The SETI@home project description reads:

"SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is a scientific area whose goal is to detect intelligent life outside Earth. One approach, known as radio SETI, uses radio telescopes to listen for narrow-bandwidth radio signals from space. Such signals are not known to occur naturally, so a detection would provide evidence of extraterrestrial technology."

My question is: Is there any scientific value to the SETI@home computations other than finding evidence technology exists outside Earth? What if all this time we've been finding evidence that shows that "narrow-bandwidth radio signals from space" ARE actually naturally occurring but just extremely rare? Are finding these narrow-band radio signals a complete scientific / electric / computational waste or might we find some value in observing a new property of nature?

Or to put it another way: lets assume that we humans are literally the only intelligent life in the entire universe. What / how would / could the "evidence" we've found so far do for / what for science or be beneficial?

It would be hinged on the CONTENT of such a microwave reception. We have ample signal processing experience to determine if their is intelligence in the received signal. I don't know if any SETI effort is actually applying this knowledge to any reception at all.

I think he is asking that if seti@home were to shut down today or if ET is not out there, is there any scientific value that can be determined from what the effort has collected in the data so far.

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Bob DeWoody

My motto: Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow as it may not be required. This no longer applies in light of current events.

The Titan IBM supercomputer, number 2 in the top500 list, uses 20000 nVidia graphic boards. Maybe something was learned from the use of graphic boards as coprocessors, both nVidia and AMD/ATI in SETI@home processing. I have just started using a Geforce GTX 750 and I am amazed at the speedup..
Tullio

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I think he is asking that if seti@home were to shut down today or if ET is not out there, is there any scientific value that can be determined from what the effort has collected in the data so far.

Exactly.

SETI@Home's Dr. Eric Korpela and Dan Wertheimer completed a project to map neutral hydrogen distribution in the Milky Way using data on the SETI@Home tapes. I could be wrong but I don't think that this was based on our processing, however it was still using the same data that wouldn't be there otherwise.

Edit: If SETI@Home shut down today, I don't doubt the data would be handed over to other group(s) who would perform a far more comprehensive correlation and re-observation than has been done until present. Don't get me started on NTPCkr again... ;^)

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SETI@Home's Dr. Eric Korpela and Dan Wertheimer completed a project to map neutral hydrogen distribution in the Milky Way using data on the SETI@Home tapes.

So what I'm hearing is that at least we're cataloging "neutral Hydrogen distributions"? By the way i tried clicking the link you provided but it was blocked on my end.

I apologize; my knowledge of astronomy is limited. I understand we're looking for "triplets" in the signals?

What I'm asking is this:

If humans are literally the ONLY intelligent life in the entire universe (which I don't believe, but lets just assume so for question's sake), what other ares could these "triplets" we find help?

By the way i tried clicking the link you provided but it was blocked on my end.

It's using a self-signed SSL certificate, so this needs to be allowed in your browser.

If humans are literally the ONLY intelligent life in the entire universe (which I don't believe, but lets just assume so for question's sake), what other ares could these "triplets" we find help?

Triplets could(?) discover pulsars although the spike duration appears to be too short. But there is an entire area of SETI@Home designed to discover astrophysical phenomena like this: Astropulse. So even if there's nothing intelligent out there, it is still valid and its data could still produce useful discoveries.

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there is an entire area of SETI@Home designed to discover astrophysical phenomena like this: Astropulse. So even if there's nothing intelligent out there, it is still valid and its data could still produce useful discoveries.

I'm aware of AstroPulse; my BOINC client sometimes assigns my computer to AstroPulse. To be honest I'd actually like to have my computer process more AstroPulse assignments but I don't know how; it seems SETI@home and AstroPulse@home are linked.

Triplets could(?) discover pulsars although the spike duration appears to be too short.

Thank you! This is what I was asking. Even if SETI@home doesn't discover evidence of alien technology, at least we're cataloging pulsars. And who knows what benefits we could achieve from them? Its my understanding that the LHC created the first ever Website and I need not say more about what the Internet has done for us...

If you go into Account and then SETI@Home Preferences you can edit them and set them to:

SETI@home v7: no
AstroPulse v7: yes
SETI@home v8: no

And your computer will only receive AstroPulse work. Caveat: there is not always a run of AstroPulse work with any available, and because it "pays" more credit for the same amount of processing, a lot of people have set their machines to AstroPulse-only and when there is any it is quickly assigned.

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The Titan IBM supercomputer, number 2 in the top500 list, uses 20000 nVidia graphic boards. Maybe something was learned from the use of graphic boards as coprocessors, both nVidia and AMD/ATI in SETI@home processing. I have just started using a Geforce GTX 750 and I am amazed at the speedup..
Tullio

now you see what I was saying about "going GPU" in next generations of SETi@home... ;)

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non-profit org. Play4Life in Zagreb, Croatia, EU