SETI @ Home Stopping Work

SETI@Home is going to switch from number crunching over to analysis of the data they've gotten from all the number crunching. Starting next month, no new work packets will be created. (No idea how long they will keep taking work that's already out there.)

https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=85267&sort_style=8&start=0

That thing has been going for 20 years!

Hopefully there are some hot tips on planets to colonize after we finish ruining this one.

Have they found even a peep yet? I guess not or it would be all over the news.

Never could understand the purpose of this project. Even if they find something USA government will classify it, dispose of everyone who knows anything about it to prevent another assange/manning/snowden cases and put a public note it was a misinterpreted signal from a meteorological baloon.

Why would the US gov want to suppress it at all?

What if nothing is out there? See the movie Ad Astra?

Capt. Huggy Face said:

What if nothing is out there? See the movie Ad Astra?

Click to expand...

Yepp. Personally I subscribe to the view (guess) that life is abundant in the universe, but intelligent life is rare. And that civilisations tend to be short lived.

Hug?

A pibbur who refers to intelligence in the strictly biological sense

I'm with you. That makes perfect sense to me. And it might be rare, but the universe is an awfully big place.

Edit: To expound a bit further, I suspect life is more tenacious than we currently think it is.

I believe in evolution, of course. I read a lengthy article in a science magazine some years ago about how scientists were revising their theories of how life was born on this planet. Rather than the purely slow progression of adaptation over time I read about in school, they were moving more toward a theory of a violent and brief period, in celestial terms, of storms and electrical activity that spurred life to crawl out of the primordial soup of our oceans.

More recently, I was watching a documentary about all the new discoveries we're making undersea, with the technological advances we're making with unmanned submersibles and cameras. So, there's this crack in the ocean floor somewhere crazy deep. Out of this crack flows some noxious gas straight from the Earth's core. Scientists had previously declared the gas anathema to all life, as it forces all oxygen out of the water it inhabits. Well, it turns out during one submersible trip, they find a new kind of corral clinging to this crack, feeding off that same gas. It's thriving, because all of we oxygen-dependent critters have died or gotten the hell out of Dodge.

Maybe more in your neck of the woods, Pib, we've seen how quickly and consistently new viruses are born in the sterile environments of hospitals. All of our efforts to control our environment might give rise to the very thing that kills us.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and life has a very consistent way of finding a way, especially if there is no competition nearby.

Capt. Huggy Face said:

I'm with you. That makes perfect sense to me. And it might be rare, but the universe is an awfully big place.

Click to expand...

Carl Sagan as a kid: Look at the sky dad, all those stars. There must be hundreds and hundreds of them.

On a serious note. Some astronomer said that maybe we're the only current civilisation in the Milky Way. Could be, if civilisations last only a couple of thousand years (before they destroy themselves or die for other reasons). After all, as a radio signal emitting society we're not much older than 100 years or so, and we're in deep trouble already. The galaxy is old. There may have been lots of civilizations in the past, and lots of them in the years to come, but not necessarily more than one or two at the same time. In the Milky Way.

I think (GUESS) that's too pesimistic. But it won't surprise me if we're the only current one in the 50 light year radius bubble of star systems which could have detected and responded in time to our radio signals.

But of course, current estimates are about 100-200 billion galaxies in the observable universe, each with 100-200 billion stars. So I would be very surprised if I learned that we're the only one in the entire universe.

a pibbur who still hopes there are ET's out there. Who will visit us. And who are friendly.

PS. According to Wikipedia "Some 52 stellar systems beyond our own, the Solar System, currently lie within 5.0 parsecs (16.3 light-years) of the Sun". If we assume that star systems are uniformly distributed where we are, there should be around 1500 star systems with in a 50 light year distance from us. DS,

EDIT: I saw you additional text (interesting) after posting this. I'll come back to you later with a comment or two.

It could well be that the whole "radio wave" era is only a few hundred years long before a civilization is likely to discover even better ways to communicate. Even if that's so, though, they've still managed to gather a ton of info that should be useful.

As for civs destroying themselves, I don't think there's any way to predict how often that happens. We've got nothing like a clue regarding the forms a civilization can actually take, never mind their long term chances of survival.

Zloth said:

It could well be that the whole "radio wave" era is only a few hundred years long before a civilization is likely to discover even better ways to communicate. Even if that's so, though, they've still managed to gather a ton of info that should be useful.

As for civs destroying themselves, I don't think there's any way to predict how often that happens. We've got nothing like a clue regarding the forms a civilization can actually take, never mind their long term chances of survival.

Click to expand...

We can at least set an upper bound on a civilization's lifetime (for non-space-faring civilizations), based on external extinction events (meteorites, super-volcanos, star goes super-nova, etc). There's probably numbers on that floating around somewhere.

We can't do any of such predictions as life on Earth doesn't necessarily have to be the same elsewhere.
In other words other civs might not be obsessed with mass murderers nor stupidly produce such leaders that are pulling them into oblivion. On the other hand they can be worse than us repeating the selfdestruction cycle every few earth years never reaching long distance communication technology breakthroughs.

Cacheperl said:

Why would the US gov want to suppress it at all?

Click to expand...

I don't have an answer why is US government doing anything. It's all beyond my logic. It's like asking why people have a capability to sing (okay, some). They have an ability to do something and they do it just because they can.

Capt. Huggy Face said:

What if nothing is out there? See the movie Ad Astra?

Click to expand...

Even if we're alone, that movie is a pointless rubbish. A waste of time and $. Not recommended.

joxer said:

I don't have an answer why is US government doing anything. It's all beyond my logic. It's like asking why people have a capability to sing (okay, some). They have an ability to do something and they do it just because they can.

Click to expand...

I don't think that "because they can" is enough. They won't suppress arbitrary information, because that would be overkill and actually beyond their capability. The alternative would be random selection of information to suppress, but that sounds kind of far fetched. They would at least have to have some vague motivation:

- Fears that it will upset religious zealots
- Fears that it may have economical impact in some form
- Aliens told them to do it
- ... ?

You don't need motivation in decision making. Or something else. All you need is power.
With that power should go some logic for every decision, but in case of potential extraterrestrial life there is absolutely no logic in decisions, at least my wild imagination cannot work the solution/reasoning.

Let's put that aside and concentrate on some actual example.
Why NASA refuses to explore Cydonia in more detail? Who decided that and why exactly?

You mean, to investigate whether "The face of Mars" is a natural areological formation vs. whether it is artificial?

If yes: Noone needs to exercise institutional power for that result. I'm sure there's some people who'd love to take a closer look, even if only to debunk any conspiracies.
But the suggestion alone would bring the risk of being associated with "questionable theories", and being ridiculed. In a sense, peer pressure is all it needs.

In this example, at least.

Obviously, many will have the genuine opinion that no further investigation is needed, being satisfied with the data we have.

Decisionmakers are not many.
Luckily, some other govs pracice actual logic. Per economy logic China for example decided the other side of the moon could be very interesting in potential helium-3 mining. Thus they ignored NASA's plans and sent probes of their own. If they find an alien (facilities?) there in the future, well, another bonus - more power to them.

Our society is not only communication based. We trade everything and that includes technology. If there is a technology to be salvaged and then used from an alien civilization, dead or alive somewhere, what would you do? Let it rot? Just talk about it as an anecdote then shift to analyzing metheorites? Pass it to worldwide enthusiasts as a public project without controlling it (SETI)?