There’s one huge problem with SETI: It will only detect intelligent life from other planets if they’re transmitting radio signals.

Consider that human beings have been transmitting radio signals for little over a hundred years, but there has been intelligent life on Earth for many hundreds of thousands of years beforehand. SETI would be useless to discover such a planet.

In my opinion SETI is fundmentally flawed, and extremely unlikely to find anything, especially considering the time it takes signals to travel through the expanses of space. If SETI _did_ hear anything, it would most likely be from a source that has long since passed.

SETI may have reasonable funds and large-scale amateur support, but it’s essentially little more than an expensive gamble. I really don’t think it deserves the pride of place on this site that it has been given, especially when compared to some of the other content.

My view is that if you’re going to run software as a part of a grass roots supercomputing initiative, you should run something like folding@home instead. SETI is cool, but I honestly believe that protein folding is a more important task.

While at UF, I had setup SETI@Home for years on as many machines as I could get my hands on…all the way up to v3.08. When they released the new BOINC version, at the time it seemed to eat a bit too many resources, and shortly after downgraded.

Overall it’s a great concept, but I am conflicted about the ethics regarding the energy usage of machines that aren’t being used. Technically, if you’re not using the machine, it probably would be best for our electrical bills and carbon footprint to turn the computer off.

I used to run Seti@home all the time on a desktop, but now that all my machines are laptops, I find that these kind of cpu-intensive application are either draining my battery too much, or getting my machine way too hot and therefore noisy. I know you can turn down the amount of resources you can use, but that sort of defeats the purpose right?

Also, for some reason the old screensaver, with 2D gfx looked better/cooler/techier than the 3D thing you got going on now.

Love Seti,

Many hundreds of thousands of years?

More like 2 if you look for modern humans in the fossil record.

I accept it’s a very small chance of success, but that won’t matter if we keep doing it, the software will improve over time and more things can be added to look for.

I don’t run any seti stuff no more because Boinc kept crashing my machines, will the old setup’s still work?

SETI actually have detected more than 30 signals that cannot be explained by Earth sources, satellites, space probes launched from Earth, or other human-made sources (the wow-signal is just the most famous one). The only reason they still talk about “the great silence” is that none of those sources were continuously broadcasting. And why expect aliens to clump together and make single worlds constantly radio-noisy? After all, there is obvious paralells between the communicative limitations in smart animals and the “i don´t want to hear your arguments”-mentality in human victims of lying, as well as genetic and fossil evidence that human ancestors were rare all the time and archaeological evidence that war and hierarchies in human society began during a great increase in global population. Obviously the fact that our ancestors were so rare that they did not have to compete against each other over resources deprived them of all motifs for deception, and that honesty was crucial for the evolution of language and culture (and of course that means that intelligent life on Earth is older than modern humans). All intelligent life of the kind that passes on knowledge must have followed a nonmalthusian evolution, so aliens inventing advanced spacefaring technology would spread to avoid overpopulation and competition, thus accounting for the lack of constant radio sources that SETI misinterprets as “the great silence”. PS. That modern humans have some nativistic aptitudes for language does not mean that pre-nativistic hominins lacked language. Just like snakes started locomoting in a ringling way before finally losing their legs as an evolutionary fine-tuning, human ancestors first learned language behavioristically and that “language niche” favoured nativistic genes in an evolutionary fine-tuning. This view is also supported by brain scans of stroke patients reclaiming their language capacity through training. And the theory nthat the speech-adaptation of the mouth should have been necessary for the origin of language is disproved by the existence of sign language. Any intelligent beings would invent a language modality that fits their physiology.

I keep an open mind but when one considers the sheer vastness of our own galaxy and the possibility of the ‘meta-Universe’ (trillions of other Universes juxtaposed or aeons apart) and the fact that life survives and thrives in severe conditions on Earth (bacteria on fumaroles, insect and plant life surviving in or near sulphur pools in caves with no sunlight, The arctic cloudberry with apparently more vitamin c than kiwi fruit!) surely there must some form of life out there.
I have spoken to several people with more degrees than a circle who have seen some unexplained and unearthly things in the sky, are all the accounts given untrue? The technology used must be so much more advanced than ours (if e.t exists!) that we may be missing a trick.
Einstein said that science is the refinement of everyday thinking. Everything has a reason or purpose in my opinion even if this doesnt seem obvious or able to be understood. I think its worth keeping on keeping on…