- 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 :)
by reconnecting
2 subcomments
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
by jasonhong
2 subcomments
- 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....
by kyleblarson
1 subcomments
- 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.
by leokennis
6 subcomments
- 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?
by johnplatte
0 subcomment
- This happened in March 2020. https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=85267
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
by muragekibicho
0 subcomment
- There's the YouTube guy who searched for aliens instead of mining bitcoin in 2011. He'll probably (not) kms after seeing SETI went into hibernation.
by CommieBobDole
0 subcomment
- 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...
- 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
by compounding_it
0 subcomment
- 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.
by KellyCriterion
0 subcomment
- Raise your hand if you read the title as "... in hiberNation"!
:)
Wasnt this the original wording?
by paradox460
0 subcomment
- I remember running SETI@home for ages, then transitioning to Einstein@home to help LIGO chunk through the ELIGO data. I also remember BOINC was a buggy piece of shit
by David_Osipov
1 subcomments
- Wait, they have been in hibernation for almost several years, why to publish it now?
by sizzzzlerz
0 subcomment
- 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.
by janandonly
0 subcomment
- 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.
- 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.
- 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".
by ElijahLynn
0 subcomment
- 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!
- What we need next is SAGI@home, a distributed computing platform for finding free and open weights that leads to AGI.
by markus_zhang
0 subcomment
- Is there any other alien searching distribution screensaver? It was really interesting watching it do FFT back in the day.
by theLegionWithin
0 subcomment
- wow. I didn't expect that to ever happen. one of the first crowdsourcing platforms...
- on the other hand, WETI still seems to be up, so you could contribute there.
http://weti-institute.org/
by Manuel_TPC
0 subcomment
- 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.
- There was another launched around 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.
[0], https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid.org
[1], https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volunteer_computing_pr...
- Oh, I used to run it during the early 2000's.
by chrisweekly
2 subcomments
- mods: typo in title (hiberNation)
by ChrisArchitect
0 subcomment
- Recently:
SETI Home Flags 100 Signals After Sorting 12B Others
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46642414
by ratelimitsteve
0 subcomment
- 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.
- 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
by logicallee
0 subcomment
- 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!
- they never found any extraterrestials. And they never will...
by bookofjoe
1 subcomments
- hiberation
- [flagged]
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