I'd define this ending as painful. The memories, the participation, the passion, and the potential this project has impacted millions of people globally.
To be able to visit & treasure or even own any part of the SETI@Home hardware would be akin to winning a lottery to some who held this project close to their hearts.
This is one of oh to many instances where I chide myself for not having the financial ability to preserve artifacts of this nature as I did in my younger years.

Thanks for sharing this farewell with us Eric.

PS- I wear my S@H 20 year Anniversary T-shirts twice a month and get interesting comments and questions from those who see it.

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Life's short; make fun of it.

Wow, been a member since 1999. I just had a dream/ thought last night that I should get back into burning some cpu time 8-). Its been a long time. I guess times have changed over 22 years. Gonna miss the projects. Let me know if something comes up!

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(that was meant to be a crying icon)

That's about as coherent as I can be.

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Hey!

Yet, Science continues :-)


Keep searchin'!
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Beyond the machines, your legacy to humanity as pioneers of a tireless generation of explorers of the cosmos will remain in the memory of the ages.
Thank you for allowing us to be part of this unique adventure of life, no matter how small our contribution may have been. °-°
It has been a real honor to coexist with you... in the end, the goal is always the journey.

Hello Eric, hello All

now the hardware goes and the Seti farewell gets something final. Seti@Home has been an essential part of my life.
Countless hours in front of the PC and the configuration files. I learned a lot through SETI and I can continue to use that knowledge today.

Thanks to the whole team for letting us be part of this great adventure.

Greetings, Klaus

If it's possible to buy some of the retired equipment or tape(s), it would be my honour to own some piece of this 'history'.

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BRANKKO<br>
BOINC@Serbia

It was fun

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:-(
Good memories. Thanx guys

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Rip-a-doodle-do.

I trust the hardware will be repurposed in an environmentally responsible way.

Thank you to all the people who have worked hard on this throughout the years.

25M credit. & I'm done, d-u-n.

"... couple thousand DLT tapes containing the raw data from the first 6 years of SETI@home. We would like to have the data transferred to a more accessible medium, but we no longer have a functioning DLT IV tape drive ..."

I'm interested in learning more about the tapes to see if it is feasible to mount an effort to save the data. Tape drives are available. Wikipedia lists DLT capacities through the years. Since this data is from the first 6 years, I'm thinking the data sizes are manageable.

1) How much data is on 1 tape?
2) How many tapes are there? ("thousands" could be 2000, 10,000, 90,000)
3) Where are the tapes located? (thinking of transport logistics)
4) What generation of DLT drive is required to read the tapes? ("DLT IV tape drive")
5) What is your thinking regarding "a more accessible medium"?

My participation goes back to the mid 90's (2003 on this email address, 2 prior addresses). I have always liked the idea of looking for ETI, and appreciated the ability to contribute a few CPU cycles to the effort. Saving the data is important.

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I have missed this project, and I hope that the data is able to be saved. I hope one day we all get to read the reports of what was or wasn't found.

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Going back to the pre-BOINC days, every computer I've owned (or, unbeknownst to my employer, had access to) has been running SETI@HOME. Like all the other posters here, I too have missed, and will continue to miss, this project.

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Perhaps the underlaying interest to look for radio waves from other remote civilizations have been fading off, we as
a young civilization with a few thousand of years of history and a few centuries of scientific development have
changed the way we communicate, even NASA is testing in brief a new LASER communication system abandoning
the classical radio waves, think in a civilization with millions of years of scientific evolution, they could have probably
found matters, energies and states of the known and unknown (for us) universe that could be considered magic by
us, as if you went to the first century and show those humans a burning laser pointer, a laptop or a flying drone, is
very probable as Michio Kaku has expressed in several occasions that civilizations with ancient scientific (non auto
destructive) evolution might have abandoned the radio waves for communications a long time ago.

At the same time the recent acknowledge by the US military forces that using million dollar cameras and radars have
detected several objects that cannot be explained with human technology nor natural events, the fact that a prestigious
Harvard astronomer run the risk to destroy his reputation telling Oumuamua interstellar asteroid could be an alien craft
due to anomalies in the dynamics observed and confirmed by several observers discarding to be caused by natural inner
force processes of that object, maybe the fact to look for very remote and ancient radio signals became obsolete, perhaps
it could be (i.e. Kepler project) to invest time and money to monitor the nearby environment of our planet to try to confirm
such theories, another chance is that SETI@home have fulfilled its purpose and a positive unambiguous detection have been
done without notifying the community of volunteers that offered for more than 20 years their hardware and enlarged their
power bills to look for radio signals showing some kind of intelligent content coming from a distant origin, the huge number
of planets now we know that exists only in our own galaxy plus the millions of galaxies we start to detect with the new
instruments plus the long history of this universe are very promising conditions for life and intelligence to develop in other
corners of this universe and much earlier than ourselves.

The coming years may be key in clarifying such suppositions or perhaps to enlarge the doubt and confusion, one thing is clear,
that mythical dream to wake up in the morning and read in the news that a distant intelligent signal have been detected by
the first time may will never occur, maybe Drake's equation will be loosing its sense, as happens in music, although some classics
never die, each concept have its age, maybe the romantic time for looking to remote radio signals have started to fade off,
in the end may be the Intergalactic Radio Station will never be possible :(

Charly
from Uruguay

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I know it's a little late to be saying this, but I do hope those servers found a home that was not in some e-recycling scrap pile awaiting to be dismantled, melted down etc.

Personally, I would very much like to see this research continue forward. I imagine that if (and I only say if due to the lack of empirical evidence) an advanced civilization exists out there in the vastness, the countless numbers of galaxies, suns, stars and planets, they would look up toward the stars in their sky with the same level of wonder that we do, that drove this science in the first place, to answer that one age-old question. Are we alone in the universe?

Personally, given all the possibilities for life to have evolved on another planet orbiting it's sun, maybe in the sweet spot that we have identified as being able to harbor life forms as we known them on our fragile Spaceship Earth, I think it is a case of massive hubris for us to think that we alone are the only life forms that ever took shape on a planet orbiting it's sun.

Maybe one day in our distant, or not so distant future, we will have answers to these questions. Admittedly this lies in the belief that another civilization would have developed communications technologies in the same ways as we have, using radio frequency energy for the transmission of voice, image and data. Who knows, in the end we may be "barking up the wrong tree" as their technology may be more, or less advanced, or simply have taken a different path.

Perhaps they never developed technologies the same was as we have, and their focus is mor agrarian.

I'd like to think that at the same time I peer up at the night sky, someone somewhere is doing the same thing with the same sense of wonder and awe at the beauty and vastness that is the universe, and is wondering if someone somewhere is looking up at their sky, or if they are alone...

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I have run into work situations where I wish data collected by my work-ancestors has been retained. A lot of effort was expended to collect the data on the tapes referenced in Eric Korpela’s 3/30/2022 post. My interest is very straightforward - see if it is feasible to mount an effort to save the data.

I would appreciate a reply to the questions in my 8/14 post.

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DB1 --> DB2 --> DB3, and you could be still on the way, except getting old in the meantime.

Edit: I almost forgot what happened with Arecibo, so here both an apology and excuse.

Well at least it all gave birth to some good ideas via BOINC and distributed protein folding etc. I remember crunching Units on a HP-UX 9000 712/60 back in the late 90's (Still got it in the attic somewhere). God we wasted so much electricity :) I bet the average phone now could have done the computations from the first few years in just a few hours.

It's been fun over the years so thanks to everyone involved at every stage it's been a privilege and thanks for all the fish

Dr. Korpela,

Can you provide information on the current status and future plans for the DLT tapes?

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