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SETI@Home Search For Alien Life Project Shuts Down After 21 Years (bleepingcomputer.com) 85

Posted by BeauHD from the information-overload dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bleeping Computer: SETI@home has announced that they will no longer be distributing new work to clients starting on March 31st as they have enough data and want to focus on completing their back-end analysis of the data. SETI@home is a distributed computing project where volunteers contribute their CPU resources to analyze radio data from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico and the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).

Run by the Berkeley SETI Research Center since 1999, SETI@home has been a popular project where people from all over the world have been donating their CPU resources to process small chunks of data, or "jobs," for interesting radio transmissions or anomalies. This data is then sent back to the researchers for analysis. In an announcement posted yesterday, the project stated that they will no longer send data to SETI@home clients starting on March 31st, 2020 as they have reached a "point of diminishing returns" and have analyzed all the data that they need for now. Instead, they want to focus on analyzing the back-end results in order to publish a scientific paper. SETI@Home has a list of BOINC projects on their website for those interested in donating their CPU resources.
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SETI@Home Search For Alien Life Project Shuts Down After 21 Years More

SETI@Home Search For Alien Life Project Shuts Down After 21 Years

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  • with modern GPUs, it is probably cheaper to analyze the data locally than to send it over the internet for processing.

  • Wouldn't It Have Been Funny.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Vandil X ( 636030 ) on Wednesday March 04, 2020 @08:09AM (#59795772)
    ...if the project was already shut down behind-the-scenes, but they were using volunteer machines to mine for Bitcoins the last few years?
    • Who says they haven't?
      Anyway, if I was an ancient alien, I would have created a project to absorb the focus of the overly curious around the world to hide my existence. If not ancient aliens running SETI, then who?

    • Re:Wouldn't It Have Been Funny.... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Wednesday March 04, 2020 @08:42AM (#59795872) Homepage Journal

      Would be interesting to see how much research and useful knowledge has come out of this, compared to how much energy it has consumed and how much CO2 it has generated.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by aitikin ( 909209 )

        Would be interesting to see how much research and useful knowledge has come out of this, compared to how much energy it has consumed and how much CO2 it has generated.

        I doubt those last two parts can be properly quantified by the SETI team, but I would expect the scientific paper they alluded in the summary to answer the former.

      • Re:Wouldn't It Have Been Funny.... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Wednesday March 04, 2020 @09:42AM (#59795998) Journal

        AFAIK that distributed computing planet finder has done some quite good work, as has folding@home.

        SETI searches were always going to be a little more needle-in-haystacky, I fear, with the results more "a chance of something amazing" than slight incremental increases in knowledge with work contributed.

        *PERSONALLY* I've always believed the SETI listening thing to be nearly pointless, basing the work on too many anthropocentric assumptions.

        I believe firmly that it's a near certainty that there's other intelligent life out there. I just think that the odds are that they are vastly more advanced than we are that they're incomprehensible. If we're talking BILLION+ years of advancement differential, that's the difference between primitive multicellular life forms on earth...and us. Assuming those primitive eukaryotes had intelligence...in what possible context could they even conceive of humans, much less perceive them, or communicate with them?

        http://rithmomachia.blogspot.c... [blogspot.com]

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Kokuyo ( 549451 )

          This is not at all a field I am well-versed in but isn't the universe like 14 billion years old? I'm not saying the development of humans was particularly slow or quick, I wouldn't know and frankly without something to compare it against, the point seems rather moot.

          However, those 14B years include the formation of all matter. Considering that most development that occurs in nature seems to tend to follow an exponential curve, that would suggest that this alien species you're thinking of would have had to h

          • are you kidding me? a person from the far-gone days of 2019 would be dumbfounded if confronted with the world of 2020.

          • Our past 100 years pale compared to the preceding several hundred. It just seems so big because gadgets. Most of the big ideas that are the basis of the gadgets came in the preceding few centuries.

            When the trinkets crumble into trash this past century might seem like a regression.

            • Imagine the world today without the "discovery" of electricity by Alessandro Volta and the work of folks like Michael Faraday and all that resulted from it. We'd be heating our homes with wood, coal or oil (?) fires, lighting with candles, traveling with our feet, horses and maybe steam. Computations might be carried out by machines with a crank or water or steam powered mechanical devices. Communication would be created on paper and delivered by mail.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Kjella ( 173770 )

            Actually if you look at earth's history it got many mass extinctions that set evolution back for tens or hundreds of millions of years each. We just know that life has begun here, not whether this is a particularly good place to start. For all we know this might be a marginally habitable planet while other planets had a billion years of unbroken, rapid progression and did in a hundred million years what took us a billion.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by dpille ( 547949 )
              Speaking of anthropocentric assumptions, surely you realize nothing really "sets evolution back for tens or hundreds of millions of years."

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by cusco ( 717999 )

            The first six or eight billion years there hadn't been enough supernova explosions to build up the heavier elements that we need, IIRC the heaviest that standard solar fusion can make is lithium. Everything else is from multiple generations of supernovas and possibly neutron star collisions.

            Our sun condensed out of a cloud of dust containing enough heavy elements to make at least 4 rocky planets, and life appears in the fossil record just about as soon as it was possible to form. And then it stagnated at

            • > "We're made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself." - Carl Sagan The number of parameters that need to be just right to enable our existence is staggering. The universe exists for us to observe it. It may even exist because we observe it. Google biocentrism.

            • IIRC the heaviest that standard solar fusion can make is lithium.

              I think you are talking about "primordial nucelosynthesis", when the immediate post-Big Bang soup of nucleons formed a moderate amount (~25% nucleus count) of helium and a trace of lithium.

              Large stars - above a couple of solar masses - can form nuclei up to CNO-ish, but it is hard to get the stuff out again since you need to go up to about 6 or 8 solar masses to get a good supernova going, at which point you start spraying heavy nuclei back o

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by cusco ( 717999 )

                I had forgotten about white dwarf collisions, I don't think they've been observed yet, have they? Neutron star collisions have been, and the outputs detected seem to indicate large amounts of higher order elements being spewed out as a result.

                • I think you're right on that, at least as far as consensus goes. The last couple of decades have had quite a bit of chatter about supernovae with peculiar light curves, as part of the "cosmic distance ladder", and as it's corollary, the discovery of "dark energy", and I think the option has come up in some of those discussions, but not to the point of achieving a consensus. You've got a fair range of possible properties for WD-WD merger process and outcomes.

                  NS-NS mergers have been modelled and match well w

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Folding@Home or climate modelling seem to be more productive.

          I suppose the best of all would have been to get in early on BitCoin, mine a few billion and donate to science.

        • The chief problem with SETI always boils down to a matter of distances. Unless an alien civilization exists no more than a few dozen light years from Earth, stray signals from their version of "I Love Lucy" will become diffused and ultimately unrecognizable due to the expanding light cone and all the other noise in interstellar space.

          The only signals more than a few dozen light years we have a chance on seeing would be very high powered directional signals. In other words, an alien civilization would have t

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by dpille ( 547949 )
            In other words, an alien civilization would have to know there's intelligent life on Earth, or at least there's a good chance of intelligent life on Earth.

            Too bad they didn't spend a century or two building whole new types of telescopes, arrays of telescopes orbiting their star, forming a mass interferometer. With that kind of technology it's quite conceivable that they would have been able to (obtain) much more detailed images of exoplanets, potentially even imaging geological features like oceans and c

          • Frankly, the odds of SETI ever succeeding were slim to none.

            You know how to guarantee that a project won't succeed? Don''t start it. Outcome guaranteed.

            If you'd read the original report (I've linked to it somewhere else in this thread), you'd have known that they're moving on to different measurement (and analysis) technologies which will increase the amount of coverage (in terms of Hz range covered, seconds of recording, and sq.degrees of sky covered) performed every month or so to exceed the sum of all

        • I believe firmly that it's a near certainty that there's other intelligent life out there. I just think that the odds are that they are vastly more advanced than we are that they're incomprehensible.

          Just like here on Earth, it's not going to be the native lifeforms that win out. It's going to be computers. The meat-based life at top of the heap will be just a tiny blip in history. Those computers don't want to talk to us, they're waiting for our computers to take over.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by flink ( 18449 )

          On the opposite end of the spectrum, it's possible that we are among the first systems with both intelligent life, and sufficient natural resources for a technological civilization. The reason being is that earlier generations of stars formed out of nebulae with relatively low concentrations of the heavier elements. It took several generations of stars forming, dying, and blasting out their remains in super novae for a system like ours to form which has enough heavy elements for not only life, but for mod

          • very implausible. carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, silicon and iron became available en masse around six or seven billion years ago already, and that doesn’t discount the possibility that some terrestrial planets could have formed earlier, but just with less frequency. so some terrestrial worlds might have billions of years' head start over us, unimaginably long by civilisation scales

        • *PERSONALLY* I've always believed the SETI listening thing to be nearly pointless, basing the work on too many anthropocentric assumptions.

          Personally, I think that's what the "back-end analysis" is that they're talking about (though I really don't know for sure how the project was laid out). The distributed work was to take the signal data and look for anything that might conceivably be useful data, in mathematical rather than anthropocentric terms. Fourier transforms for periodic components, matching signals on different frequencies, and things like that. It's nothing that would say "here are aliens", but more "This is what the data looks lik

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jbengt ( 874751 )
      According to TFA, they're only closing the "At-Home" part because they've fallen behind on analyzing the data they've already gotten from it. They might start it up again (but don't hold your breath)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ken_g6 ( 775014 )

      They haven't. Their code is open-source, others have compiled it better for faster compute times, and their own code just doesn't draw enough power to be doing mining.

      However, there is a project using volunteer machines to mine for Bitcoins [bitcoinutopia.net] if you're interested.

    • They have done a variety of different analyses on their data over the decades, and each analysis is done multiple times by multiple users, up to several years after the data was collected. One of the recurring tasks is comparing repeated observations of the same part of the sky, which will need to be re-processed each time the telescope goes back to observe the same region again. (You do know that the SETI@Home data was collected from "parasitic" observations - if the telescope went back to look at a partic

  • Although its chance of success may have been small, if it worked it would have been more beneficial than all other distributed projects combined.

  • Or (Score:5, Funny)

    by Impy the Impiuos Imp ( 442658 ) on Wednesday March 04, 2020 @08:30AM (#59795844) Journal

    Mmmmaybe they discovered something and want to keep it to themselves.

    Or are being threatened by government who knows about aliens!

  • Opportunities (Score:3)

    by Krakadoom ( 1407635 ) on Wednesday March 04, 2020 @08:36AM (#59795854)

    It seems a missed opportunity to fund their future research by covertly just starting to send blockchain mining tasks to their compute clients :-p

  • My first work units for SETI@Home were done on an AMD K6-2 400.

  • Project ended... (Score:4, Funny)

    by nicolaiplum ( 169077 ) on Wednesday March 04, 2020 @09:27AM (#59795954)

    Beam us up, Scotty. There's no sign of intelligent life on this planet.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tflf ( 4410717 )

      The project is not ended, at least not yet. Data collection is one of the first steps in any scientific survey or experiment. Data analysis follows. Most studies have a cut off point, after which they no longer collect data, so this step is not unexpected.
      Suspect there is a chance for SETI@Home version 2, where data collection and subsequent crunching is focused on the most promising findings from this analysis. It's a big universe - movement from random data collection to more focused data collection wa

  • Well that sure is a shame. This was one of those projects that made the internet interesting.

    Though I think world grid is still up for other projects- BOINC Etc...

  • Now they should do Climate Change (Score:4, Funny)

    by Dallas May ( 4891515 ) on Wednesday March 04, 2020 @10:18AM (#59796116)

    Use their computer network to calculate the climate impact of the last 30 years of using computers to analyze static.

    • here you go! [cpdn.org]
  • SETI@home member since 27 Nov 1999 At the time I only had a 233MHz Cyrix CPU, so I doubt I helped very much to start!
  • Did they actually produce any significant results? Or was it just a huge waste of resource, that now is no longer justifiable in the times of climate change.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      20-20 hindsight is so special.

    • Re:21 years too late (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ledow ( 319597 ) on Wednesday March 04, 2020 @11:19AM (#59796340) Homepage

      Yes.

      The result was that, with the sheer amount of processing power available to the SETI / BOINC projects... there was no easily-discernible SETI-interest signals.

      Negative results are just as important as positive. And in the process it spawned BOINC which is/was doing things like protein-folding and all sorts of things that are literally making pharmaceuticals and helping cure cancer.

      For zero public-funding costs, we have found a huge range of positive science, and confirmed the hypothesis that any SETI signal would be rare and unusual. And mostly with "idle" CPU time that would have done nothing otherwise.

      Even accounting for the "cost" of the exercise... you got something out of it for far less than, say, a Microsoft datacentre puts out.

    • They're in the writing-up phase - or will be when they've turned off the firehose. They have published a number of results on the frequency of various types of spiky noise.

      Spin-off projects based on the SETI@Home design (generalised as BOINC) have produced a lot more - the Galaxy@home (actually, "GalazyZoo", I think) project has found a considerable number of weird findings. The recurring topic of "Boyajean's Star" was a discovery from a distributed Kepler-mining project. Within the scientific community, t

  • They've repurposed all that background tasking to mining bitcoin for botnets now.
  • Certificate of Computation

    This certifies that

    Inerlogic

    has participated in the SETI@home project since 14 July 1999, and has contributed 2,819,165 Cobblestones of computation (2.44 quintillion floating-point operations) and 3916 Classic workunits to SETI@home's search for extraterrestrial life.
    • It was fun while it lasted, and a great community too .... Go Classic SETI ! . Certificate of Computation . This certifies that H***** . has participated in the SETI@home project since 22 September 1999, and has contributed 640,242 Cobblestones of computation (553.17 quadrillion floating-point operations) and 6381 Classic workunits to SETI@home's search for extraterrestrial life. & Cross Projects has contributed 1,299,793 Cobblestones of computation (1.12 quintillion floating-point operations) to the
  • To call this a successful project, I think they would need to have narrowed down signals of aliens.

    Which reinforces why I really think they stopped it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cusco ( 717999 )

      A negative result is still valuable, it tells us that detectable radio signals of alien origin are difficult or impossible to detect with our current level of technology. So yes, it was successful.

  • this project was only to end when aliens were found and contacted.

    Occam's razor, what fits the data better, that the project changed its goals? or that the project is a victim of its own success.

    • this project was only to end when aliens were found and contacted.

      Do you have any evidence to support that assertion?

  • They replied "sorry, you're not intelligent. call us when you grow up."

  • While SETI@Home may have been little more than a cool screensaver in practice, I think its standardization on BOINC and its ability to popularize the platform and its underlying protocols are still great contributions.

    Folding@Home is helping with diseases, and is probably the most helpful overall. Others have helped find prime numbers that help keep data secure. Still others have simulated things that help with agriculture and disease mitigation and things of that nature. Sure, it would have been possible without S@H, but I think the project was the first one to gain enough traction to show that "1,024 chickens" was just as viable as renting time on a Blue Gene, and that there was enough public interest to justify using it elsewhere.

  • At one point back in 2001 or 2002 I was in the top 50 SETI@Home contributors. I was a high school computer science teacher and the 30 classroom computers would bit-bang on SETI data all night using the old graphical client before BIONC came about. I used the program as a teaching tool for distributed computing. Then one day the SETI@Home client couldn't talk to the servers. The idiot system admin the school had blocked the IP addresses because it appeared what I was doing was "hacking" in some way. LOL Pub

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