Nerd status: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence [SETI@home]

SETI@home is a program you can install on your computer which replaces whatever current screensaver you have. When the screensaver runs, it helps analyze data collected by The Search for Extraterrestrial Life.

A brief explanation of how SETI@home works:

The Problem — Mountains of Data

 

Most of the SETI programs in existence today, including those at UC Berkeley build large computers that analyze that data from the telescope in real time. None of these computers look very deeply at the data for weak signals nor do they look for a large class of signal types (which we'll discuss further on...) The reason for this is because they are limited by the amount of computer power available for data analysis. To tease out the weakest signals, a great amount of computer power is necessary. It would take a monstrous supercomputer to get the job done. SETI programs could never afford to build or buy that computing power. There is a trade-off that they can make. Rather than a huge computer to do the job, they could use a smaller computer but just take longer to do it. But then there would be lots of data piling up. What if they used LOTS of small computers, all working simultaneously on different parts of the analysis? Where can the SETI team possibly find thousands of computers they'd need to analyze the data continuously streaming from Arecibo?

 

The UC Berkeley SETI team has discovered that there are already thousands of computers that might be available for use. Most of these computers sit around most of the time with toasters flying across their screens accomplishing absolutely nothing and wasting electricity to boot. This is where SETI@home (and you!) come into the picture. The SETI@home project hopes to convince you to allow us to borrow your computer when you aren't using it and to help us "…search out new life and new civilizations." We'll do this with a screen saver that can go get a chunk of data from us over the internet, analyze that data, and then report the results back to us. When you need your computer back, our screen saver instantly gets out of the way and only continues it's analysis when you are finished with your work.

 

It's an interesting and difficult task. There's so much data to analyze that it seems impossible! Fortunately, the data analysis task can be easily broken up into little pieces that can all be worked on separately and in parallel. None of the pieces depends on the other pieces. Also, there is only a finite amount of sky that can be seen from Arecibo. In the next two years the entire sky as seen from the telescope will be scanned three times. We feel that this will be enough for this project. By the time we've looked at the sky three times, there will be new telescopes, new experiments, and new approaches to SETI. We hope that you will be able to participate in them too!

Links

• You can read more about the overall process here.
  
• Learn about SETI@home in general here.
  
• What would an alien signal look like?

I just downloaded it last week and it's only run a little bit. But it's cool. So download it and be nerdish.

We should make a 12oz Seti @home team...

Join the 12oz Seti Team

is this for real? or just for entertainment?

Didnt some college make a big ol' deal (Like hacking

and computer conspiracy charges and what not)

out of this when one of the professor's replaced

the screensavers with these?

I remember hearing about this...yeehaw.

Originally posted by sarcasm

is this for real? or just for entertainment?

Naw, it's for real.

Guess where the #1 Blingmaster radiotelescope dish used for this venture is located?

Wordemup 2

didnt arcel make a similar thread about a month ago? except it was like a screen saver? i dunno......anyways.

i used to have this on my old powerbook.

I will link other distributed computing applications to this thread at a later date. My bro's over right now and he's sleeping...

Blump.

Originally posted by Poop Man Bob

Naw, it's for real.

damn if this is for real, thats fuckin crazy...

i downloaded it on my comp, i don't understand a thing it doing...

just a whole bunch of graphs and data.... but that'd be some crazy shit if

i actually found some sort of outer space intelligence on my home pc...

haha before i would know it, it's independence day at my house, with

will smith running around trying to save the world....

Distributed computing supercomputers. The poor mans supercomputer:

http://www.top500.org/

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, when finished in 2007, will employ distributed computing to find the Higgs boson (aka: the God particle). It won't be available to ordinary users such as ourselves, but the principle is there.

Stuff.

Originally posted by Dirty_habiT

We should make a 12oz Seti @home team...

 

 

Join the 12oz Seti Team

tried to join but i got a 404, will try later

one of my old physics professors used to run this on his entire computer lab. my dad used to run this as well...

Originally posted by El Mamerro

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, when finished in 2007, will employ distributed computing to find the Higgs boson (aka: the God particle). It won't be available to ordinary users such as ourselves, but the principle is there.

 

Stuff.

We love smashing atoms in our deconstructive scientific methods. What about watching them form? I really don't know a whole lot about quantum physics but this is the logical conclusion of my mind not being entrenched in the paradigms of this field.

???

I don't think I understand your question. Atoms don't get built from scratch.

yo yo yo dun, it be like E=MC little two, n shit. like yo, check it. energy BE matter. and matter BE energy. like, i be wastin' all my energy on this shit that don't matter. yaheardme?

villian

the closest i can think of anything that might come close to what u would like to see, are these things called virtual particles. it being quantum physics they are quite weird. needless to say, their names describe what they are. they pop in and out of existence at times of singularities. they actually fit quite well into multiverse theory, and help contribute to the notion that all universes are formed form a singularity in another universe. really neat stuff. they also are part of this theory called zero point energy. its basically harnessing the virtual particles power for convertable energy. anywho, the prollem with what u would like to do, is that u cant per se form an atom, aside from the fact that the way we see atoms infact is destructive. atoms themselves come from destruction. all atoms and elements that exist today came from extrememly heavy base elements that existed around the time of the big bang. as with all atoms they decay to smaller atoms, just as uranium, and other more mainstream naturally radioactive elements. anywho just thought id contribute and help settle that for ya.

Originally posted by dosoner

tried to join but i got a 404

same here

the last few posts in here make it clear i am a completely fucking

out of touch with these things. god particle?

maybe about 5yrs ago i regularly read scientific american and

discover..but not anymore..

no worries browner...only reason i stay up on this is cus im gonna be a physics major when i start college next year. well physics and philosophy. if anyone has any great reads on quantum theory, lemme know.

iquit

ha, i didnt even read ur post. but in a strange way it makes good sense. conservation of mass and all. anywho only thing though is that u can induce a new atom by shootin other particles into it, thus the last part of the lanthanide serious in the periodic table, so i i think to some extent "creating an atom" is possible, but agreed not in the respect of creating it from nothing.

Originally posted by BROWNer

the last few posts in here make it clear i am a completely fucking

out of touch with these things. god particle?

From the article:

"Specifically, the Higgs boson, the most elusive speck of matter in the universe. Often called the God particle, it's supposed to be the key to explaining why matter has mass. Physicists believe that Higgs particles generate a kind of soupy ether through which other particles move, picking up drag that translates into mass on the macroscopic scale. The Higgs is the cornerstone of 21st-century physics; it simply has to be there, otherwise the standard model of the universe collapses."

And villain, I believe this sentence from shape says all you need to know:

Originally posted by shape1369

aside from the fact that the way we see atoms infact is destructive, atoms themselves come from destruction.

Re: villian

Originally posted by shape1369

the closest i can think of anything that might come close to what u would like to see, are these things called virtual particles. it being quantum physics they are quite weird. needless to say, their names describe what they are. they pop in and out of existence at times of singularities. they actually fit quite well into multiverse theory, and help contribute to the notion that all universes are formed form a singularity in another universe. really neat stuff. they also are part of this theory called zero point energy. its basically harnessing the virtual particles power for convertable energy. anywho, the prollem with what u would like to do, is that u cant per se form an atom, aside from the fact that the way we see atoms infact is destructive. atoms themselves come from destruction. all atoms and elements that exist today came from extrememly heavy base elements that existed around the time of the big bang. as with all atoms they decay to smaller atoms, just as uranium, and other more mainstream naturally radioactive elements. anywho just thought id contribute and help settle that for ya.

Ok thanks for trying to clear that up. All I know is that quantum physics is way funky an shit. So what you're saying is that once upon a time this pangaea of the universe was made up of the densest matter in the universe and it just got bigger and more dense and then the gravity became so great at the center it became a fusion reactor and blew the shit out of everything and it went flying around creating an expanding universe and the shit has been steadily breaking apart making smaller more volatile and unstable atoms? Or maybe I have this all wrong but it's damn interesting.

I have heard of this multiverse theory before as well as parallel universes because the quantum level is sooo damn funky. What the heck.

yeah mams, bosons are tight stuff. so is mass, have u ever started thinkin about the relationship between space, time and temperature. of all things...? its reall interesting. think bout this, absolute zero right? every thing supposedly stops moving at this temperature that we know to be 0 K, well if everything stops moving, then wouldnt the bonds in an atom break, and even on the smaller scale of quarks and bosons and what not. this in turn kills matter, and the idea of distance. which is inherit to the measure of time. so if im right,a nd ive held this theory for a while, if one wants to "kill time" all one would have to do is bring a piece of matter to 0 K.

completely convoluted theory, but it sorta came to me on a ride home one night from dinner with my folks. needless to say, i think ima explore that idea more in college. lukcily the school im goin to next year puts u in research projects first year. so ima try and see what i can do with my theories

and mams, if u ever wanna talk physics hit me up on aim if u got it... aimbiteshard

*o and to villian, basically ur gist of it all is right, thats sort of the prevailing ideas right now. if u really wanna get into it. try researching M Theory, its the closest they have come to a grand unified theory yet.

Shape, ther's an old, old thread hanging around the archives on superstring theory, you might be interested in giving it a look and hopefully breathing new life into it.

I wish I could pull it up, but the search engine seems FUBAR'ed. I'll bump it or post a link if I find it.

man string theory...whew

string theory is so antiquated now. its actually be encompassed by all the new stuff. its so cool. the really funny thing that i find about it is that its all about their vibrations and whatnot that determine what they are. well pythagoras had this theory that everything made music, through their vibrations and that it was their vibrations that set them apart form everything else. ie, the musical orbs, or planets. well pythagoras was seemingly on to somethin even thuogh he was wrong. u get to watch that serious on pbs couple months ago called elegant universe?

guy who wrote the book hosted the show. i cant think of his name rigth now... brian somethin... either way he has a much better gift for explainin quantum in laymans terms then hawking does. but nothin will ever beat the tenth anniversary edition of brief history of time.

Originally posted by shape1369

think bout this, absolute zero right? every thing supposedly stops moving at this temperature that we know to be 0 K, well if everything stops moving, then wouldnt the bonds in an atom break, and even on the smaller scale of quarks and bosons and what not. this in turn kills matter, and the idea of distance.

Hmmm, well, I'm unsure if movement is a prerequisite for any of the forces to exist, even though the forces are based on the behavior of subparticles.

And even still, I'm not very sure the movement of the subparticles that make forces possible will react in any way to a drop in temperature... remember, heat is a result of relatively large-scale particle movement, I'm not sure it affects the very small scale stuff.

Yeah, you're talking about Brian Greene... I'd read "The Elegant Universe" about 4-5 years ago, I didn't catch the PBS special on it though (still bashing myself in the head for that one). I've been thinking about copping his new book that recently came out, though I hear it's a bit dumbed down.

But anyways, true, string theory is no longer where it's at... it's M-theory.