SETI @ Home

March 18, 2003 9:53 AM

Nearly 4 years ago, Seti@Home projectstarted.Today, thanks to millions of CPU and loyal users, after picking 200 interesting signals out of a few billions, they have started rescanning the most interesting ones at Araceibo. One step closer to ET.
posted by elpapacito (7 comments total)

Computers are one of mankinds greatest developments and the first large scale computer project ever built is an Alien Probe.
posted by stbalbach at 10:36 AM on March 18, 2003

The BBC has a piece about this too. I've got my fingers crossed!

Somewhat oddly the BBC piece says that SETI researchers will be re-observing "about 150" candidates, and the Planetary society says it's "between 100 and 200". They start today, so you'd think they'd have a precise number.

By the way, is there a MeFi group of Seti@Home participants?
posted by Songdog at 12:01 PM on March 18, 2003

Not that I know of Songdog...I have a group that consists of just me under my addy [e-mail] if anyone wants to join.
posted by jmd82 at 12:13 PM on March 18, 2003

Nearly 4 years ago, I registered for the Seti@Home project. Last week I finally got off my lazy ass, managed to look up my account password, and fired up 3 machines at home to start running it.

I've gone from 0 work units (in all of 3-odd years, ha ha) up to 14 so far, steadily rising up among the bottom rankers of my chosen team.

feel sorta bad that I could have been churning out work units the entire time; then again not too long ago when they adjusted the work unit quanta, they managed to throw out a whole raftload of work units that a friend of mine had done while he was the admin of a rather large university lab in a rather large Massachusetts city, heh.
posted by dorian at 4:13 PM on March 18, 2003

Related threads here and here.
posted by jaronson at 4:49 PM on March 18, 2003

I did a lot of work at the beginning of SETI@home. I started the Yahoo club (which I can't even visit without a Yahoo ID anymore), helped optimise a lot of people's installations, found some great upgrades, but utimately fell so far behind in the processing stakes that I stopped running the client.

I started it up again about a week ago. What made it possible, believe it or not, was my purchase of an Apple iPod that now handles all my MP3 playback, taking quite a large load off my CPU and making it worth running the S@h client again.

Now I just need a PC that runs for more hours of the day...
posted by krisjohn at 5:16 PM on March 18, 2003

There are some comments about this at K5, too.
posted by tbc at 8:17 PM on March 18, 2003