Although I think the seti@home project was one of the groundbreaking distributed/crowdworking projects, my personal opinion is that the actual search for ETI is a waste of time (not factoring in any advances in science/engineering that have been derived from the project).
I'm a firm believer in the most common solution to the Fermi Paradox (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox) - ie there's nothing else out there - because for any civilisation that's even slightly more advanced than us (for galactic values of slightly), the effort to make a noticeable impact on galaxy is reasonably trivial.
Does Folding@Home really yield a lot? I did some quick figuring (http://www.gwern.net/Notes.html#charitable-supercomputing) and that project costs a lot, while, as far as I can tell, delivering little especially compared to alternate charities.
You write, "$12.65 million is a lot of money. What could we do with that?" Here are some issues:
1. This implies that there is a direct way that everyone who runs Folding@Home could, instead, have donated their electrical costs directly to a charitable organization.
2. The article fails to address how Folding@Home eases scientific contributions by the masses. I agree that $12.65 million can save many lives -- provided it was not split across scores of charities.
3. Folding@Home has the potential to save hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives.
> 1. This implies that there is a direct way that everyone who runs Folding@Home could, instead, have donated their electrical costs directly to a charitable organization.
Either you are paying for all of your electrical bill or you're not.
If you are paying for all of it, then yes, you can donate your electrical costs! just don't run Folding@Home and send Oxfam or whatever a Paypal donation at the end of the year.
If you are not paying for all of it, if someone is sharing the bill or footing the bill entirely, then donating directly may harm your pocketbook, yes. But in such a situation, does it really still make sense to force the other to pay for all the electricity you are using? The overall economics are bad per the original note, it's an inefficient way to turn someone else's money into charity. What right do you have to burn the electricity like there's no tomorrow, for that matter? (If you weren't going to use a year's worth of electricity, then whomever is paying for your electricity is poorer by that $10 as surely as if you had pick-pocketed him of $10.)
> 2. The article fails to address how Folding@Home eases scientific contributions by the masses.
'Scientific contributions'? What contributions? If you just mean, let the masses feel like they're doing something useful, then Folding@Home could do us all a favor and make the main loop of the daemon a call to sleep()! If you mean, actual scientific progress, that overlaps with your point #3 which I'll get to.
> I agree that $12.65 million can save many lives -- provided it was not split across scores of charities.
A dollar is a dollar, no matter where it comes from. If you and 99 other people each donate $100 to 100 charities, then it's the same as if each person donated $10,000 to just 1 charity. The only difference is whatever overhead there might be; and even if we say that our Folding@Home contributors lose 50% to overhead and the charities wind up getting only $6 million in their bank accounts to use, that's still thousands more lives saved than by running Folding@Home and wasting the same amount of money!
> 3. Folding@Home has the potential to save hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives.
This is the key question. If Folding@Home has expected value of thousands of lives a year, then running it is fine. But if it's not producing...
For these sort of stakes, one would hope that one had really good evidence. But let's lower standards and merely ask for ordinary evidence. What reason do you have to think Folding@Home has such extraordinary potential? It has been operating for nearly 11 years. 11! And nothing that has saved a single life. (You are free to provide a counter-example.) At what point do we stop talking about its potential to save millions of lives and about the possibility of teapots in orbit around Mercury?
BOINC was actually developed to support SETI@HOME. Without the pulling power of SETI who knows if you had all the others spinoffs. As for many other kind of research, space research often brings very unexpected innovations.
That is very true. I didn't mean to imply that nothing good came out of it at all - obviously they developed some great tech to help their search for alien life, which can be reapplied elsewhere.
I have multi multi-core machines, so I run seti@home as well as a (much larger timeshare of) rosetta@home. I agree that disease research has a much more probable impact, but the implications of a successful SETI search are not trivial either.
I also run Einstein@home, and world community grid.
Agree with your 1st paragraph. As for whether there's anything out there, I don't know. But if there is, it's optimistic to assume their technology would be related to ours in such a way that we could detect it with a few dishes plunked down in a valley. Besides that, the news would be at least 2.5 million year old. ;)
An alternative solution to the Fermi paradox would be that radio signals fade into the background fairly quickly. SETI only has the ability to pick up signals coming just few light-years away (if emitted by an Earth-like radio culture). It would be expected that a more advanced civilization would prefer to use highly focused directional beams (perhaps lasers), signals which won't (easily) get picked up by those to whom they're not intended. Even now, as communication bandwidth is increasing, it's mostly as ground-based fiber optics.
Yes or 'they' might use a form of energy that is totally foreign to us. Maybe it's not even a beam or a ray. Maybe it's micro-black-hole-oscillation (yeah, made that up). I mean, who knows? It's all hypothetical anyway. And here we are spending money on a bunch of dishes that pick up a specific range of radio frequency. Stick the same dishes on top of a sports bar and at least we can all watch football.
The advantage of SETI is that the radio equipment can be used for radio astronomy just as well. So the money spent has dual use (almost complementary).
Assuming such beings work on the same physics we do, they need massive amounts of energy to run a galactic civilization; and they have the same sources available that we do: Stars; and for extra credit black holes.
Putting a dyson sphere around a star changes its energy output, shifting it far into the infrared. Putting a matrioshka brain around a star is even more dramatic a change--but it still has the same gravitational effect on other stars. But no, unfortunately that doesn't explain the effects of "dark matter."
I'm a firm believer in the most common solution to the Fermi Paradox (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox) - ie there's nothing else out there - because for any civilisation that's even slightly more advanced than us (for galactic values of slightly), the effort to make a noticeable impact on galaxy is reasonably trivial.