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Crypto-currency craze 'hinders search for alien life'
Scientists listening out for broadcasts by extra-terrestrials are struggling to get the computer hardware they need, thanks to the crypto-currency mining craze, a radio-astronomer has said.
Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) researchers want to expand operations at two observatories. However, they have found that key computer chips are in short supply. "We'd like to use the latest GPUs [graphics processing units]... and we can't get 'em," said Dan Werthimer.
Demand for GPUs has soared recently thanks to crypto-currency mining. "That's limiting our search for extra-terrestrials, to try to answer the question, 'Are we alone? Is there anybody out there?'," Dr Werthimer told the BBC.
[...] Other radio-astronomers have been affected. A group looking for evidence of the earliest stars in the universe was recently shocked to see that the cost of the GPUs it wanted had doubled.
[...] Prof [Aaron] Parsons' radio telescope, the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionisation Array (Hera), is an American, British and South African project located in South Africa's western plains. [...] Three months ago, the Hera team had budgeted for a set of GPUs that cost around $500 (£360) - the price has since doubled to $1,000.
"We'll be able to weather it but it is coming out of our contingency budget." added Prof Parsons. "We're buying a lot of these things, it's going to end up costing about $32,000 extra."
When the inevitable flood of cheap GPUs onto the market happens, will it be a boon to science?
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday February 15 2018, @06:28PM (6 children)
I'm all for detecting aliens, but SETI just seems to be a massive waste of time and resources to me. The whole thing is predicated on a huge assumption: that the aliens are intentionally beaming extremely strong, repeating radio signals into space so that we'll find them. However, *we* don't do this ourselves. So why should we expect other civilizations to do this? If aliens tried to detect us the way SETI does, they wouldn't find us: we use low-power radio for our communcations that's not detectable outside the solar system, and we don't generate signals that intentionally repeat, so anything they did see would look like noise. Maybe they'd get lucky and detect our transmissions to our handful of space probes, but that's about it. Plus, what makes us so sure aliens use radio anyway? They could very well use photonic technologies for space-based communications, or worse, something we've only dreamed of, such as neutrinos. It doesn't help that our antennas are all Earth-based, and subject to all kinds of radio noise from that. Maybe we could do better if we had some real space capability, and built antenna satellites which orbited in the outer system.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @07:23PM
There are no aliens.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday February 15 2018, @07:24PM
Photonic communications (lasers) could also be detected from afar, although that hardly detracts from your argument.
"Optical SETI" is where it's at. So long as the JWST and a successor or two launch without a hitch.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Bot on Thursday February 15 2018, @07:29PM
you are not sure you are the mightiest civilization around? then DO NOT advertise your position.
you are sure you are? then why advertise your position? go visit the peasants on weekends.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @07:50PM
maybe you could go through a couple of physics books before you start talking about this.
1. the frequencies SETI is looking at are the frequencies that we would use if we wanted to talk to people living around other stars. they are the frequencies for which most of the universe is transparent, while at the same time they are cheap to produce.
2. "photonic technologies"? grow up. any radio technology is, by construction, "photonic technology".
3. "we don't generate signals that intentionally repeat". go read the SETI website. they routinely detect human generated signals and classify them as "communication". they then figure out it's human because they know where satellites are etc.
4. neutrinos. again: grow up. neutrinos are hard to generate, and hard to detect. let's ignore that for now, and just talk about signal to noise ratios. supernovas are the only source of neutrinos that we can clearly detect with neutrino detectors. otherwise whatever neutrinos we do detect (one per month or something) are of unknown origin, i.e. noise. in fact, the universe is filled with neutrinos travelling in all possible directions at many different speeds, because neutrinos don't generally interact with anything. so, you will need to put in an enormous amount of energy when generating your neutrino signal, because the noise level is gigantic.
in more simple terms: go to a rock concert, and try to talk to your friend from 10 m away. that's probably easier to do than try to talk across star systems with neutrinos.
(Score: 2) by unauthorized on Thursday February 15 2018, @11:55PM (1 child)
Incorrect. SETI is not listening just for information radio signals, they are looking for distinctive radio patterns that suggest engineered origin. Many high energy processes emit all across the spectrum as a byproduct and can easily be detected by a project like SETI.
We are a mere K0.6-K0.8 civilization and the energy we have available is tiny. To a hypothetical K2 civilization, the total artificial energy our civilization uses 0.000000000004% of their energy budget. Such a civilization could afford energetic processes that we could't even begin to dream of - mass production of antimatter, engineering artificial blackholes, accelerating planetoid-sized objects to appreciable fractions of c, building Dyson spheres and even star lifting.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday February 16 2018, @05:08AM
Such a civilization could afford energetic processes that we could't even begin to dream of - mass production of antimatter, engineering artificial blackholes, accelerating planetoid-sized objects to appreciable fractions of c, building Dyson spheres and even star lifting.
And how many of these processes are going to create signals we can detect?
More importantly, why do we expect to find K2 civilizations? K1 and ~K0.5 ones like ours are probably much more common, and perhaps there's little real incentive for a civilization to try to build the technology necessary to harness an entire star's energy, rather than just living in artificial reality. Assuming there's a bunch of K2 civilizations out there, which is really almost godlike to us, and not even something most of our sci-fi speculates on, seems like a pretty silly thing to assume and base an entire research program on.