This page was created due to the limitation on the profile page of Seti to 2KB. It may get more ambitious one day...
Tell us your opinions about SETI and SETI@home. Possible topics:
1.a. I think it must. After all, the primary "Extraterrestrial" did such a
good job making everything else in our Universe so elegant and smoothly-
operating, I'm sure He made others than us.
1.b. I'm not sure we will discover ET-life via Seti, but it is one of those "if
you don't try, you surely won't succeed" situations, right? It does not
hurt to try. I think we will have to have some severe paradigm-shifts in
physics understanding, so that we can get past our current notions of
speed-limitations, get out "there", and find them.
1.c. I think the answers to this question are self-evident. Culture-shock is a
risk. Being overrun by superior forces is a risk. Our collective
governments' reactions are a big risk.. however, the potential for
advancement in all areas is nigh-infinite.
2.a. Once again, I do not feel it has a high probability of success, but
probably would not hurt. Unless Warrior-ET homes in on it and conquers
us... ;) I think that the decision of whether to transmit should be in
the realm of the United Nations -- individually, we do not have the right
to speak for the whole planet.
2.b. Information to send is difficult until a common language is determined.
Something to provide a common basis for communication, like mathematical
progressions, should be the start. Eventually, descriptives and images to
define the communication. Care should be taken to ensure that the images
we send represent what we THINK they do in any visual or auditory
spectrum, since we cannot predict the type or acuity of the senses of an
unknown ET. Assuming that a dialog begins, there will be plenty of time
to discuss abstract concepts like religion and philosophy, so these should
not be emphasized in the beginning.
3.a. Because this project is almost guaranteed not to succeed, and Americans
love the underdog. Because it is a good benchmarking tool for me that
also has the potential to do something "positive".
3.b. I think it has done remarkably well considering its funding situation.
3.c. I have posted these on the forums in the past, but briefly:
- stop base64 encoding the work units; this will reduce their size by
12.5% and help your bandwidth problem
- identify a loss-less compression method, such as RAR or ZIP that does a
good job on audio, and compress the work-units with it
- implement a standardized local-queuing function so that the dedicated
crunchers can have plenty of work units without having to resort to
third-party add-ons. SetiQueue is a good program, although its reams
of statistics make it somewhat bloated for my purposes, and probably
wasteful of more CPU that I'd like
- keep any statistics reporting (a la SetiQueue) separate and optional
- convert SetiAtHome to one of the now standardized "Distributed
Computing" systems such as Condor.
Advantages would include:
- could define the work queue to run at high priority until a keyboard/
mouse event, then automatically step down to idle or suspended state
- automatically detect compute-node's OS, platform, power, etc.
- automatically distribute the appropriate client if needed (i.e.,
upgrade of Seti Client becomes automatic)
The only real disadvantage is needing to install the appropriate DC
client on the system, but even the free Condor has a nice installer
interface for just about any platform
- make more diversity of clients (i.e., it should be simple to re-build
the WINNT client with different optimization settings for each CPU-
type, especially with something like Condor ensuring the right client
goes to each platform