I'm sure it's been discussed here before, but I couldn't find it with a search. SETI is something I've always had an interest in, and I've often thought I'd download SETI@ home, but I never did. Has anyone else tried it? What were the consequences to computer performance (I know it'll mostly depend on the machine). I understand that you can limit SETI@ home's use of you computer in terms of time, bandwidth, processor capacity, etc. Any thoughts?
I've been running it since 2000. I think the premise is silly. I don't think ET is using the 21cm band just because we would. And either way, I don't really buy that ET is out there. That being said, there is real radio astronomy going on in the project and that's what I support them for. Also, they had the virtue of being first. Sure, I could use my PC time to cure cancer or solve cryptological keys, but my background is in astrophysics, so that's where my clock cycles go. And no, generally I have experienced little or no system degradation for running it.
I've been using it for about the same length of time and I've never noticed any computer system slowdown. Not even back when I started it on my Windows 95 machine in the late 1990s. You can have it run in the background all the time, or just when the screensaver is active. You can configure the internet connection options as well, although it never uses a lot of bandwidth as the packets are small - only a few hundred kb. There are lots of options for distributed computing programs - climate change, protein folding, etc. - but if SETI @ home is what interests you then I wouldn't let computer issues hold you back. -MEC
I'm another who's been running it for quite some time. I have it kick in when I'm not using the comp, so it's never gotten in the way.
My spare CPU cycles go to the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, mostly because SETI@HOME already has lots of volunteers. Most distributed computing groups are pretty careful to set things up to run in the background and not slow things down.
My computer doesn't do good with heat, but in the cold months I run Folding@Home. They've had a number of papers published and their research will one day lead to measurable, meaningful benefits for mankind. (Let's hope, anyway.) That's not something I can say with any confidence for a lot of other distributed projects. If you want to do something extravagantly useless, distributed.net is still doing RC5-72. The prize money got pulled, but they're still working on it, and at yesterday's rate will exhaust the keyspace in 1190 years.
I think there's plenty of intelligent life in the universe...they just think that Earth is too backwards and primitive and hence not worth contacting. I mean, if you were a super advanced intelligent alien race, would *you* want to talk to us?
Truthfully? No. I'd forbid others of my species to even visit earth, and make a quarantine area around the whole sector. -J.
Reminds me of something I read once - the shortest sci fi short story ever written. It was a report card filed about Earth by an alien race. The whole story was one letter: F.
I don't know about talk to us, I'd observe though. We're pretty resilient when it comes to things if you think about. We bounce back from a hell of a lot of things. Do we have our problems? Sure that's just how it goes. Another interesting reason to observe us is because maybe to some super advanced race, we offer some kind of insight into their own history or whatnot. That is of course assuming there are alien sociologists and historians out there. I'd also mess with us by sending signals we'd either A) not be capable of finding, or B) decipher as backround static. I'm sure if there are aliens out there sending their own signals into space, they'd make it so a society can't even detect it until they reach a certain lvl of evolution. But that's just me.
I used to run it until I realised that it wouldn't achieve anything. I'm not looking for a dc project to run. Something technology/space related.
It didn't occur to me that there were other distribution groups like SETI@ home. Where have I been? I agree SETI probably has plenty of volunteers now. I'll have to start researching other options.