SETI@home

[Minerva]

Does anyone here run SETI@home?

[Jeffro]

as in search for extra terrestrial intelligence?

no i don't run it but i'm lookin at it... i'm scared to say b/c i don't want this to turn into heated debate... but i am one of the believers out there that believe there is life out there probably intelligent. i'm gonna have to look into this.

[ViTO]

i'm scared to say b/c i don't want this to turn into heated debate...

This coming from someone who appears to have their eye brow crawling off their face

There will be NO heated debates from you my friend

[Dead_And_Gone]

We are just one itty bitty corner of ONE galaxy.

I'd say the probabilities of SOMETHING being alive out there are
pretty high. Maybe not Earthlike, but Something.

After all, scientists have been lookng for a clone like earth for years, and
have yet to find anything that would seemingly support life
AS WE KNOW IT. (Caveat)

Not that there Isn't a gazillion earth-like planets out there, they just
haven't been seen yet or noticed. It's all done with spectrum analysis,
gas readings, yada yada yada, so we don't actually SEE them in the
truest eyeball sense.

After all, this is what the military thinks of any sighting.
EVERYTHING is a Weather balloon.

[Thrashdragon]

I figure that if there is intelligent life out there that's advanced enough to travel to us, it's probably not a good idea for us to show them the way here.

<dons tinfoil hat>

[Minerva]

I was just curious. I saw a program on tv the other day and I was wondering if any of you had it.

[BlackArrow]

Sorry Minerva,

I still dedicate most of my time and computational power to finding intelligent life on THIS planet. As you can imagine it is hard work and slow going.

[-IRC-MIKE]

It does make you wonder, though. Even though it may not be in our lifetime, but if we were to find another planet with a similar ecosystem as earth and there were living creatures... would we kill them all and take over if they were not friendly?
We could possibly find that the planet is still in its infancy and possibly have carnivorous dinosaurs.
I think we would probably lose a few people just trying to get on the ground... possibly shot up with some sort of giant planet-protecting orange juice laser cannon.
They could be far more advanced than us, and watching everything we do remotely and studying our habitat. They could have a plan to take over OUR earth since we send fighter jets after everything that moves. There's really no telling how we would even handle anything like that.

[-Bar]

Sorry Minerva,

I still dedicate most of my time and computational power to finding intelligent life on THIS planet. As you can imagine it is hard work and slow going.

Specially in New Joisey

[paceman]

I used to run it, but like BlackArrow, I now devote my unused cycles to fighting diseases.

[WalkinTarget]

I was involved in UD (United Devices) which was primarily a search for a cure for cancer. In 6+ calendar years, I had invested over 16.5 CPU years worth of crunching, so .. yea, I was a big numbers guy.
Every upgrade on any of my rigs was clearly done with UD in mind. Out of my team of 700+ members, I was #15 in CPU time devoted, so that shows you how interested I was in the search for a cure.

IMHO, Seti is not nearly as critical to advancing our current world issues than UD, but alas, UD retired the cancer genome research as of April of last year, and I came home from vacation to find that all of my PCs were now doing nothing with their spare time.

I was literally despondent for a week or so, with no idea what to do next ! That may be a bit f an exaggeration, but I'd say 99% of families will lose a loved one to cancer, so that to me is more relevant than a search for ET. I lost my Mom to cancer in '93, and life was never the same after that ..