After 21 years, in a move that might signify a cultural change in pop science:
SETI@home has announced that they will no longer be distributing new work to clients starting on March 31st as they have enough data and want to focus on completing their back-end analysis of the data.
SETI@home is a distributed computing project where volunteers contribute their CPU resources to analyze radio data from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico and the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).
Lawrence Abrams, “SETI@home Search for Alien Life Project Shuts Down After 21 Years” at BleepingComputer
At Mashable, we learn,
For those who don’t remember the heady days of the early 2000s, the SETI@home project offered an exciting alternative to screensavers. Instead of having a bunch of random shapes dancing around your giant monitor, your computer screen could be occupied by the visual representation of all that possibly alien data your machine was churning through at the behest of SETI@home. It was a cool idea, and, as The Atlantic reported in 2017, a million people signed up right when the service launched.
Well, twenty-one years later, the state of computing has changed a bit.
Jack Morse, “SETI@home no longer needs your Gateway 2000 to search for aliens” at Mashable
Well, the state of computing has certainly changed but, after so many years of no Contact, the magic has probably also gone out of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project. Also, to use the “Woke” approach that is becoming increasingly popular in popular science, why should SETI get to say what is and isn’t a valid search for ET? Why should SETI control the narrative? Can’t everyone have or be their own ET?
Sow the wind…
See also: Tales of an invented god