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Seti@home pointless?

RhodyDave said:
My statement about the pointlessness of Seti applies to both the @home, and the other form. It is truly pointless. Even IF we were to discover some signal from multiple light-years distant, it would have absolutely no bearing on life on our planet. It is nothing more than mental gymnastics.
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You really bring meaning to the word blandness as it applies to mental gymnastics. In other words meaningless.

If you think that discovering that there is intelligent, technological, life elsewhere in the universe would have no bearing on human life I have to plead for a special exemption to rule 12. When I get it I will finish this sentence..

Perhaps you were speaking of plants, or tadpoles?
 
As to the SETI argument.

How many discoveries in the course of human history would have been missed or greatly delayed if we had decided it "just isn't worth it to look" ?


I quit reading half way through the posts so forgive me if someone else has made a similar statement.
 
Some guy is now claiming he got a possible signal from that area -- but when pressed, refuses to release the details.


"I know the scientist, and when he first announced it, I asked him for the details, and he wouldn't send them to me," astronomer and SETI pioneer Frank Drake told SPACE.com. "I'm very suspicious."
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Doing about 4500 units a day according to BOINC, with my NVIDIA GTX 750 TI and hexcore machine. The graphic processor is about 95% of that.
 
Gawdzilla Sama said:
And who knows, someday someone might go through all that and find the Zimmerman telegram buried in all that noise.
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In spite of British misinformation suggesting the contrary, that message went only by cable. Will we detect cable traffic sent by aliens if our planet gets tangled in alien telegraph wires as the solar system meanders through cosmic space? Maybe, but maybe not. Wiki.
It has traditionally been claimed that the telegram was sent over three routes: transmitted by radio and also sent over two trans-Atlantic telegraph cables operated by neutral governments (the United States and Sweden) for the use of their diplomatic services. But it has been established that only one method was used. The message was delivered to the United States Embassy in Berlin and then transmitted by diplomatic cable first to Copenhagen and then to London for onward transmission over transatlantic cable to Washington. The misinformation about the "three routes" was spread by William Reginald Hall, then the head of Room 40, to try to conceal from the United States the fact that Room 40 was intercepting its cable traffic.​
 
BenBurch said:
Not pointless. It is a necessary processing of data. Very unlikely to find a result, but not pointless.
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That was kinda what I was thinking. Just think of all the newer computers being sold, because people think that if they just had one extra GTX Titan X they'd be the ones to detect ET. And we're not even just talking small PCs. There's been more than one admin who got caught running it on the server at work. Just think of all those $100,000 server racks got bought because the old one seemed to crawl lately :p

So, yea, necessary processing of data. Necessary for the economy, that is :p
 
AWPrime said:
Even then we must ask the question: do we really want to communicate with aliens?
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Well the game is UP AWPrime, who is obviously an Alien who is trying to put us off the scent, most likely prior to a massive Alien invasion of Earth - Holey Jeezuz and Mary and all the Gnomes, God save all our souls !! :jaw-dropp
 
BenBurch said:
Not pointless. It is a necessary processing of data. Very unlikely to find a result, but not pointless.
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It is pointless, insofar as innumerable participants seem to all be redundantly processing the same packets of data.
 
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