+1 for the idea of a better organized AND much more frequently updated scientific results page. I know it's not easy but it is what keeps us (or at least me) motivated most.

Thanks Andras.


@ Alexander

I think I might stumbled onto a sensitive subject. I don’t criticize the SETI crunchers for their objective: finding ET. I’m convinced there is intelligent life in universe – even in our galaxy, right now – and we might one day come into contact with them, but now is not the time to search for them.

I think we should use our recourses as effectively as possible and the task you have undertaken is simply beyond our technological reach. You are, maybe, ruling out intelligent life in a area that covers only a miniscule part of all the, almost, endless possibilities for why there hasn’t been any contact. Never mind the search model’s theoretical limitations, which exist as a consequence of the practical hurdles; it goes beyond that. Read about Fermi’s Paradox:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

Again, I’m not criticizing your objective. I’m criticizing your – almost gullible – approach and your acceptance of the low probability of ever receiving any return on your investment. The yields are almost zero.

I’m also not saying it’s wrong crunching for SETI – if you do it for fun. Like you said, they have a vibrant community. But make sure you debit your social account and not your altruistic account.


This is also why I’m a bit hesitant when it comes to crunching for all the protein folders in the BOINC community and why I liked the SIMAP project: the former have poor yields and the latter have good return on invested kWh.

One could argue that A@H also has poor yields, and one would be right, but I do this almost as a protest against the scientific communities’ priorities. How can it be more important to map the galaxy, our and all the others, instead of mapping all the asteroids and comets that have the potential of ending all life on this planet, or at the very least, ending our civilization?

It all centers around the ego, the scientists’ and the politicians’. The scientist are motivated by recognition, mostly from their peers but also from the general public, and they don’t get any of that if they map asteroids. But they receive recognition if they can verify the existence of gravitational waves. And for God’s sake, let’s not forget the Nobel price.

So the scientists go to the politicians and ask for money and the politicians give it to them, on the only condition that whatever the scientist are doing will generate news articles with colorful pictures. Perhaps a nebula and the mandatory reference to the politicians in question. Said and done. Again and again. Pulsars, quasars, neutron stars, black holes, black matter, multiverse, gravitational waves and so on. Sending a probe to Pluto, yes, building a special purpose probe to map and track asteroids and comets, no. It’s not sexy and sexy rules, sets the agenda.

Meanwhile the people in Chelyabinsk are counting their healed scars from flying debris.


This ought to be everybody’s concern and it should be funded through UN, since it’s everybody’s potential problem.

Here is a link to the Gaia mission objectives. I’m convinced that more than 99% of the time being spent on observations will be of objects far beyond the solar system.

http://sci.esa.int/gaia/28890-objectives/


Also, had ESA been serious about detecting NEO:s they wouldn’t have sent their Gaia satellite to the Lagrange point L2, but to a Venus following orbit, like B612 Foundation's Sentinel satellite. Lets hope the Sentinel mission happens in 2018 like planned.


https://b612foundation.org/sentinel-mission/

http://sci.esa.int/gaia/40413-solar-system/

http://wmap.gsfc.nasa.gov/mission/observatory_l2.html

So the scientists go to the politicians and ask for money and the politicians give it to them, on the only condition that whatever the scientist are doing will generate news articles with colorful pictures. Perhaps a nebula and the mandatory reference to the politicians in question. Said and done. Again and again. Pulsars, quasars, neutron stars, black holes, black matter, multiverse, gravitational waves and so on. Sending a probe to Pluto, yes, building a special purpose probe to map and track asteroids and comets, no. It’s not sexy and sexy rules, sets the agenda.

Unfortunately money is what makes everything happen, without money Boinc would NOT be a reality, it was initially funded by a grant to prove that they could in fact get lots of people, 30k I think was the original number, to focus their pc's on a common goal. With tons and tons of Scientists and more and more graduating every year the money will get tighter and tighter for the foreseeable future too. Since that is just the way it is projects that grab other people imagination, ie the money folks, get funded while other projects do not. We all have our own favorites but since we aren't the ones holding the purse strings to the money we don't really have a say, OTHER then what we do with our pc's.

Part of the problem with Asteroid tracking is 'what do we do when we find a planet buster heading our way?' The current and only answer for the foreseeable future is say ooh and aah as it kills us. Find a way to make those Asteroids, like the Russian, one NOT hit the Earth and you will find the money bags coming your way faster then you can spend it.

Exploring Pluto is a non political thing that is just for the ooh and aah factor, it is cool. And it's being downgraded to non Planet status just increases the public awareness of it. After all it is mostly PUBLIC money we are talking about, taxes, not some billionaire spending his own money to go off and explore Pluto, Asteroids or whatever. It is Government money, ie tax dollars at work, so getting the taxpayer onboard IS a good thing to those willing to spend the money. That often means sexy projects as opposed to the more practical ones, finding ET IS sexy, mapping the Asteroid that is going to splatter the Earth like a broken egg is just not. After all maybe ET can come and save us from ourselves, it could just as easily dominate us and then eat us for snacks too, but that isn't how it plays out in most peoples minds. "ET go home" is how ALOT of people think of ET, not the Romulans of Star Trek wanting to rule the Galaxy and enslave it's inhabitants.

finding ET IS sexy, mapping the Asteroid that is going to splatter the Earth like a broken egg is just not.

Unfortunately this is true, but I think it is so very wrong. I'll explain why, but please understand that this is just my personal opinion and I have no intention whatsoever to convince anybody that my opinion is the correct one. I respect that everybody believes in their own thing.

In my opinion (but I'm sure many will disagree) finding ET is a hopeless and most importantly pointless quest. Even if we found a signal, why would it matter? The distance to the closest star is roughly 4 light years away. With the current fastest imaginable (not even existing) transportation system it would take thousands of years to get to the closest star. But you could not sustain the life of generations of humans on a spaceship for thousands of years. So we have no hope of visiting even the planets of the closest star. But that's not all. The closest known and confirmed exoplanet which is assumed to be able to sustain human-like life is roughly 20 light years away, even farther. Even if we could travel with the speed of light (which is theoretically impossible unless you're an energy particle), the journey would take 20 years... and nobody says that there's ET on those planets. Perhaps ET is a lot farther.
What I'm trying to say is that cosmic distances are just so unimaginably long that there's no real hope for us visiting the places where ET might live and even for ET civilizations with much more advanced transportation systems, these distances are so huge that they probably would not come here to check us out. So what's left? Communicating using radio waves? Even with that in the best imaginable scenario sending/receiving a signal would take many many years. But in reality more likely it would take thousands of years (I'm assuming that ET lives a lot farther than the closest possibly inhabitable planet).
Again, this is my opinion, my belief, I understand that many don't agree and I have no intention of offending anybody, I'm just trying to explain why I think that finding ET is magnitudes less important than computing asteroid properties.

Mapping asteroids, finding out their physical properties, trying to figure out when an asteroid could hit Earth, especially a big one, which could wipe out life completely, is a problem much closer at hand for humanity. OK, we have no idea how we could stop such an asteroid... yet. But I bet that if we knew for certain that we have only 50 years left, everybody would start thinking of a solution and pretty soon we would find it. It's amazing what humans can do when they are motivated. And there are 7 billions of us, with quite a few brilliant minds among us. I think we would save ourselves. But the first step is knowing what awaits us. So if you ask me, mapping asteroids is a lot more important than looking for ET. The fact that such asteroids, which can sterilize Earth, have hit in the past is proven. And it is statistically certain that it will happen again. It might not happen in 10 years, 100 years or even 1000 years, but it will definitely happen sometime. Maybe only in a few million years, if we are lucky.

So this is what I think... sorry for the long "speech". It seems I had a lot of rest on my vacation and I'm all philosophical now :) Just wanted to share these thoughts :)

[quote]finding ET IS sexy, mapping the Asteroid that is going to splatter the Earth like a broken egg is just not.

Unfortunately this is true, but I think it is so very wrong. I'll explain why, but please understand that this is just my personal opinion and I have no intention whatsoever to convince anybody that my opinion is the correct one. I respect that everybody believes in their own thing.

In my opinion (but I'm sure many will disagree) finding ET is a hopeless and most importantly pointless quest. Even if we found a signal, why would it matter? The distance to the closest star is roughly 4 light years away. With the current fastest imaginable (not even existing) transportation system it would take thousands of years to get to the closest star. But you could not sustain the life of generations of humans on a spaceship for thousands of years. So we have no hope of visiting even the planets of the closest star. But that's not all. The closest known and confirmed exoplanet which is assumed to be able to sustain human-like life is roughly 20 light years away, even farther. Even if we could travel with the speed of light (which is theoretically impossible unless you're an energy particle), the journey would take 20 years... and nobody says that there's ET on those planets. Perhaps ET is a lot farther.
What I'm trying to say is that cosmic distances are just so unimaginably long that there's no real hope for us visiting the places where ET might live and even for ET civilizations with much more advanced transportation systems, these distances are so huge that they probably would not come here to check us out. So what's left? Communicating using radio waves? Even with that in the best imaginable scenario sending/receiving a signal would take many many years. But in reality more likely it would take thousands of years (I'm assuming that ET lives a lot farther than the closest possibly inhabitable planet).
Again, this is my opinion, my belief, I understand that many don't agree and I have no intention of offending anybody, I'm just trying to explain why I think that finding ET is magnitudes less important than computing asteroid properties.

And I think this is why people finally chose to crunch for other projects, they too come to the conclusion that the process is long and involved and may never be helpful in the end.

[quote]Mapping asteroids, finding out their physical properties, trying to figure out when an asteroid could hit Earth, especially a big one, which could wipe out life completely, is a problem much closer at hand for humanity. OK, we have no idea how we could stop such an asteroid... yet. But I bet that if we knew for certain that we have only 50 years left, everybody would start thinking of a solution and pretty soon we would find it. It's amazing what humans can do when they are motivated. And there are 7 billions of us, with quite a few brilliant minds among us. I think we would save ourselves. But the first step is knowing what awaits us. So if you ask me, mapping asteroids is a lot more important than looking for ET. The fact that such asteroids, which can sterilize Earth, have hit in the past is proven. And it is statistically certain that it will happen again. It might not happen in 10 years, 100 years or even 1000 years, but it will definitely happen sometime. Maybe only in a few million years, if we are lucky.

So this is what I think... sorry for the long "speech". It seems I had a lot of rest on my vacation and I'm all philosophical now :) Just wanted to share these thoughts :)

This is sort of why there are several dozen Boinc projects, some come and gone, some still hanging on just fine. Each cruncher has to rationalize in their own mind why do I crunch here and not there. Lots of choices makes that easier to find one that piques our interest today, tomorrow is another story. Some people like the idea of helping children live by curing Malaria, some people like looking for ET, still others like this or that project. Choices, lots of choices, I think is a good thing as more and more people can find something that works for them. And more people crunching is always a good thing. One guy even setup a Boinc project to help him find a better beer recipe, it closed but I don't know if that is because he found it, or for other reasons.

I agree with mikey completely. The fact that there are so many projects for which people can crunch, the fact that everybody can choose at least one in which he or she really believes, is a great thing. And I'm really happy that A@H exists because for me it is the project that gives me the feeling of doing something really useful by getting involved. So let us thank the people who make this project work. It might not be perfectly maintained and there's certainly room for improvement, but the pure fact that it exists and it keeps going is a wonderful thing.

BTW, am I the only one getting the feeling that we're running out of work units to process? If you check the server status, the number of WUs ready to send is down to 65K. Not so long ago it was around 2M.

@ Andras

I couldn't have written it any better myself. I agree completely. Everyone's free to do whatever they want, as long as they don't try to prevent me from expressing my doubts.

@ Andras

I couldn't have written it any better myself. I agree completely. Everyone's free to do whatever they want, as long as they don't try to prevent me from expressing my doubts.

Nope I think doubts make one think of other possibilities, and then either accept or reject those doubts. Either way we get to step out of our cocoons and see things thru other peoples eyes.

During the 'Cold War' lots of people were very worried about nuclear bombs falling everywhere, me I didn't worry about them as I live near Washington DC and that will be a well targeted area, meaning I have zero chance of living thru it. But their concerns caused me to understand why some people moved to remote parts of the US and start creating 'bunkers' for themselves. It didn't make me want to do that, I like my high speed internet and grocery stores 10 minutes away, but if they want to chose differently it's okay with me. So far my way has been better for me, tomorrow could be a different story, but so far I think I am better off.

TBMS
Crunching SETI isn't a waste (not waist ;) ), until we find ET, then maybe it is :P.

Also you mentioned that theirs only a very small chance of finding anything, true, but if we don't look we'll never find!

Re A@H GPU app, it was only released fairly recently (just this year IIRC), significant speed gains are being seen in new releases.

Btw I agree with you that Asteroid hunting should be funded by the UN, although I will say, AFAIK A@H isn't about finding new asteroids it's about better understanding the properties of the ones we do know about.
I believe Orbit@home was going to find new asteroids but that's still on ice atm.

In my opinion (but I'm sure many will disagree) finding ET is a hopeless and most importantly pointless quest. Even if we found a signal, why would it matter?
Hopeless? Well maybe the current method will turn out to be, but the only way to find out is to try.
Pointless?? I'm still staggered that anyone could think that at least! ;) Are you seriously saying that if you suddenly heard a news flash on TV that an ET
signal had been received, & conclusively proven to be so, that you wouldn't sit up & take notice??

Regarding what could happen after the 'wow' factor, well travelling to these places has never been on the cards (don't know where you got that from, maybe it would be centuries into the future).
But for now, if they're not too far away (say a few tens of light years or so) then it could be possible to communicate with them (if we thought it was safe to!), obviously this would incur lengthy communication times & so would have to occur over generations.
Naturally any signals in the 100s of LYs away & up would pretty much bar communications, but if they transmitted regularly we could learn a lot about them. Imagine what would be learnt of us by an alien species 1000 LYs away picking up our radio & TV signals in ~950 yrs time.

Regarding discovered exoplanets, we've only really just started the planet hunt, so expect many more discoveries over our life times, the rate of discoveries has & will continue to accelerate rapidly (e.g. Kepler has given a big burst of info there).

. So if you ask me, mapping asteroids is a lot more important than looking for ET.

Agreed, which is why most of my CPU crunching power has been on A@H since I found out about it last year ;). I do roam a little & other slower/part time rigs crunch SETI as I still like to contribute to my 1st DC project :).


Oh & you could of made your links clickable ;).

Mikey
Regarding asteroid deflection, your not entirely right about having nothing at all to deflect them.
Their are 2 that I'm aware of offhand, although they only cover a very small range of likely scenarios.
1 option is using a satellite as a gravity tractor, i.e. you fly the satellite very close to the asteroid & it's own gravity very slowly pulls the asteroid off course. This option of course would require significant advance warning & not too large an asteroid to be effective.
2nd option (controversially) are nuclear missiles, but the scenarios where this would be possible &/or effective are likely smaller still. But if the asteroid is a solid one, not a collection of 'rubble' or ice but an iron or solid rock, if we get enough warning & again if it's not too big then it would be possible to detonate a nuke on it or very near it to deflect it.

Their are other ideas out their (mass projector, think that's the right name lol), but as you said, their not feasible right now.

---

Team AnandTech - SETI@H, Muon1 DPAD, Folding@H, MilkyWay@H, Asteroids@H, LHC@H, POGS, Rosetta@H, Einstein@H,DHPE & CPDN

Main rig - Ryzen 3600, 32GB DDR4 3200, RX 580 8GB, Win10
2nd rig - i7 4930k @4.1 GHz, 16GB DDR3 1866, HD 7870 XT 3GB(DS), Win7

Gentlemen,

also I have the feeling, that most arguments are correct and have a right to exist I must say that this is the wrong place to discuss it. Please move the discussion into the cafe section. I am shure that there are many more arguments that can be brought in. And it is good for the project, it's life.

But this is what is called 'hijacking' a thread. Threat title is 'Support for Radeon GPU's'.

Was there a special reason to choose nVidia for a gpu-app? Over @ Einstein they also started with nVidia. At some time they have choosen to try a openCL app for AMD-cards, and - what a surprise - the hosts with AMD gpu's are on top of the top-hosts list.

But if we are really running out of data a new app makes no sense ...

Alexander

Alexander is right, we are waaay off topic here. The thread hijacking was unintentional, though, I think :)

Something much more related to this thread: can we expect, along with ATI Radeon GPU support also some integrated Intel HD Graphics support?

Ah, maybe I should start another thread for this. I think I will.

But if we are really running out of data a new app makes no sense ...

OK, answered by the server status page, enough wu's there to crunch.

Mikey
Regarding asteroid deflection, your not entirely right about having nothing at all to deflect them.
Their are 2 that I'm aware of offhand, although they only cover a very small range of likely scenarios.
1 option is using a satellite as a gravity tractor, i.e. you fly the satellite very close to the asteroid & it's own gravity very slowly pulls the asteroid off course. This option of course would require significant advance warning & not too large an asteroid to be effective.
2nd option (controversially) are nuclear missiles, but the scenarios where this would be possible &/or effective are likely smaller still. But if the asteroid is a solid one, not a collection of 'rubble' or ice but an iron or solid rock, if we get enough warning & again if it's not too big then it would be possible to detonate a nuke on it or very near it to deflect it.

Their are other ideas out their (mass projector, think that's the right name lol), but as you said, their not feasible right now.

Yeah I knew of the options but as you they are realistic in all situations. For instance the ones that come from the Sun are VERY hard to detect right now and in fact the 2nd one that came in the same day the one that exploded over Russia was not even seen until the last couple of hours before it too exploded. There are plans to put more detectors in space, but they are woefully underfunded and are still only about detecting, not preventing. Yes I agree that knowing about something is by far the first step in formulating a plan to then do something about it. That's kind of why I am here, if we can map the ones we know, maybe we can figure out how they tumble, roll, etc and then come up with a plan to stop the ones that will hit us eventually.

As for some of the other reasons I am here, I gotta crunch someplace!!

I opened a separate thread for this in the cafe: Asteroid detection and prevention.
http://asteroidsathome.net/boinc/forum_thread.php?id=322#3215

any news about openCL and ATI card support?

We have now two volunteers who try to make OpenCL app for AMD cards. Next I'm so busy at work for now. If both of them failed to do OpenCL app, I will do one.

Z

Any progress in sight?

any news about openCL and ATI card support?

did anyone request some support to AMD for OpenCL programming?
They could be interested in supporting your project because could be a great way to sell a good number of high end card to boinc user.

any news about openCL and ATI card support?

did anyone request some support to AMD for OpenCL programming?
They could be interested in supporting your project because could be a great way to sell a good number of high end card to boinc user.

AMD does not help Boinc, Nvidia does help which is why alot of projects have Nvidia gpu crunching first. It's just not in AMD priorities to help Boinc right now. The video card market is FIRST by high end 'super computers', second by gamers, then somewhere down the list a bit comes us crunchers.

The admin said he had a couple of friends that can do it, if not he can do it when he gets more time.

We have now two volunteers who try to make OpenCL app for AMD cards. Next I'm so busy at work for now. If both of them failed to do OpenCL app, I will do one.

Z

Any progress in sight?

Sorry guys ... I'm still very busy at work. Meanwhile I made success at court of law and I can finally spent my free time with my son.