Dear All,

Amongst the tumult of life here on earth, we have the very meekly published results of 25 years of s@h:


See David Anderson's recent post over on Nebula: SETI@home papers accepted for publication

My notes:

Great news! Two papers on SETI@home will be published in The Astronomical Journal, a well-regarded scientific journal...

... There will probably be another paper at some point. Using the FAST observatory in China, we're reobserving the 92 top-ranking candidates found by Nebula...

... The central thing we tried to prove: if there were certain types of ET radio signals, above certain power levels, in certain areas of the sky, SETI@home would have discovered them...

... We did lots of brainstorming, from which new ideas magically emerged. Super fun. I encourage you to read the Conclusions sections of each paper. They're fairly non-technical...

... The publication of the papers gives a purpose and meaning to the vast volunteer effort (and electric bills, and carbon emissions) that went into SETI@home. For me, it's a deeply satisfying conclusion to 25 years of hard work. This includes 15 years developing the original SETI@home, then developing BOINC and porting SETI@home to it. This was a lot of work, but it was fun...

... but the programming and debugging was a solitary endeavor. There were some fun Eureka! moments, but mostly it was a long, hard slog...

... I think of SETI@home as a million people reaching out together into space, hoping to find other minds...

FANTASTIC!


All beautifully done.

Very Well Done to all that are some part of all this!


Keep searchin'!!
Martin

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