Kuba Ober wrote:
On Friday 14 April 2006 15:25, Chris Morgan wrote:
Just thought that I would throw out the point that it isn't likely that SETI at home will ever find any intelligent signals and that it is mostly a waste of energy to look for them given our long distance to nearby galaxies and planets. A more productive use of the same cpu time is likely to be protein folding, something that can be applied to science in the near term.
This is all for fun anyway. Probably SETI@home wastes less energy than running Doom3 on a high-end GPU :)
Besides, something being not likely is not an excuse for not trying. People win lotto, survive cancer and develop windows replacements from scratch, after all ;)
Cheers, Kuba
there's a difference, there *is* a chance to win lotto etc; even if you'd find ET with the SETI@home thing, it's completely useless; except for some people freaking out, it doesn't make any difference whatsoever; and chance of finding ET is zero too (finding ET? using radio signals? don't think so) why not spend idle computer time usefull if you are going to spend it?
one related question -- wouldn't running cpu hardware maximally reduce their lifetime?
regards,
Joris