alt Hacker NewsI 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?
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That's pretty dismissive outright; consider uh. All forms of distributed computing, from cloud computers to bittorrent to bitcoin / cryptocurrency. Seti@home was one of, if not the first distributed projects, the predecessor of cloud computing and spreading a workload over many computers, years before Hadoop and map/reduce became popular (which at least in my head was the start of "big data" and cloud computing).
I won't claim it was "the" most important or it was critical in that, but it's not to be dismissed.
(Re)search is still valuable, even if the result turns out to be negative.
Well it led to the creation of BOINC, a distributed computing system that probably has led to scientific advances in other fields
So I wouldn’t say it was all for nothing, but it’s main benefit was the idea, and not the results it generated
The fact that all SETI endeavors haven’t really found anything is actually a very valuable result, because it constrains “they’re everywhere, we just haven’t been looking” arguments quite a bit.
Even humanity’s (weak) radio emissions would be detectable from tens of light years away, and stronger emissions from much further. So the idea that intelligent life is absolutely everywhere that was liberally tossed around a few decades ago is pretty much on life support now.
No, they just published two papers in 2025. You can watch a video about it or link to paper in my other comment on this thread: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt07R_amRT8