The original site is down, but jump to November 5, 1999 to see the screenshot. https://web.archive.org/web/20030404093458/http://www.monzy....
For a long time I would periodically check on the screen saver in case there would be some big message saying my computer found aliens or something. Never did though :)
If you tried to submit it would spend a while with a really slow progress bar, and then say it failed to submit and asked you to contact SETI directly. I wonder if anyone actually did....
The truth is still out there.
Anyone else collect The X-Factor partworks magazine? I used to love reading it.
I'm not arguing a position on the theory, just saying it's very active and has the old-school qualities that were present in the 90's.
I'm quite surprised these are still around as I hadn't seen them mentioned in so long.
I always assumed the phase out of screensavers (and introduction of CPU low power modes) were terminal for them.
Some of these projects could occupy entire regions of cloud compute in some cases for awhile, some even more depending on the problem. But running that for even a short time or decades needed would cost more money than anyone has to do.
Academic HPCs existed long before cloud compute options and for certain problem spaces could also be used even in non-distributed memory cases to handle this stuff. But you still needed allocation time and sometimes even funding to use them, competing against other cases like drug design, cancer research, nuclear testing… whatever. So searching for ET could be crowdsourced and the cost distributed which is something that made it alluring and tractable.
https://foldingathome.org/2024/05/02/alphafold-opens-new-opp...
You can run on a spare Raspberry Pi. I remember doing that. Performance isn’t great but every little bit helps
> please have a look around before spreading FUD
Please don't turn HN into reddit.
Was it all for nothing?
So I wouldn’t say it was all for nothing, but it’s main benefit was the idea, and not the results it generated
Did it though?
Even humanity’s (weak) radio emissions would be detectable from tens of light years away, and stronger emissions from much further. So the idea that intelligent life is absolutely everywhere that was liberally tossed around a few decades ago is pretty much on life support now.
That's not true. Non-directional radio transmissions (e.g. TV, broadcast radio) would not be distinguishable from cosmic background radiation at more than a light year or two away [0]. Highly directional radio emissions (e.g. Arecibo message) an order of magnitude more powerful than the strongest transmitters on Earth would only be visible at approximately 1000 light years away [1], and would only be perceptible if the detector were perfectly aligned with the transmission at the exact time it arrived.
When you say perfectly aligned, what kind of precision are we talking about? If we aimed a receiver at a nearby star, would we be able to achieve this kind of precision?
Update: looks like there is a Wikipedia list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volunteer_computing_pr...
Would still be nice to know for the applicable ones if any success have come out of these or if they're just fun toys
You know of this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal
SETI at Home was a screensaver that was looking for signals like that via distributed searching and they didn't find anything (but they do have telescope time for tackling the 92 highest priority follow-up scans).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45077654
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43979537