SETI@home is in hiberation

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....

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 :)

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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 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.

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.

Is there any other alien searching distribution screensaver? It was really interesting watching it do FFT back in the day.

Wait, they have been in hibernation for almost several years, why to publish it now?

mods: typo in title (hiberNation)

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!

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