SETI@Home ends its crowdsourced search for alien life after 21 years
The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence is a series of projects that scrub the background noise of the universe to look for alien life. One of the most famous ventures under the name was SETI@Home, in which members of the public were encouraged to donate their idle computing time to the venture. After 21 years, however, UC Berkeley has announced that the project will stop on March 31st.
SETI@Home was born at UC Berkeley and released to the world on May 17th, 1999, using the university’s distributed computing platform, BOINC. Whenever people left their machine on, but weren’t using it, the program would take over and crunch data sent from UC Berkeley. In that way, the system created a giant, internet-connected supercomputer to grind through all of the information.
Thanks to the many volunteers who have helped crunch data for SETI@home in the last two decades. On March 31, the project will stop sending out new work to users, but this is not the end of public engagement in SETI research. pic.twitter.com/P0t0v8w7n4
— UC Berkeley SETI (@BerkeleySETI) March 3, 2020
In a statement, project leaders say that the reason for the “hibernation” is that they’re “at the point of diminishing returns.” Fundamentally, so much information has already been processed that it’s now time to sift through it and look for any sort of conclusion. “We need to focus on completing the back-end analysis of the results we already have,” they continue, and then publishing a “scientific journal paper.”
While SETI@Home is closing, UC Berkeley’s other astrophysics projects that use BOINC will still harness your computing time, if you’re offering. Or, if you’re looking for another good cause to support, you could always support Folding@Home, which is still in operation. That platform offers distributed computing for disease research, drug design and other medical research, which recently began tackling COVID-19.
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