SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

But that was probably a bit earlier, since I was off Windows by '98 or '99.

Put it this way. Explaining to the customer higher ups why that crap was running on their central billing cluster servers when an outage occurs and the place loses revenue ($mil's).

"Job ending" for the manager in question is a good description. ;)

I also maxed out the RAM to 32mb and upgrade the SRAM in my Trident video card so I could do 256 color in Windows 95.

I also had a 40mb Erwin Tape Drive for backing up my 100mb HDD. It wasn't fast but it was faster than reinstalling Tie Fighter from Floppies.

- The baseline electricity the computer is using. This will get used and produce no S@H work either way (in an era where our computers didn't go to sleep)

- The added electricity to do S@H work. This certainly was not idle, but also was a relatively small amount relative to an entire household's use.

- The hardware itself.

I would say that S@H were making use of hardware that was "going to waste" (this is CAPEX the project didn't need to spend), was having volunteers donate the added electricity, and could be said to be making use of the baseline electricity inasmuch as it would be used either way, and if S@H were to set up their own compute cluster, they would also incur similar overhead.

I don't know what system efficiencies were like in the late 90's, but I would totally believe someone if they said "idle" was 40% the power consumption of "max usage". Using that number as an example, "donated electricity" gets (1/0.6=) 1.6x as much compute-per-watt as if it was donated to run an equivalent, dedicated, machine. Maybe you can convince yourself that you were using "idle cycles" and donating on top of that?

So running distributed.net or Seti@Home was using unused processing capacity for a marginal increase in power draw. If you ran them overnight with your monitor (CRT typically) your computer was drawing less power than if you were sitting up all night on IRC or playing Quake. This changed once frequency scaling was commonplace on desktops.

That relies on the assumption that people within a single habitat wouldn't want to separate for whatever reason. Nation within a nation. It already happens on Earth(see: Catalonia, Taiwan, Hong-Kong, Silesia).

Mobile? Are we talking O'Neal Cylinders here? While yes, technically they will be mobile, I highly doubt the reaction mass requirements to actually move a constructed space habitat on the scale of maintaining as near to self-sufficiency as possible a city size population would be terribly practical, especially if everyone was doing it wantonly.

Keep in mind the effect as of late with Moore's Law in processors, and realize that the same phenomena is likely to happen with spaveflight in that yes, the technology will scale in capacity, but a great deal of that capacity may be expended in rendering the technology "more accessible" to the less specialized consumer as opposed to remaining in a state where you're actually optimizing for maximum throughput theoretically possible.

Cars/motorcycles would be another example of the same phenomena I'm trying to get across in that we're trading technically superior performance of the motorcycle (maximally efficient, yet relatively hard to control and severe to lose control of) vs. The relative safety and friendliness offered by a car to an less skilled user, even if lugging around all the extra metal eats into the overall efficiency of attaining movement of small packets of material from point A to point B via motion attained through internal combustion processes.

Never mind the political issues. I fail to entertain enough optimism to realistically expect even getting beyond the ISS-like stage of space habitation within my lifetime at the rate we're going, and fully expect climate/ecological breakdowns to start creating too much conflict to really keep us moving forward in a cooperation friendly regime.

I'd love to be proven wrong though.

> On the contrary, excessive CO2 is, at least in some context, a remarkably simple problem.

I would argue that even though we have the technical skill, the fact we do not have the political capacity is a significant problem.

Given where humans came from, I’m sometimes surprised that our political thought processes functions at all on groups as large as cities, never mind nations or the plant as a whole. While I would like to hope that scaling it to the size of a Dyson swarm or larger would be fine, even at the level of one planet we do keep repeating cycles of genocides followed by people saying “never again” followed by more genocides elsewhere.

Waste processing in space? Just give it a slight push in the direction of the sun (or whatever the right direction is taking in consideration gravity) and forget about it.

It's not about habitats coexisting with each other or not, it's about them imploding internally because people develop factions, compete for resources internally, threaten brinkmanship with critical systems, and eventually someone goes too far -- like people do all the time in countries all around the globe today.

Except a company can go bankrupt and a political regime can be replaced without all their employees or citizens dying in the process, because none of them are responsible for maintaining earth's life support.

It's pretty easy to imagine a minority of administrators on a space habitat decide they'll take some critical system hostage unless they get a bigger share of whatever they want because they think (perhaps legitimately) they've been the victim of some injustice... overplay their hand, critical system fails despite nobody actually intending it, millions of people in the habitat die. Or a million other ways for disaster to happen because of human reasons, not engineering ones.

Here on earth, even when societies devolve into civil war and massacre (e.g. Syria the past few years), at least they don't destroy the earth along with it. But with a space habitat, even a partial breakdown of order easily means everybody can just die.

So let me be clearer: I wouldn't just "like" to see us manage Earth better first. My point is that this may very likely actually prevent space habitats from being viable at all. "Accepting that this trend will continue" doesn't mean we'll make space habitats regardless -- it means accepting space habitats might not ever be thing (no matter how possible the engineering is), unless it ever happens that we first make enough massive progress in our forms of political organization and cooperation as well.

The converse: any life out there trying their best to communicate with us, beyond 600 ly... we wouldn't realize it even if we happened to catch (what's left of) the signal.

Just in mass. In volume(orbitals), electric charge, importance for chemistry, the proportions are way different.

The Earth's magnetic Van Allen belts deflect most of the sun's nasty radiation streaming at the planet. These belts are created by the molten iron core of the planet. Mars no longer has this magnetic shield, and the sun's radiation burned off the atmosphere. If we generate new atmosphere, it will just get burned off again unless we can generate some way of deflecting that radiation.

I'm not saying one or the other is more or less likely, but the range of possibilities is vast and unimaginable. The idea of energy (in the sense you and I use it now) is not even 400 years old. Harnessing ever larger amounts of stored energy was the hallmark of the industrial revolution. Declaring it to be the fundamental law underlying civilization is like concluding that the earth is flat: You mistake the shape of our immediate environment (the recent past and short term future) for the structure of the overall thing.

We are quite definitely headed in the next couple of hundred years for an end to exponential growth in energy consumption. Exponential growth near where we've been would lead us to cooking the earth in 300-400 years. By the time we're capable of doing solar system scale engineering we will have had millennia of 'culture' that exists within a constant energy envelope. What these entities will value, or want to do is beyond anyone's guess.

Is the idea that the habitats would be much larger than planets or that there would be far more of them for a given total volume of matter ?

Maximally exploiting your resources is not civilized.

If we lived in a world where every culture had achieved a certain level of education and development (and most all of them do want to get there), it's likely they would all have flat or declining populations. They might have to heavily subsidize reproduction just to sustain themselves and all this talk about building space habitats would be even more abstract than it is today.

And that is only thinking about the impact of tech we might see this century.

Exponential growth is really a phenomenon of transitions. We are in a very rapid 10.000 year transition from biological system to cultural system. This transition accelerated further in the last two centuries. If we think about the end point of this transition it should be a system that is entirely defined by its culture rather than by its biology. Maybe even completely away from its biology. It's fun but idle to speculate what that culture will be like, but if experiences can be shared as easily as text today, what is the value of having billions of copies of similar experiences? What _is_ an individual in that situation?

Even if we accept your simple expansion/competition/ressources based model of reality* (and I see no reason we should) maybe combining consciousnesses leads to much better results. Maybe expansion will look like ever increasing use of energy resources to enable larger consciousness rather than maintaining more animal bodies.

When I was a kid, I figured the Earth itself would be a blip on a universal timescale. It's kind of disappointing that geological and astronomical timescales are so similar.

Of course, it doesn't really change your point. If a billion years is a surprisingly short period of time, then 21 years is an instant.

This was my original point: you can’t hide a Dyson Swarm. It goes the other way too. You can’t really hide from a K2 civilization either.

We’re getting into Fermi Paradox territory here. The beauty of a lot of arguments here is that you don’t need to prove or even assume that civilizations will, on average, “hide” because it just takes one to be detected. So the arguments is actually “do ALL civilizations hide?”

This is a much harder argument to make.

> There could have been aliens nearby a million years ago that are now extinct or elsewhere

In Fermi Paradox terms, this questioned is framed as “is there a Great Filter ahead of us?” This question predictably has a lot of discussion. It’s hard to predict what that might be because even apocalyptic scenarios other than extreme bad luck (eg a nearby star going supernova) are unlikely to completely wipe us out at this point, even nuclear Armageddon.

Of course what exists or doesn't exist in the universe that's not visible is pure unscientific speculation; might as well be made of blue cheese as far as science is concerned.

> Space is ridiculously big. The universe is ridiculously old.

This isn't true. Mathematical concepts of infinities and limits are "ridiculously big". Space is finite and thus ridiculously small.

The obvious problem is that there's no judgment of "correct" or "incorrect". Analogizing to a bitcoin proof-of-work, it would be as if a hash beginning with more zeroes always outranked a hash beginning with fewer zeroes, but there was no way to know whether your hash started with "enough" zeroes or not.

I have run BOINC on my own computers for about 20 years. I really like it because it always properly steps out of the way whenever the computer is being used for something else (including config to do that when simply other processes need more resource), and because it's cross-platform.