Will SETI ever return?
24 Jul 2021 17:42:34 UTC
Topic 225727
(moderation:
I know SETI was cancelled due to lack of government grant money drying up after 20 years, but will it ever return?
How much of the whole sky was "searched" by the SETI project? 30% 50% I do not believe it was 100%
Will there be other types of projects that BOINC can search for SETI with and we can do the calculations for?
George
Proud member of the Old Farts Association
If you equate the volume of
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If you equate the volume of the sky searched to the volume of all of Earth's oceans, we have searched about the volume of a small swimming pool.
And Seti was not stopped because of inadequate funding. They decided they had gathered enough data and ought to finally get around to actually analyzing the data.
Plenty of radio telescopes available for listening even after the demise of Arecibo. The Chinese FAST telescope, Green Bank still runs and the Square Kilometer Array in Australia is online and listening now.
So you could once again get data from those sources and distribute that out to crunchers in the future.
But you have to setup a new project with probably a much better set of applications that aren't as limited in bandwidth as what Seti did.
I don't think that there is the desire from the past researchers to start a new project. Maybe new researchers might get the itch though.
Keith Myers wrote: If you
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You also need a new set of people running it so things don't happen that happened in the past to cause people to leave too! I am not saying other projects don't have issues but lying to it's users should never be one of them.
My bigger question would be what are they doing with all the data being collected by the places Keith named, along with the others not named, and is the data already being fully analyzed or is it just being stored away for someone with a better idea to look at it later on? Because they are building better and faster pc's everyday and together we have one heck of a super computers capability!!
mikey wrote: My bigger
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That's pretty much what I was alluding to.
And with what Keith had mentioned about the search area on BOINC's SETI search project being a "swimming pool" vs the Earth's oceans, I was referring to the other areas like what Keith had mentioned (Chinese FAST telescope, Green Bank and the Square Kilometer Array in Australia along with others not named) when I suggested how much they have surveyed.
But I did not know that the federal grant monies had not dried up, I thought it did. Thanks Keith.
Proud member of the Old Farts Association
When looking up the reason
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When looking up the reason for SETI's demise, I found this article from 2 years ago:
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-annual-cost-of-operating-SETI-Is-it-worth-the-money/answer/Eric-Korpela
You’ll have to be a bit more specific before I can answer the question. What do you mean by SETI? An individual SETI project (like SETI@home), all US based SETI projects, or all SETI projects worldwide?
I also need to know what you mean by cost. The total cost from all sources of funding? The cost borne by government funding? The costs borne by corporate or foundation funding? Or the costs covered by private donors?
In terms of SETI@home, a while back I computed its total cost since 1999 to be about equivalent to the cost of producing 10 minutes of an episode of “The Big Bang Theory.” It might be up to 10 minutes 15 seconds at this point, although it’s more likely that episodes of “The Big Bang Theory” have gotten more expensive faster than SETI@home has spent money.
Whether it’s worth primarily depends upon whether you are paying for it. For the most part, there is no US government funding of SETI, and therefore any cost borne by you is entirely voluntary. If you’re getting something for free, it’s hard to complain about its cost.
Following clarification:
It’s hard to come up with an exact value for total spending on SETI projects, because many SETI projects are run as voluntary/off hours projects and many shared instrumentation projects have SETI applications. The bulk of the spending, however would be in the Breakthrough Listen project. We’ll assume that they are spending the $10M/year that Yuri Milner has allocated for it.
The last number I’ve seen from the SETI Institute was that they wanted to spend $2.5M/year on SETI with the ATA. Given personnel reductions, I would assume that they are spending less than $1M, but let’s put it at $1M
All Berkeley SETI projects I’m involved it (including SETI@home) are about $0.4M
There are probably a dozen additional FTEs world wide working on other SETI projects so another $1.2M.
Then there are the projects I don’t know the cost of. One issue with private funding is they don’t need to tell us how much they are spending. They only need to tell their funder. There are two all-sky optical SETI projects, one funded by Breakthrough Listen (so part of their $10M) another that is otherwise funded. I’ll take a WAG at that one and call it $0.75M.
That a total of $13.4M annually or about 1.5 “Big Bang Theory” episodes. That value is probably accurate to ±50%.
There are rumors that there will be some funding for SETI in next year’s federal budget, but I’ve counted a lot of unhatched chickens since 1999, so I’ll believe it when it happens.
Proud member of the Old Farts Association
And I found this (which I
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And I found this (which I quoted) on https://www.history.nasa.gov/seti.html
" NASA joined in SETI efforts at a low-level in the late 1960s and early 1970s...[SNIP]...On Columbus Day in 1992, NASA initiated a formal, more intensive, SETI program. Less than a year later, however, Congress canceled the program. "
Which tends to prove that I was not entirely wrong.
Proud member of the Old Farts Association
Well, yes their grant money
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Well, yes their grant money dried up even though the boiler plate for the funding appears on project pages at the bottom.
The scientists were getting paid by the university or at least the tenured ones. There was money for some time for some undergrad, postgrad or interns for a while also I believe.
But a lot of the operational funding was funded by the volunteer donors with the fundraising drives. Or hardware was purchased, like the fundraiser for the gpu cards for the Parkes array that were never used.
And most of the money for current Seti-type searches is provided by the private Breakthrough Listen project by that Russian billionaire.
GWGeorge007 wrote:Will
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My understanding is there is public access to the data that projects like Break Through Listen are collecting.
What would be needed is sufficient SME (subject matter expertise), computer expertise, and server/internet resources to set up BOINC-based data analysis. And operational staff to administer the Server/Forums.
There seem to be two common ways to do this under the BOINC system
1) Discrete completely stand-alone tasks and data sets.
2) Downloaded database/dataset with individual/discrete parameter files running as "tasks".
If I have missed another way please let me know.
My understanding is BOINC is a "client/server" arrangement. So someone would have to be responsible for hosting that server.
My brother runs a small ISP so we could probably hire him to host the project. We would still need design advice and coding for the data analysis. And decisions about "data reduction" vs. analysis to look for results.
And a specific limitation on how many volunteers the host server can serve before we have to pay to scale up.
It really sounds like a University/Institutional host project is the only way we could really manage it.
Tom M
ps. I propose we call it the LGW (Little Green Women) @Home project and start by focusing the data analysis using Android cell phones ;)
And maybe we could convince Ian&SteveC to host it on his 192 core monster ;)
A Proud member of the O.F.A. (Old Farts Association). Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® (Garrison Keillor) I want some more patience. RIGHT NOW!
Tom M wrote: GWGeorge007
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LOL!! I like the Little Green Women@Home name for the project, but alas... I don't think I can provide anything towards the project. I don't know anywhere near enough to even suggest anything of the like.
I agree that if your brother runs a small ISP that maybe he could be influenced to do so, and yes, it would be nice if Ian were to host it on his monster computer (but that would mean he'd have to give up using it for doing his current calculations). I doubt he would do that.
I was just hoping that one day (in the near future?) that we could all have, once again, the opportunity the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence.
Proud member of the Old Farts Association
How to find a signal in a lot
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How to find a signal in a lot of data
"Our" problem is most of us are system operators rather than researchers.
This makes it more difficult to originate a distributed processing project.
There are couple of things we could try using publically accessible data like the Break Through project.
What would a "sign of intelligence" look like given the Break Through data set?
What kind of steps would we need to try to find a signal?
It seems like any repetitive signal that is non-monotonic (identically regular for an extended period of time like a pulsar) might be a candidate for a "techno signature".
SETI@Home went through a lot of steps to "normalize" data so that maybe a signal could be found in spite of the earth orbiting and the potential ETI signal orbiting.
Mumble...
Tom M
ps. what would be signs of intelligence from another planet?
A Proud member of the O.F.A. (Old Farts Association). Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® (Garrison Keillor) I want some more patience. RIGHT NOW!
find a repetitive signal that
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find a repetitive signal that is non-monotonic?
A Proud member of the O.F.A. (Old Farts Association). Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® (Garrison Keillor) I want some more patience. RIGHT NOW!