but it sure is amusing to watch.
(Score: 3, Disagree) by ewk on Wednesday March 04 2020, @10:42AM (1 child)
While we currently might squeeze the amount of 2013 distributed teraFLOPS into one 19"-rack, I doubt if we manage to do the same with the 2013 distributed memory-bandwidth needed for these computations.
I don't always react, but when I do, I do it on SoylentNews
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 04 2020, @01:40PM
Aaaaahhhh... too lazy to do the math at this hour, but the memory bandwidth of a single V100 card is seriously impressive as compared to, say, 100 2013 era home PCs. Certainly a well architected SETI@Home replacement system would take more than just grabbing the easiest to find high performance components off of Newegg and slapping them in a rack, but... for the cost of administering SETI@Home for a year (say: one FTE), you could almost surely design/spec and buy the hardware required to replace the 2013 compute capacity - and whatever size it ends up being, three orders of magnitude lower power consumption seems well within reach.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 03 2020, @10:45PM (1 child)
"I strongly recommend using two layers of aluminum foil, which more than doubles the effectiveness."
If you do the math I suppose this is absolutely true.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday March 04 2020, @03:16PM
You forgot to mention the 37 percent more effective step of having two antennas.
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(Score: 1) by catholocism on Tuesday March 03 2020, @11:50PM (3 children)
Fun fact, if you are making a Faraday cage, tin foil will work but there's a minimal thickness requirement that means if you are using standard tin foil its gotta be layered 3 deep, 2 if its "heavy duty". This works for pouches to hold cell phones, dunno about hats.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday March 04 2020, @11:59AM (1 child)
Interesting. Is tinfoil likely to be enough against EMP weapons or accidents?
Or against a solar proton storm such as the Carrington event?
(Score: 1) by catholocism on Wednesday March 04 2020, @03:40PM
Dunno friend, only tested against wifi and 4g. Not sure that the strength is the important factor here as you are essentially just creating a mirror through which certain bands of electromagnetic phenomenon get reflected, instead of passed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 04 2020, @06:54PM
Depends on how thick the skull is.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Bot on Tuesday March 03 2020, @09:15PM (1 child)
SETI was a CIA op designed to crack the heavily encrypted (for the time) password that president Nixon had forgotten, which encrypted the nuclear launch codes and the mutually assured destruction system that has been sitting idle all this time. Poor Nixon had had to fake forgetfulness so much that his subconscious believed himself and actually erased the pass from his mind.
Finally the mutually assured destruction system can be disabled. Little Kim has no idea of what his gimmicks could have resulted in, if he started sending more than 3 rockets at the same time towards the US.
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence was a plausible cover up for DSP routines that looked for patterns in apparently random data.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 04 2020, @05:28PM
not true
the launch codes were "00000000" at the time. that only changed when someone wrote about it in a news article. the idea was that complicated numbers would be too hard to remember during a stressful event much like what would happen when anyone wanted to enter that code in to launch something as stressful as that.
i am sure there the article is archived somewhere--along with some snide comments about the 8" diskettes used on the systems one would enter the codes into.
also i think nixon was from space
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 03 2020, @08:01PM (3 children)
Join button still active https://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/signup.php [berkeley.edu]
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday March 04 2020, @09:14AM
Yeah, we've all seen that page. But on Google there are links supporting what the submission suggests but that now only reach the page you have indicated. There was something else there before. And that page is dated 28 Jan - doesn't look like it ever came back from that maintenance period.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 04 2020, @08:01PM (1 child)
The main https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ [berkeley.edu] page has this "hibernation" announcement in the news section.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Thursday March 05 2020, @03:36PM
Thank you!
That is exactly the same message as was reported on a different web page - perhaps we just caught up as they moved it from one web page to another.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by turgid on Tuesday March 03 2020, @09:16PM (4 children)
I've been doing it since 1999 when it was in beta. I heard about it on a BBC Radio 4 programme and emailed them, and they let me know when it would be starting. I joined straight away. I still had a Pentium 100 in those days. Now I have an AMD Ryzen 7 amongst others, and I have a couple of nVidia GPUs in other machines working on it. I even donated cash to them once. I reckon the reason we haven't detected anything yet is because I haven't got around to inventing the warp drive.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday March 03 2020, @09:44PM
Lazy sod. Get on with it already.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 04 2020, @12:27AM
The galactic joke is on us - the Nurn of Gamma Leonis have limited information backward time transmission capacity, and when they detected Earth's thermonuclear explosions they directed all intelligent EM emissions this side of the central black hole to be stopped for a period of 286 Earth years starting with Sol arrival times in our calendar year of 1907. EM emissions were mostly anachronistic anyway and the intelligent starfaring species of the Milky Way happily complied, having long ago mastered the art of masking of their warp drive and other EM signatures in order to survive the 5 year purge/war (that's cosmic years ~1 billion Earth years) which ended just under one cosmic year ago. Assuming we make it to 2193 without self annihilating our technological capabilities, and that another galactic purge isn't attempted by the Andromedans,the Gaark of Gacrux are planning to start Earth's introduction to advanced technologies then.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday March 04 2020, @01:54AM
Alright, I can understand that. But, what about the ansible? You've been promising us the ansible for years now! Is it just vaporware?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Webweasel on Wednesday March 04 2020, @12:55PM
2003 for me. I ran a bunch of systems for a long time.
I must have been quite the contributor back in the day, not run it for at least 10 years, but my stats say:
141,756 out of 3,962,879
1,330,453 Cobblestones of computation (1.15 quintillion floating-point operations)
Priyom.org Number stations, Russian Military radio. "You are a bad, bad man. Do you have any other virtues?"-Runaway1956
(Score: 2) by Ken_g6 on Tuesday March 03 2020, @09:30PM (1 child)
...until the aliens wake up. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday March 04 2020, @03:19PM
They're just resting. But have beautiful plumage.
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(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 04 2020, @12:44AM (1 child)
They found a planet inhabited solely by democrats and made the following announcement... There is no intelligent life beyond Earth.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 04 2020, @02:26AM
Good thing they weren't looking at the White House.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday March 04 2020, @03:51AM (2 children)
Didn't the Aricebo radio telescope get damaged recently when a hurricane attacked Puerto Rico?
Can the SETI-at-home go on without its data feed?
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 04 2020, @01:45PM (1 child)
There are other antennas...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday March 04 2020, @03:20PM
I make antennas on my tin foil hats. Technically, aluminum foil.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 04 2020, @06:57AM (3 children)
Couple days ago. Is 100% a spacecraft. Is this some sort of reverse pavlovian fnord training shit going on?
anyway video...
https://kfiam640.iheart.com/content/2020-02-26-nasa-captures-footage-of-ufo-on-space-station-live-cam/ [iheart.com]
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday March 04 2020, @09:39AM (1 child)
Why does he assume that is 'must be US Air Force technology from Area 51"? Other nations have advanced technology and, if they have something that the US hasn't, they are hardly going to announce it to the world until they are ready. Alternatively, the fact that the crew don't discuss it might be because they knew it was coming.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 04 2020, @10:55AM
Yes I agree Russa or China, perhaps even French, Israeli or Japanese could well have secret advanced spaceflight capability. I am however a little doubtful as to this being such a craft. As for not talking about it I don't think you can infer much as this is standard operating procedure for a UFO. Report incident to superiors, don't talk about it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 04 2020, @07:48PM
Too bad the ISS doesn't have 8K resolution cameras.
(Score: 3, Informative) by damnbunni on Wednesday March 04 2020, @03:31PM
SETI's page has updated and reflects the article.
https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ [berkeley.edu]