The At-Home Analysis of SETI Data Is Ending (1 Viewer)

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Linda

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The idea of SETI always interested me, and after the movie, Contact, who does not see themselves on their car hood listening amongst the field of antennas!

After seeing that news bit about the program closing, I realized I did not know much about its beginnings. The hunt began, and as so many interesting ideas start, it was a conversation at a party.

The idea for SETI@Home originated at a cocktail party in Seattle, when computer scientist David Gedye asked a friend what it might take to excite the public about science. Could computers somehow do something similar to what the Apollo program had done? Gedye dreamed up the idea of “volunteer computing,” in which people gave up their hard drives for the greater good when those drives were idle, much like people give up their idle cars, for periods of time, to Turo (if Turo didn’t make money and also served the greater good). What might people volunteer to help with? His mind wandered to The X-Files, UFOs, hit headlines fronting the National Enquirer. People were so interested in all that. “It’s a slightly misguided interest, but still,” says David Anderson, Gedye’s graduate-school advisor at Berkeley. Interest is interest is interest, misguided or guided perfectly.
But Gedye wasn’t a SETI guy—he was a computer guy—so he didn’t know if or how a citizen-computing project would work. He got in touch with astronomer Woody Sullivan, who worked at the University of Washington in Seattle. Sullivan turned him over to Werthimer. And Gedye looped in Anderson. They had a quorum, of sorts.
Anderson, who worked in industry at the time, dedicated evenings to writing software that could take data from the Arecibo radio telescope, mother-bird it into digestible bits, send it to your desktop, command it to hunt for aliens, and then send the results back to the Berkeley home base. No small task.

As I read this story, I realize that many great, "out-there" ideas may pop-up, but it takes just the right mix of people and circumstances to bring them into practice. Also, I believe it takes an attitude of what people in the US call the wild-west, which means no rules. No way could this have worked within some kind of structured process. It took a few very smart people to see what might happen first.

The idea was that maybe a thousand people would sign up - nope, it was a million.

And yet, by May 17, 1999, they were up, and soon after, they were running. And those million people in this world were looking for not-people on other worlds.
One morning, early in the new millennium, the team came into the office and surveyed the record of what those million had done so far. In the previous 24 hours, the volunteers had done what would have taken a single desktop one thousand years to do. “Suppose you’re a scientist, and you have some idea, and it’s going to take 1,000 years,” says Anderson. “You’re going to discard it. But we did it.”
After being noses-down to their keyboards since the start, it was their first feeling of triumph. “It was really a battle for survival,” says Anderson. “We didn’t really have time to look up and realize what an amazing thing we were doing.”

Is the program over? No, but it will take on a different organization.

When the software stops pushing out new data to users at the end of March, the Berkeley SETI@home team will continue to work through the backlog of data generated by the program over the next few months. The team is small—there are only four full-time employees—and it has struggled to stay on top of managing the public-facing part of the SETI@home program while also publishing research on the data that has been collected. So far, the team has only been able to deeply analyze portions of the dataset. Getting a solid understanding of what it contains will require looking at all the data in aggregate.
“SETI@home volunteers only have access to 100 seconds of data from the telescope, so they can’t see this global picture over 20 years,” says Werthimer. “If you see an interesting signal in the sky, it needs to be there when you go back and look again. That’s what we’re going to be looking for.”

Remember I was saying it took a wild-west mentality - well, having an interested billionaire is pretty helpful, too.

In the meantime, Breakthrough Listen will be carrying the torch for massive public-facing SETI projects. Founded in 2015 with a $100 million donation from the Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, Breakthrough Listen is dedicated to collecting and analyzing massive amounts of radio data to search for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. Like SETI@home, Breakthrough is also being shepherded by the Berkeley SETI Research Center, but its data firehose would overwhelm a distributed computing program like SETI@home to search through it all. Instead, to parse through the data it uses massive banks of GPUs at the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia running advanced search algorithms.

Both articles are interesting and don't take too long to read.

For me, every night I go outside and look upwards.
 

Lila

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Fascinating.

Yes, all good things in my life seem to start at a party, on a beach or somesuch beautiful, relaxed setting. IMO meetings should be held while walking outside as a group as things always seem to move better when one is moving and has beauty to contemplate.

Meantime, yes, looking up each night (and day) brings wonders.
 
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dharmapee

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You hooked me right from the start here – Contact is one of my all time favourite movies (I watched it for probably the tenth time recently with my son; his first viewing, he loved it), and I was one of those first million back in the early 2000s who installed the @seti software. I kept it going for a few years – and then let it lapse. The reason I dropped it was that I slowly became more and more exposed to the serious research data out there on ET; and the more I learned, the more I realised that ET has been here all along – several versions in fact. I do not doubt the sincerity of the @seti developers and researchers, and much good has come from their approach to say the least, but they have been on the receiving end, like the rest of us, of centuries-long official gaslighting and control of the public narrative on this subject. The truth is much stranger than the public stories we’ve been fed (from flying saucers from Andromeda to mega-lightyear-gulf cosmic morse code conversations), and I suspect it will not be too much longer before much of this multi-generational secrecy begins to be exposed. When it is, our species will never be the same again. I still look upwards too at night though...
 

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