Do we have any other former SETI@home users here?

I’m still bummed that the project stopped and for that matter that nothing really came of their analyzation phase. Nothing seems to have happened since they moth balled it…

I wasn’t the most active user by by far but I had tens of thousands of classic cpu hours and some millions od current score after close to 20 years of on and off participation.

Sure, there are other projects I could join but… there was something magical about SETI to me.

For those who never heard of the project:

https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/

You could donate spare cpu cycles to help analyze data from the Arecibo radio telescope to look for signs of artificial signals. You had it running in the background and as a screensaver if you wanted to see what you were analyzing.

I’m sure most of you have heard of it or similar distributed computing projects. There are plenty to choose from using BOINC (that S@h used) over at https://boinc.berkeley.edu/

https://foldingathome.org/ is one if the most known similar ones.

I just wanted to vent a bit.

I’m still struck now and then by the fact that they stopped the project and I get bummed out…

    •  interolivary   ( @interolivary@beehaw.org ) English
      5•1 year ago

      At least reading the wiki article it looks like the problem was more about funding, and that while losing Arecibo was unfortunate, they could have used data from any other telescope:

      However, in the overall long-term views held by many involved with the SETI project, any usable radio telescope could take over from Arecibo (which completely collapsed in December 2020), as all the SETI systems are portable and relocatable.

    •  nlm   ( @nlm@beehaw.org ) OPEnglish
      3•1 year ago

      No, they basically realized that they needed to actually do something with all the results people sent in. They had too much material for them to be able to handle any more so they figured they had to pull the breaks on it all.