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Talk:SETI

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Someone with some more specific knowledge or good interest in gathering information should look into the early SETI work and how it's different from today's work. There was an earlier SETI project which looked at the stronger energies, but that has ceased partly, imo, because these bands are used for military applications. I've heard that those stronger bands would be far more useful to look into. <code> =/ </code> -- rack

Kindof annoying that there are offensive or blank / test names and groups littering this project. -- rack

Wonderful.. I received "join my team" spam after I signed up to SETI. -- rack

The future of SETI@home:

from: http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/setifuture.html

The current SETI@home search will wind down over the next year or so. However, we are working on new projects that will continue to use the computer power of millions of volunteers to further SETI and other scientific research. Our plans include the following:

BOINC - Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing

SETI@home southern hemisphere search

AstroPulse - astronomical pulse detection

and rack ,wanna join our team? :) -- mutante of s23.org

Ya know, I took a serious look at this sort of thing, and I even participated for a while. I've got a number of concerns which remain:

  • How can I trust the client software if I can't see it's source?
    • What proof is there that my client will be crunching information as advertised?
    • What proof do I have that the data my client sends is as advertised?
  • Why crunch numbers on my energy bill when I can throttle my cpu and save electricity and improve system lifespan instead?

Furthermore, specific to SETI.. they're banned from searching through certain channels/frequencies. These channels are used by the (USA) military. These channels are thought to be the most likely candidates for contact. It seems almost pointless that all this number crunching could be done for almost nothing.

Essentially, I'd want a cause which has some merit without being in existance for corporate profit. Something which is somewhat useful (ooh, calculating pi.. sigh) without being restrained like SETI is. Perhaps human genome work, but not searching for cancer cures (there are already solutions with good merit which are apparently purposely ignored).

I'd love to join a project which attempts to optimize variations of a compiled gcc or some such thing. That'd be cool.

-- rack

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