[HN Gopher] SETI@home is in hiberation
___________________________________________________________________
SETI@home is in hiberation
Author : keepamovin
Score : 240 points
Date : 2026-01-21 09:49 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (setiathome.berkeley.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (setiathome.berkeley.edu)
| David_Osipov wrote:
| Wait, they have been in hibernation for almost several years, why
| to publish it now?
| keepamovin wrote:
| It just completed. Published paper. Final release & final
| analysis:
| https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ade5ab/...
| ramses0 wrote:
| TLDR of jve's AI comment:
|
| 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).
| leokennis wrote:
| I remember feeling like a right scientific benefactor running the
| SETI@Home screensaver on my Pentium II, looking at the fancy
| graphs.
|
| Was it all for nothing?
| Waterluvian wrote:
| It's all mostly all for nothing.
| keepamovin wrote:
| Well, except for Vogon poetry
| blitzar wrote:
| It's all mostly all for REDACTED
| keepamovin wrote:
| No, they just published two papers in 2025. You can watch a
| video about it or link to paper in my other comment on this
| thread: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt07R_amRT8
| p-e-w wrote:
| The fact that all SETI endeavors haven't really found anything
| is actually a very valuable result, because it constrains
| "they're everywhere, we just haven't been looking" arguments
| quite a bit.
|
| 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.
| netsharc wrote:
| Probably due to the Great Filter:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjtOGPJ0URM
| floxy wrote:
| or not:
|
| "Dissolving the Fermi Paradox":
| https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| >Even humanity's (weak) radio emissions would be detectable
| from tens of light years away, and stronger emissions from
| much further.
|
| 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.
|
| [0] https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/245562
|
| [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0610377.pdf
| isolli wrote:
| Thanks, these rules of thumb are very useful.
|
| 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?
| voidUpdate wrote:
| This is my biggest issues with all of the messages we keep
| sending out to space. By the time it gets to its
| destination, it will basically be indistinguishable from
| noise
| bluGill wrote:
| That depends. If there is "someone" within 20 light years
| advanced enough to detect our signals we can establish
| communication and learn from each other - the 40 year
| round trip time means we can only ask long term
| questions, but just sending all of human knowledge, and
| them returning with their knowledge can be a big leg up
| for both (though sorting through all the things we
| already know will be a big effort). They may have solved
| fusion, while we are still 50 years away, meanwhile we
| have solved something else they are interested in but
| haven't solved yet.
|
| 20 light years is about the farthest useful communication
| can be established. The farther out things are the longer
| the round trip and thus the more likely we have already
| figured things out by the time we get their answer. It
| would still be interesting to get a response, but our
| (and we assume their) civilization is moving too fast for
| much knowledge sharing. Eventually with knowledge sharing
| you assume something is obvious that isn't and so you get
| another round trip. Watching an alien movie no matter who
| far away they are will be interesting (even if it is more
| a smell based or something that we don't think of)
|
| There is no reason to think we will ever visit them, but
| we can do other things when they are close.
|
| There are not many stars within 20 light years though.
| The Femi paradox doesn't exist at that distance, there
| just not enough stars to expect to find life that close.
| Alex-Programs wrote:
| Is there a reason we would need to coordinate on what to
| exchange rather than, say, beginning with encyclopedias
| and textbooks then moving to a constant stream of notable
| papers, news, discoveries, etc? What kind of bandwidth
| can you hit with a cooperating neighbour where
| improvements become civilisationally important? How many
| bytes (megabytes? Terabytes?) of meaningful new data does
| humanity produce per second? I suspect it's reasonably
| low.
| bluGill wrote:
| Good question. My thought is similar to yours, but there
| is a lot of room for debate on what to send. They
| probably don't care about the roman empire like we do -
| but there are enough references in modern science that we
| need to send a summary just so they understand some
| things. We produce a lot of data, but most of it isn't
| meaningful.
|
| if this is a real situation I wouldn't be asked. So use
| salt
| gamer191 wrote:
| Well it led to the creation of BOINC, a distributed computing
| system that probably has led to scientific advances in other
| fields
|
| So I wouldn't say it was all for nothing, but it's main benefit
| was the idea, and not the results it generated
| andsoitis wrote:
| > system that probably has led to scientific advances in
| other fields
|
| Did it though?
| Izkata wrote:
| Except as a kid back then, the screensaver was trivial to
| install and neat to look at, and BOINC was a pain. I dropped
| it when they switched. I imagine some less-technical adults
| who were interested did as well.
| wongarsu wrote:
| (Re)search is still valuable, even if the result turns out to
| be negative.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| That's pretty dismissive outright; consider uh. All forms of
| distributed computing, from cloud computers to bittorrent to
| bitcoin / cryptocurrency. Seti@home was one of, if not the
| first distributed projects, the predecessor of cloud computing
| and spreading a workload over many computers, years before
| Hadoop and map/reduce became popular (which at least in my head
| was the start of "big data" and cloud computing).
|
| I won't claim it was "the" most important or it was critical in
| that, but it's not to be dismissed.
| reconnecting wrote:
| I feel sorry for every child who didn't have _SETI@home_ and _X-
| Files_ at the same time during their childhood.
|
| The truth is still out there.
| losthobbies wrote:
| When conspiracies were a bit more fun.
|
| Anyone else collect The X-Factor partworks magazine? I used to
| love reading it.
| x187463 wrote:
| Of all the current US conspiracy theories, the UFO/UAP
| conspiracy is still the most interesting and fully
| developed/ongoing conspiracy space. Just check out the recent
| 'Age of Disclosure' documentary from this year.
|
| 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.
| lagniappe wrote:
| It's not a conspiracy anymore
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| I'd really like to see it disclosed by a government that
| isn't panicking about epstein files/being impeached and
| trying to cover up other stories before I'm fully
| convinced
| pixl97 wrote:
| I mean this is a meta-conspiracy in itself. I don't think
| you're incorrect/wrong, but using one conspiracy theory
| to hide a conspiracy with lots of evidence is
| interesting.
| nephihaha wrote:
| I would be more interested in the former USSR or China,
| maybe Iran and Latin America. The Eastern Bloc must have
| covered up a lot of stuff but would have wild stories.
| RajT88 wrote:
| There's some genuinely weird shit unexplained, I'll give
| you that. Unlike Bigfoot, where you can look at a map of
| the historical range of bears and see it exactly matches
| where all the Bigfoot sightings are.
| nephihaha wrote:
| People claim to see Bigfoot creatures in the Mississippi
| Delta and Florida... Even Scotland. None of these are
| much noted for their bears.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| > the Mississippi Delta and Florida... Even Scotland.
| None of these are much noted for their bears.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_black_bear
|
| The US South has bears.
| RajT88 wrote:
| There are some outliers (like Hawaii, or the 2 sightings
| in my local forest preserve) which cannot be bears, but
| what you will find is there is way more bear populations
| wandering around than you realize.
|
| The trend is pretty clear.
| nephihaha wrote:
| People claim to see these things in Australia and New
| Zealand. Not many bears round there. I don't count koalas
| in Oz as bears.
| Bratmon wrote:
| I dunno. I think the fact that these sightings are always
| from sleep deprived individuals describing things at the
| far end of their range of detection (whether that's 5
| miles away with the Mk 1 eyeball or 500 miles away with
| classified superradar) suggests a pretty clear pattern.
| RajT88 wrote:
| It probably is both. Up for debate the ratio.
| steve1977 wrote:
| IMHO, the whole social/psychological aspect of the
| "conspiracy" or phenomenom or whatever you want to call it
| is at least as interesting as the phenomenon itself.
| nephihaha wrote:
| Pilots from the Eastern Bloc and NATO countries have had
| sightings. It's not just a US thing. People have been
| claiming to see them for longer than the USA has existed.
| scottLobster wrote:
| Not to be that guy, but if the majority of sightings
| coming from nations capable of producing advanced
| military aircraft... well perhaps the aliens thought the
| F-15 was badass and wanted a closer look?
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| You know when you pass a nice classic car reeeeally
| slowly so you can get a good look? Aw yeah, don't see
| many of those, do you?
| nephihaha wrote:
| US sightings get publicised best due to the nature of
| international media (wide distribution of US films, TV
| and books)... But there certainly are other places
| claiming to see them. There are a lot of supposed
| sightings in Chile for example, which doesn't have a huge
| air force.
| ckozlowski wrote:
| Oh, I feel this. As a pre-teen, I loved it. SETI@Home running
| on our family's Pentium 100, X-Files, and hanging out on the
| "Parascope" forum and chatroom on AOL for all things UFO
| related. An "I Want To Believe" poster on my wall.
|
| I've (thankfully) moved on past that, but I look back at that
| with nostalgia.
| scottLobster wrote:
| Same here, you either move past it or go crazy, if the UFO
| subreddits are any indication. Given the population was
| already obsessed with blurry clumps of pixels in short video
| clips, AI is going to send a lot of those people into
| trailers in the desert with a lifetime supply of aluminum
| foil.
|
| And now that we have mass-produced hyper-maneuverable quad-
| copter drones, the whole "it moved backward in a way that no
| aircraft ever could!" doesn't really hit as hard.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| My current UFO conspiracy brain is that the UAP makers want
| Greenland as their home, and the US wants to get the
| benefits of that. Because that would be less crazy to me
| than what it's really about.
| nooflare wrote:
| This is probably the reason | except the UAP makers are
| now us
| nkrisc wrote:
| This was my screensaver for several years starting in maybe 2001.
| It felt really cool as a 12 year old to be contributing to the
| project in some small way.
|
| 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 :)
| entuno wrote:
| I remember seeing a prank program years ago that showed the
| SETI@home screensaver for a bit, then popped up an alert box
| saying "Alien Life Found!" with options to submit or cancel(!).
|
| 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....
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| I wonder if that screensaver ever made it into the
| Xscreensaver BSOD screensaver. I hope so.
| world2vec wrote:
| It was my screensaver too and it felt like the most sci-fi
| thing ever. I'd stare it while daydreaming about aliens.
| rtkwe wrote:
| My dad did a similar thing with a bunch of computers at his
| store. It made way more sense back when processors didn't clock
| down efficiently so there was such a thing as 'wasted/excess
| clock cycles' you could donate to a distributed computing
| project. Now though processors shut off cores, reduce their
| clock speed etc so there's a lot less spare processing power
| you can siphon off without increasing power draw.
| catigula wrote:
| People were doing this as a donation, not because they
| perceived it to be free.
| rtkwe wrote:
| True but it was much cheaper when a computer you might have
| on for other reasons wouldn't consume noticeably more power
| for your donation, eg computer lab admins which I think
| made up some of the top contenders of the leader boards.
| There were definitely groups that would run clusters of
| computers just for the donation (my dad was one of those
| too, there was no other reason to run those PCs other than
| Seti@Home) but for the average home user it was spare
| cycles that were low cost to free.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| I am here to inform you that people were doing this for a
| variety of reasons, and one of those absolutely was because
| the cycles were free and going to waste.
| Perepiska wrote:
| Wow! My screensaver was some guy's project to invent running
| and walking creatures from leverages and wheels via genetic
| algorithms. I can't remember project name neither .edu domain
| connected to it.
| compounding_it wrote:
| The 14 year old me wondering if aliens were being discovered on
| my pentium 4 feels like the answer maybe out there. BOINC and
| SETI.
| jomohke wrote:
| It looks like folding@home is still going
| https://foldingathome.org/
|
| 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.
| viraptor wrote:
| Are they doing anything not covered by alphafold? I thought
| that approach basically crushed all previous efforts.
| cess11 wrote:
| Here's their take on it:
|
| https://foldingathome.org/2024/05/02/alphafold-opens-new-
| opp...
| firesteelrain wrote:
| I forgot all about this project - thanks for the reminder!
|
| You can run on a spare Raspberry Pi. I remember doing that.
| Performance isn't great but every little bit helps
|
| https://downey.io/blog/folding-at-home-raspberry-pi-arm/
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| Does it? I stopped doing @home projects because I started
| never finishing a unit for credit under BOINC.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| I have Pi4B 2GB, Pi4B 4GB, and Pi400 folding full time with
| reasonable success. You need to use the 64-bit OS.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| How many papers have been published as a result of this, and
| more pertinently, how many "real" things are now being made or
| used based on that? I'm hoping it's not all just perpetual
| "regrowing teeth" territory where nothing ever comes from it.
| gnramires wrote:
| This is extremely far from any of my expertises, but I'll
| offer an answer while no one else did (please correct me!).
| Basically, all medicine (i.e. drugs) we have are proteins or
| certain compounds that fit within some of our cell's (or
| viruses) molecules and does funny stuff to them, like
| disabling certain parts, acting as a signal to regulate
| behavior, and so on. Doing funny stuff is basically about
| fitting into another molecule. So research about how proteins
| (most molecules (after water) in our body, I guess) interact
| is incredibly important in basically all medicine, specially
| in the discovery of medicine (like suggesting compounds
| (drug) that could fit in certain receptors or perform certain
| function), and understanding disease/pathologies (which give
| ideas on how to prevent and treat them).
|
| If folding@home helps to understand and model this behavior
| of molecules (which I guess tends to be difficult and
| unreliable to do without the aid of computers), it is
| extremely helpful. Now I don't know other details like,
| perhaps molecular biology is the bottleneck and there is
| scant available molecules to analyze (reducing its
| impact/marginal sensitivity), or perhaps compute really is a
| bottleneck in this particular problem. But nonetheless it
| seems like a great project for which contributions do make a
| difference.
|
| (Note: although, that said, if you were expecting something
| like 'compute->miracle drug comes out', I believe that's not
| quite how it works; research in general rarely works that
| way, I think because the constraint space and problem space
| that would require this approach is too large and
| complicated; and in fact I believe many if not most
| significant discoveries have resulted from playing around and
| investigating random molecules, often from (nonhuman)
| animals, plants and bacteria[1]; although molecular sciences
| (molecular biology) seem to enable a slightly more
| methodological approach)
|
| [1] The GLP-1 based weight loss drugs for example came from
| investigating the Gila monster lizard venom
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLP-1_receptor_agonist#History
| Bratmon wrote:
| Wow, 333 words without even attempting to address the
| question. Have you considered a career in PR?
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| Do you think they used an AI or something? Seems to be
| answering a question I didn't even ask. The strange
| performative replies I've had to my question makes me
| more suspicious about folding@home.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I would've thought that with the advent of general purpose
| GPUs, cloud computing, etc that they would've run out of work
| by now.
| Frost1x wrote:
| I think you're missing the main limiting resource: money.
|
| 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.
|
| I used to run a small academic cluster that was underutilized
| but essentially fully paid for. I'd often put some of these
| projects running as background throttled processes outside
| scheduler space so the 90% of the time no one was using them,
| the hardware would at least be doing some useful scientific
| research since it's after-all funded largely from federal
| scientific research funding. There was of course some bias
| introduced by which projects I chose to support whereas
| someone else may have made a more equitable choice.
| komali2 wrote:
| Folding@home got a boost recently from Pewdipie deploying his
| 12-stack 4090 build against it and then getting a bunch of his
| fanbase to also participate in his folding@home squad.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| World Community Grid at https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/ is
| also running, though it has had struggles since moving
| datacenters, and it seems their external stats are _still_ out
| of commission.
|
| I've recently decided to end my own participation, mainly
| because I've run three systems into the ground, and we're now
| in the "save what you can" era. There's one motherboard I want
| to get refurbished, since it became unstable when idle but
| loved 24x7 crunching. It would make a great NAS if I could find
| some DDR4 at a price I could stomach, or I could lay it in as a
| spare if the new motherboard goes south in the future.
| ckozlowski wrote:
| They saw a huge uptick in users during the COVID pandemic. As
| the corona virus is a protein shell, and their software folds
| protein molecules, they were able to apply it to look for
| targets for other molecules to attach to the virus where it
| would normally latch onto a cell, this could then lead to
| treatments.
|
| They'd found some promising results, and were working with a
| pharmaceutical company to manufacture the first compounds that
| could then be tested. Unfortunately that company's facility was
| located in eastern Ukraine. =(
|
| But that aside, they've still been going strong.
| vzaliva wrote:
| I could not find mentions of any Ukraine-based company
| working with them. Do you have more info?
| gambiting wrote:
| I have several machines contributing to it all the time, and
| every now and then I run it on my 5090 at home to heat up my
| room a bit in winter :D It does an incredible 1M points per
| day, it's a monster of a GPU.
| Frotag wrote:
| Some sites are using *@home as a cdn.
| logicallee wrote:
| Contributing resources to a scientific experiment aligns
| contributions with outcomes, since getting a hit is knowledge
| that everyone benefits from: the result (including a negative
| result) is in the public domain and benefits everyone to know. In
| this case, the result is that after 20 years of distributed
| search, no plausible ET signal was found and verified. That's
| good to know!
| dnel wrote:
| I rebuilt my PII system last year and really wanted to run SAH on
| it for old time's sake but sadly that hasn't been possible for a
| long time. I miss watching that old screensaver and optimising
| the system performance so I could get through a WU in less time,
| iirc at the time it took about 18 hours each.
| gvurrdon wrote:
| Years ago I worked for another BOINC project,
| climateprediction.net and I'm pleased to see that they are still
| operating (see: https://main.cpdn.org/). IIRC SETI@Home was well-
| known back then - I'd always mention it if people asked what I
| did, and they usually recognised it.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Is there any other alien searching distribution screensaver? It
| was really interesting watching it do FFT back in the day.
| sgt wrote:
| Used to have this running on all of our computers in the office
| back in 1999, or 2000. Such a satisfying screensaver! Then I went
| even further and put it on the servers too.
| b3lvedere wrote:
| If i remember correctly, back then even some sysadmins were
| even fired over it because of the usage of resources. It also
| sprouted some weird projects on how to distribute all those
| unused cpu cycles for other things.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| And yet, distributed computing only became huge when people
| could earn / generate money off of it. Seti / Folding walked
| so that bitcoin could run?
| b3lvedere wrote:
| I can't really condemn people trying to earn money with
| their cpu cycles, but good causes sometimes still exist.
| scottLobster wrote:
| Yeah I remember a few projects attempting "grid computing",
| where the idea was distributing application threads across
| CPUs over freaking ethernet.
|
| Have to say that would be a fun puzzle to try and optimize
| for, but network latency would always be a hard physical
| constraint no matter how fast. Maybe some niche use cases,
| but then multi-core CPUs and GPU processing really took off
| and I guess it just got even less useful.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| mods: typo in title (hiberNation)
| MrGilbert wrote:
| It could be [sic] added to it, as the source has the same typo.
| floxy wrote:
| I'm beginning to wonder if typos, missing words, and other
| grammatical error in titles is an accidental thing, or if
| someone has discovered that it gets more "engagement".
| kyleblarson wrote:
| My first internship was at DEC / Compaq in 2000. I was on their C
| compiler team and my project was to build seti tools with their
| updated Alpha Linux C compiler and compare perf against the tools
| built with the GNU C compiler. It was a fun project.
| philipallstar wrote:
| That is very fun.
| turbocon wrote:
| Any other worthwhile projects to donate cpu time to? I see
| Folding@Home is still going.
|
| 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
| janandonly wrote:
| I don't believe extra terrestrial life will contact us through
| effort or negligence via radio. To help proof this I've run the
| SETI@HOME screensaver for years.
| jasonhong wrote:
| Wanted to share this funny SETI@home prank that Monzy
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Maynes-Aminzade) did in 1999,
| where he created a fake VB app that tricked a coworker into
| believing that his computer successfully found an
| extraterrestrial signal.
|
| The original site is down, but jump to November 5, 1999 to see
| the screenshot.
| https://web.archive.org/web/20030404093458/http://www.monzy....
| jjordan wrote:
| Sigh. I miss websites like this.
| duxup wrote:
| Small personal web is best web.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Yishan Wong jumpscare
| pjmlp wrote:
| Oh, I used to run it during the early 2000's.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| I remember at the time that donating CPU time was considered
| trivial. Not so much today.
|
| At the time of SETI@home, a typical CPU used maybe 20W at full
| load, fans usually ran at constant speed, and power management
| was much more primitive. So you barely noticed the difference
| between idle and full load, both on your electricity bill and on
| the noise the PC made.
|
| Now hundreds of watts is not uncommon if you also use the GPU,
| and people are much more conscious about how much power computers
| use. And at full power, fans spin up loudly, laptops get
| uncomfortably hot, etc... It means you are not going to do it as
| easily. It probably didn't help the "@home" projects.
| thunderfork wrote:
| I generally run BOINC during the winter in place of a space
| heater, but that's only a cold month or two of the year.
| organsnyder wrote:
| My homelab is in a closet that has the water meter for my
| above-garage apartment. Before I put a heater in the garage
| itself, I needed to make sure that that closet didn't freeze. I
| rigged up a temperature sensor to start mprime on a server if
| the temperature got too low, but higher than the electric
| heater that's also in that closet. I figured I might as well
| contribute to research if I'm just burning watts for heat
| anyways.
| ragebol wrote:
| Where can I buy a compute-for-heat home system?
|
| Edit: I have a heat pump, which is more efficient for heating
| of course
| speedgoose wrote:
| You might prefer a heat pump.
| ragebol wrote:
| I do and have one actually. I have no idea if a kWh of
| compute could be worth more than eg. a kWh/(heat pump
| COP) though. Probably not...
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| My understanding is that for most residential heat pumps,
| the temperature needed to make the heat pump less
| efficient than resistive heating is so low that it enters
| a range that the pump doesn't even work anymore.
|
| However, that's only a measure of _efficiency_. It could
| still be that the throughput isn 't enough. A 30 kW
| resistive heater can ALWAYS output 30 kW of heat. But my
| 7 kW heat pump could produce anywhere from 14 to 30 kW
| depending on outside temperature.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Does that mean the heat pump gets less efficient as the
| outside warms? Because that would be fine. 7kW to make
| you home a constant temperature seems wonderful.
| kelnos wrote:
| No, they get less efficient as the outside gets colder.
| mh- wrote:
| A late model Intel MacBook from eBay and pretty much any
| Electron app from 2020 should do it.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| I remember some startups trying to install cryptominers in
| people homes, the idea was to use the electricity that
| would be spent heating the space anyways. The company would
| pay for the mining hardware while the customer would
| provide the electricity, and the profits would be shared.
|
| I don't know how it worked out, but the idea was there.
| cloud-oak wrote:
| I know of this one [1], a 1000W space heater with
| integrated cryptominer. Looks kike you can actually buy
| it now. Not sure how much the mined crypto offsets the
| heating costs though.
|
| [1] https://21energy.com/products/ofen-2
| bookofjoe wrote:
| hiberation
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| Tastier rations I guess.
| theLegionWithin wrote:
| wow. I didn't expect that to ever happen. one of the first
| crowdsourcing platforms...
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| Raise your hand if you read the title as "... in hiberNation"!
|
| :)
|
| Wasnt this the original wording?
| sizzzzlerz wrote:
| I started running SETI back in 1999 when it first came out. I ran
| it on both my personal machines and even had it running on
| several servers I controlled at work. I probably ran it for
| several years before losing interest, pulling it off of
| everything. I guess I am a bit surprised to learn it was still
| running. It was quite unique back in the day. I wonder how many
| years of CPU time were burned running this thing.
| js-j wrote:
| they never found any extraterrestials. And they never will...
| johnplatte wrote:
| This happened in March 2020.
| https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=85267
| dark-star wrote:
| What is hiberation? First I thought it was a typo, but it's on
| the website in the same spelling too. I couldn't find it in my
| dictionary
| ratelimitsteve wrote:
| https://foldingathome.org/
|
| there's always folding@home if you like contributing idle cycles
| to projects like this. it's not quite alien hunting but it's
| kinda neat to try to brute force protein structures to beat
| various diseases.
| Manuel_TPC wrote:
| Oh man, SETI@home! That takes me back. That screensaver was a
| total vibe--my little gateway drug to distributed computing. It
| was wild feeling like my humble PC was out there, just a small
| cog in this massive cosmic search party. The thought that it
| might, against all odds, stumble on "the signal"... that was the
| magic of it. That specific kind of hopeful, nerdy optimism of the
| early 2000s is hard to find now.
|
| You hit the nail on the head about missing projects like that. It
| wasn't just about the science; it was about the story, the shared
| dream. You felt like you were part of the crew on the starship,
| even if you were just scrubbing the decks. Modern BOINC projects
| are awesome, but they don't quite have that same "Holy cow, we're
| listening for E.T.!" mainstream charm. It was our generation's
| version of a barn raising, but for the galaxy.
|
| Thanks for the nostalgia trip, my dude. Here's hoping the aliens
| are just shy and on dial-up.
| f_allwein wrote:
| on the other hand, WETI still seems to be up, so you could
| contribute there.
|
| http://weti-institute.org/
| CommieBobDole wrote:
| Apparently they are not completely finished with the project -
| according to this article from five days ago, there are still
| some signal candidates currently in the process of being re-
| observed with the FAST radio telescope.
|
| https://www.space.com/space-exploration/search-for-life/this...
| skrrtww wrote:
| Does anyone have a mirror of the old Mac SETI client?
| setiathome_mac_3_08.hqx? I'd like to see if I can get it running
| again on my old iMac. Either the OS 9 or the early OS X one would
| work.
|
| I checked the wayback machine and the download pages are still
| findable, but the client downloads are all FTP links and don't
| seem retrievable.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Recently:
|
| _SETI Home Flags 100 Signals After Sorting 12B Others_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46642414
| arkj wrote:
| What we need next is SAGI@home, a distributed computing platform
| for finding free and open weights that leads to AGI.
| msarrel wrote:
| I used to work in a lab and we set up all 256 machines with the
| screensaver for when they weren't running tasks. It was fun to
| walk though there and think we were "helping".
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| RIP SETI@home!!!
|
| I remember setting up SETI on my first computer on dial-up when I
| was 17 years old! It was such an exciting thing to participate
| in!
| unixhero wrote:
| There was another launched aroums the same time as Seti@Home and
| before Folsing@Home. It was called IBM Grid.org [0]. It did the
| same as Seti@Home, but researched cancer.
|
| Here [1] is a list of all active community computation projects
| and historical ones.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volunteer_computing_pr...
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid.org
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