This was my screensaver for several years starting in maybe 2001. It felt really cool as a 12 year old to be contributing to the project in some small way.
For a long time I would periodically check on the screen saver in case there would be some big message saying my computer found aliens or something. Never did though :)
I feel sorry for every child who didn't have SETI@home and X-Files at the same time during their childhood.
The truth is still out there.
Oh, I feel this. As a pre-teen, I loved it. SETI@Home running on our family's Pentium 100, X-Files, and hanging out on the "Parascope" forum and chatroom on AOL for all things UFO related. An "I Want To Believe" poster on my wall.
I've (thankfully) moved on past that, but I look back at that with nostalgia.
Same here, you either move past it or go crazy, if the UFO subreddits are any indication. Given the population was already obsessed with blurry clumps of pixels in short video clips, AI is going to send a lot of those people into trailers in the desert with a lifetime supply of aluminum foil.
And now that we have mass-produced hyper-maneuverable quad-copter drones, the whole "it moved backward in a way that no aircraft ever could!" doesn't really hit as hard.
My current UFO conspiracy brain is that the UAP makers want Greenland as their home, and the US wants to get the benefits of that. Because that would be less crazy to me than what it's really about.
This is probably the reason | except the UAP makers are now us
When conspiracies were a bit more fun.
Anyone else collect The X-Factor partworks magazine? I used to love reading it.
Of all the current US conspiracy theories, the UFO/UAP conspiracy is still the most interesting and fully developed/ongoing conspiracy space. Just check out the recent 'Age of Disclosure' documentary from this year.
I'm not arguing a position on the theory, just saying it's very active and has the old-school qualities that were present in the 90's.
There's some genuinely weird shit unexplained, I'll give you that. Unlike Bigfoot, where you can look at a map of the historical range of bears and see it exactly matches where all the Bigfoot sightings are.
It probably is both. Up for debate the ratio.
> the Mississippi Delta and Florida... Even Scotland. None of these are much noted for their bears.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_black_bear
The US South has bears.
There are some outliers (like Hawaii, or the 2 sightings in my local forest preserve) which cannot be bears, but what you will find is there is way more bear populations wandering around than you realize.
The trend is pretty clear.
Pilots from the Eastern Bloc and NATO countries have had sightings. It's not just a US thing. People have been claiming to see them for longer than the USA has existed.
US sightings get publicised best due to the nature of international media (wide distribution of US films, TV and books)... But there certainly are other places claiming to see them. There are a lot of supposed sightings in Chile for example, which doesn't have a huge air force.
You know when you pass a nice classic car reeeeally slowly so you can get a good look? Aw yeah, don't see many of those, do you?
IMHO, the whole social/psychological aspect of the "conspiracy" or phenomenom or whatever you want to call it is at least as interesting as the phenomenon itself.
It's not a conspiracy anymore
I mean this is a meta-conspiracy in itself. I don't think you're incorrect/wrong, but using one conspiracy theory to hide a conspiracy with lots of evidence is interesting.
I would be more interested in the former USSR or China, maybe Iran and Latin America. The Eastern Bloc must have covered up a lot of stuff but would have wild stories.
It looks like folding@home is still going https://foldingathome.org/
I'm quite surprised these are still around as I hadn't seen them mentioned in so long.
I always assumed the phase out of screensavers (and introduction of CPU low power modes) were terminal for them.
Folding@home got a boost recently from Pewdipie deploying his 12-stack 4090 build against it and then getting a bunch of his fanbase to also participate in his folding@home squad.
They saw a huge uptick in users during the COVID pandemic. As the corona virus is a protein shell, and their software folds protein molecules, they were able to apply it to look for targets for other molecules to attach to the virus where it would normally latch onto a cell, this could then lead to treatments.
They'd found some promising results, and were working with a pharmaceutical company to manufacture the first compounds that could then be tested. Unfortunately that company's facility was located in eastern Ukraine. =(
But that aside, they've still been going strong.
I could not find mentions of any Ukraine-based company working with them. Do you have more info?
Are they doing anything not covered by alphafold? I thought that approach basically crushed all previous efforts.
Here's their take on it:
https://foldingathome.org/2024/05/02/alphafold-opens-new-opp...
World Community Grid at https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/ is also running, though it has had struggles since moving datacenters, and it seems their external stats are still out of commission.
I've recently decided to end my own participation, mainly because I've run three systems into the ground, and we're now in the "save what you can" era. There's one motherboard I want to get refurbished, since it became unstable when idle but loved 24x7 crunching. It would make a great NAS if I could find some DDR4 at a price I could stomach, or I could lay it in as a spare if the new motherboard goes south in the future.
I would've thought that with the advent of general purpose GPUs, cloud computing, etc that they would've run out of work by now.
I think you’re missing the main limiting resource: money.
Some of these projects could occupy entire regions of cloud compute in some cases for awhile, some even more depending on the problem. But running that for even a short time or decades needed would cost more money than anyone has to do.
Academic HPCs existed long before cloud compute options and for certain problem spaces could also be used even in non-distributed memory cases to handle this stuff. But you still needed allocation time and sometimes even funding to use them, competing against other cases like drug design, cancer research, nuclear testing… whatever. So searching for ET could be crowdsourced and the cost distributed which is something that made it alluring and tractable.
I used to run a small academic cluster that was underutilized but essentially fully paid for. I’d often put some of these projects running as background throttled processes outside scheduler space so the 90% of the time no one was using them, the hardware would at least be doing some useful scientific research since it’s after-all funded largely from federal scientific research funding. There was of course some bias introduced by which projects I chose to support whereas someone else may have made a more equitable choice.
I forgot all about this project - thanks for the reminder!
You can run on a spare Raspberry Pi. I remember doing that. Performance isn’t great but every little bit helps
Does it? I stopped doing @home projects because I started never finishing a unit for credit under BOINC.
I have Pi4B 2GB, Pi4B 4GB, and Pi400 folding full time with reasonable success. You need to use the 64-bit OS.
Some sites are using *@home as a cdn.
I have several machines contributing to it all the time, and every now and then I run it on my 5090 at home to heat up my room a bit in winter :D It does an incredible 1M points per day, it's a monster of a GPU.
How many papers have been published as a result of this, and more pertinently, how many "real" things are now being made or used based on that? I'm hoping it's not all just perpetual "regrowing teeth" territory where nothing ever comes from it.
This is extremely far from any of my expertises, but I'll offer an answer while no one else did (please correct me!). Basically, all medicine (i.e. drugs) we have are proteins or certain compounds that fit within some of our cell's (or viruses) molecules and does funny stuff to them, like disabling certain parts, acting as a signal to regulate behavior, and so on. Doing funny stuff is basically about fitting into another molecule. So research about how proteins (most molecules (after water) in our body, I guess) interact is incredibly important in basically all medicine, specially in the discovery of medicine (like suggesting compounds (drug) that could fit in certain receptors or perform certain function), and understanding disease/pathologies (which give ideas on how to prevent and treat them).
If folding@home helps to understand and model this behavior of molecules (which I guess tends to be difficult and unreliable to do without the aid of computers), it is extremely helpful. Now I don't know other details like, perhaps molecular biology is the bottleneck and there is scant available molecules to analyze (reducing its impact/marginal sensitivity), or perhaps compute really is a bottleneck in this particular problem. But nonetheless it seems like a great project for which contributions do make a difference.
(Note: although, that said, if you were expecting something like 'compute->miracle drug comes out', I believe that's not quite how it works; research in general rarely works that way, I think because the constraint space and problem space that would require this approach is too large and complicated; and in fact I believe many if not most significant discoveries have resulted from playing around and investigating random molecules, often from (nonhuman) animals, plants and bacteria[1]; although molecular sciences (molecular biology) seem to enable a slightly more methodological approach)
[1] The GLP-1 based weight loss drugs for example came from investigating the Gila monster lizard venom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLP-1_receptor_agonist#History
Wow, 333 words without even attempting to address the question. Have you considered a career in PR?
Honestly, I doubt it was an LLM because an LLM would have stuck closer to answering the question.
I'm not quite sure what the point of the response was.
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I wasn't aware asking a question was FUD. That's also a list of achievements with no links without any information regarding how much if any volunteer contributed computing has contributed to them.
> please have a look around before spreading FUD
Please don't turn HN into reddit.
> That's also a list of achievements with no links without any information regarding how much if any volunteer contributed computing has contributed to them.
That's papers that are citing them. The reason for no links is explained on the page,
> The distribution rules for published papers vary by the publication in which the paper appears. Due to these rules, a public web-source of each paper may not be immediately available. If full version is not linked below or available elsewhere on the Internet (Google Scholar can be helpful for this), most, if not all of these publications are freely available at a local municipal or collegial library. These articles are written for scientists, so the contents are fairly technical.
I remember at the time that donating CPU time was considered trivial. Not so much today.
At the time of SETI@home, a typical CPU used maybe 20W at full load, fans usually ran at constant speed, and power management was much more primitive. So you barely noticed the difference between idle and full load, both on your electricity bill and on the noise the PC made.
Now hundreds of watts is not uncommon if you also use the GPU, and people are much more conscious about how much power computers use. And at full power, fans spin up loudly, laptops get uncomfortably hot, etc... It means you are not going to do it as easily. It probably didn't help the "@home" projects.
My homelab is in a closet that has the water meter for my above-garage apartment. Before I put a heater in the garage itself, I needed to make sure that that closet didn't freeze. I rigged up a temperature sensor to start mprime on a server if the temperature got too low, but higher than the electric heater that's also in that closet. I figured I might as well contribute to research if I'm just burning watts for heat anyways.
Where can I buy a compute-for-heat home system?
Edit: I have a heat pump, which is more efficient for heating of course
A late model Intel MacBook from eBay and pretty much any Electron app from 2020 should do it.
I remember some startups trying to install cryptominers in people homes, the idea was to use the electricity that would be spent heating the space anyways. The company would pay for the mining hardware while the customer would provide the electricity, and the profits would be shared.
I don't know how it worked out, but the idea was there.
I know of this one [1], a 1000W space heater with integrated cryptominer. Looks kike you can actually buy it now. Not sure how much the mined crypto offsets the heating costs though.
You might prefer a heat pump.
My understanding is that for most residential heat pumps, the temperature needed to make the heat pump less efficient than resistive heating is so low that it enters a range that the pump doesn't even work anymore.
However, that's only a measure of efficiency. It could still be that the throughput isn't enough. A 30 kW resistive heater can ALWAYS output 30 kW of heat. But my 7 kW heat pump could produce anywhere from 14 to 30 kW depending on outside temperature.
I generally run BOINC during the winter in place of a space heater, but that's only a cold month or two of the year.
Wanted to share this funny SETI@home prank that Monzy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Maynes-Aminzade) did in 1999, where he created a fake VB app that tricked a coworker into believing that his computer successfully found an extraterrestrial signal.
The original site is down, but jump to November 5, 1999 to see the screenshot. https://web.archive.org/web/20030404093458/http://www.monzy....
Sigh. I miss websites like this.
Small personal web is best web.
Yishan Wong jumpscare
My first internship was at DEC / Compaq in 2000. I was on their C compiler team and my project was to build seti tools with their updated Alpha Linux C compiler and compare perf against the tools built with the GNU C compiler. It was a fun project.
That is very fun.
I remember running SETI@home for ages, then transitioning to Einstein@home to help LIGO chunk through the ELIGO data. I also remember BOINC was a buggy piece of shit
This happened in March 2020. https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=85267
I remember feeling like a right scientific benefactor running the SETI@Home screensaver on my Pentium II, looking at the fancy graphs.
Was it all for nothing?
No, they just published two papers in 2025. You can watch a video about it or link to paper in my other comment on this thread: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt07R_amRT8
Well it led to the creation of BOINC, a distributed computing system that probably has led to scientific advances in other fields
So I wouldn’t say it was all for nothing, but it’s main benefit was the idea, and not the results it generated
> system that probably has led to scientific advances in other fields
Did it though?
Except as a kid back then, the screensaver was trivial to install and neat to look at, and BOINC was a pain. I dropped it when they switched. I imagine some less-technical adults who were interested did as well.
(Re)search is still valuable, even if the result turns out to be negative.
It’s all mostly all for nothing.
It’s all mostly all for REDACTED
Well, except for Vogon poetry
That's pretty dismissive outright; consider uh. All forms of distributed computing, from cloud computers to bittorrent to bitcoin / cryptocurrency. Seti@home was one of, if not the first distributed projects, the predecessor of cloud computing and spreading a workload over many computers, years before Hadoop and map/reduce became popular (which at least in my head was the start of "big data" and cloud computing).
I won't claim it was "the" most important or it was critical in that, but it's not to be dismissed.
The fact that all SETI endeavors haven’t really found anything is actually a very valuable result, because it constrains “they’re everywhere, we just haven’t been looking” arguments quite a bit.
Even humanity’s (weak) radio emissions would be detectable from tens of light years away, and stronger emissions from much further. So the idea that intelligent life is absolutely everywhere that was liberally tossed around a few decades ago is pretty much on life support now.
>Even humanity’s (weak) radio emissions would be detectable from tens of light years away, and stronger emissions from much further.
That's not true. Non-directional radio transmissions (e.g. TV, broadcast radio) would not be distinguishable from cosmic background radiation at more than a light year or two away [0]. Highly directional radio emissions (e.g. Arecibo message) an order of magnitude more powerful than the strongest transmitters on Earth would only be visible at approximately 1000 light years away [1], and would only be perceptible if the detector were perfectly aligned with the transmission at the exact time it arrived.
This is my biggest issues with all of the messages we keep sending out to space. By the time it gets to its destination, it will basically be indistinguishable from noise
Is there a reason we would need to coordinate on what to exchange rather than, say, beginning with encyclopedias and textbooks then moving to a constant stream of notable papers, news, discoveries, etc? What kind of bandwidth can you hit with a cooperating neighbour where improvements become civilisationally important? How many bytes (megabytes? Terabytes?) of meaningful new data does humanity produce per second? I suspect it's reasonably low.
Thanks, these rules of thumb are very useful.
When you say perfectly aligned, what kind of precision are we talking about? If we aimed a receiver at a nearby star, would we be able to achieve this kind of precision?
Probably due to the Great Filter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjtOGPJ0URM
or not:
"Dissolving the Fermi Paradox": https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404
Years ago I worked for another BOINC project, climateprediction.net and I'm pleased to see that they are still operating (see: https://main.cpdn.org/). IIRC SETI@Home was well-known back then - I'd always mention it if people asked what I did, and they usually recognised it.
I rebuilt my PII system last year and really wanted to run SAH on it for old time's sake but sadly that hasn't been possible for a long time. I miss watching that old screensaver and optimising the system performance so I could get through a WU in less time, iirc at the time it took about 18 hours each.
Used to have this running on all of our computers in the office back in 1999, or 2000. Such a satisfying screensaver! Then I went even further and put it on the servers too.
If i remember correctly, back then even some sysadmins were even fired over it because of the usage of resources. It also sprouted some weird projects on how to distribute all those unused cpu cycles for other things.
Yeah I remember a few projects attempting "grid computing", where the idea was distributing application threads across CPUs over freaking ethernet.
Have to say that would be a fun puzzle to try and optimize for, but network latency would always be a hard physical constraint no matter how fast. Maybe some niche use cases, but then multi-core CPUs and GPU processing really took off and I guess it just got even less useful.
And yet, distributed computing only became huge when people could earn / generate money off of it. Seti / Folding walked so that bitcoin could run?
I can't really condemn people trying to earn money with their cpu cycles, but good causes sometimes still exist.
Apparently they are not completely finished with the project - according to this article from five days ago, there are still some signal candidates currently in the process of being re-observed with the FAST radio telescope.
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/search-for-life/this...
Any other worthwhile projects to donate cpu time to? I see Folding@Home is still going.
Update: looks like there is a Wikipedia list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volunteer_computing_pr...
Would still be nice to know for the applicable ones if any success have come out of these or if they're just fun toys
The 14 year old me wondering if aliens were being discovered on my pentium 4 feels like the answer maybe out there. BOINC and SETI.
Raise your hand if you read the title as "... in hiberNation"!
:)
Wasnt this the original wording?
Wait, they have been in hibernation for almost several years, why to publish it now?
It just completed. Published paper. Final release & final analysis: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ade5ab/...
TLDR of jve's AI comment:
You know of this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal
SETI at Home was a screensaver that was looking for signals like that via distributed searching and they didn't find anything (but they do have telescope time for tackling the 92 highest priority follow-up scans).
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As someone who cares about HN remaining a place for humans to engage in curious conversation, please read:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45077654
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43979537
Hello chatgpt, what should I make for dinner with bananas and chicken breast as the only ingredients?
I started running SETI back in 1999 when it first came out. I ran it on both my personal machines and even had it running on several servers I controlled at work. I probably ran it for several years before losing interest, pulling it off of everything. I guess I am a bit surprised to learn it was still running. It was quite unique back in the day. I wonder how many years of CPU time were burned running this thing.
Does anyone have a mirror of the old Mac SETI client? setiathome_mac_3_08.hqx? I'd like to see if I can get it running again on my old iMac. Either the OS 9 or the early OS X one would work.
I checked the wayback machine and the download pages are still findable, but the client downloads are all FTP links and don't seem retrievable.
I don’t believe extra terrestrial life will contact us through effort or negligence via radio. To help proof this I’ve run the SETI@HOME screensaver for years.
I used to work in a lab and we set up all 256 machines with the screensaver for when they weren't running tasks. It was fun to walk though there and think we were "helping".
RIP SETI@home!!!
I remember setting up SETI on my first computer on dial-up when I was 17 years old! It was such an exciting thing to participate in!
What we need next is SAGI@home, a distributed computing platform for finding free and open weights that leads to AGI.
There was another launched around the same time as Seti@Home and before Folsing@Home. It was called IBM Grid.org [0]. It did the same as Seti@Home, but researched cancer.
Here [1] is a list of all active community computation projects and historical ones.
[0], https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid.org
[1], https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volunteer_computing_pr...
Is there any other alien searching distribution screensaver? It was really interesting watching it do FFT back in the day.
wow. I didn't expect that to ever happen. one of the first crowdsourcing platforms...
on the other hand, WETI still seems to be up, so you could contribute there.
Oh man, SETI@home! That takes me back. That screensaver was a total vibe—my little gateway drug to distributed computing. It was wild feeling like my humble PC was out there, just a small cog in this massive cosmic search party. The thought that it might, against all odds, stumble on "the signal"... that was the magic of it. That specific kind of hopeful, nerdy optimism of the early 2000s is hard to find now.
You hit the nail on the head about missing projects like that. It wasn't just about the science; it was about the story, the shared dream. You felt like you were part of the crew on the starship, even if you were just scrubbing the decks. Modern BOINC projects are awesome, but they don't quite have that same "Holy cow, we're listening for E.T.!" mainstream charm. It was our generation's version of a barn raising, but for the galaxy.
Thanks for the nostalgia trip, my dude. Here's hoping the aliens are just shy and on dial-up.
Oh, I used to run it during the early 2000's.
mods: typo in title (hiberNation)
I'm beginning to wonder if typos, missing words, and other grammatical error in titles is an accidental thing, or if someone has discovered that it gets more "engagement".
It could be [sic] added to it, as the source has the same typo.
Recently:
SETI Home Flags 100 Signals After Sorting 12B Others
there's always folding@home if you like contributing idle cycles to projects like this. it's not quite alien hunting but it's kinda neat to try to brute force protein structures to beat various diseases.
What is hiberation? First I thought it was a typo, but it's on the website in the same spelling too. I couldn't find it in my dictionary
Contributing resources to a scientific experiment aligns contributions with outcomes, since getting a hit is knowledge that everyone benefits from: the result (including a negative result) is in the public domain and benefits everyone to know. In this case, the result is that after 20 years of distributed search, no plausible ET signal was found and verified. That's good to know!
they never found any extraterrestials. And they never will...
hiberation
Tastier rations I guess.
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those darn good for nothin' kids amirite
unhelpful and untrue
I remember seeing a prank program years ago that showed the SETI@home screensaver for a bit, then popped up an alert box saying "Alien Life Found!" with options to submit or cancel(!).
If you tried to submit it would spend a while with a really slow progress bar, and then say it failed to submit and asked you to contact SETI directly. I wonder if anyone actually did....
I wonder if that screensaver ever made it into the Xscreensaver BSOD screensaver. I hope so.
My dad did a similar thing with a bunch of computers at his store. It made way more sense back when processors didn't clock down efficiently so there was such a thing as 'wasted/excess clock cycles' you could donate to a distributed computing project. Now though processors shut off cores, reduce their clock speed etc so there's a lot less spare processing power you can siphon off without increasing power draw.
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People were doing this as a donation, not because they perceived it to be free.
True but it was much cheaper when a computer you might have on for other reasons wouldn't consume noticeably more power for your donation, eg computer lab admins which I think made up some of the top contenders of the leader boards. There were definitely groups that would run clusters of computers just for the donation (my dad was one of those too, there was no other reason to run those PCs other than Seti@Home) but for the average home user it was spare cycles that were low cost to free.
I am here to inform you that people were doing this for a variety of reasons, and one of those absolutely was because the cycles were free and going to waste.
It was my screensaver too and it felt like the most sci-fi thing ever. I'd stare it while daydreaming about aliens.
Wow! My screensaver was some guy's project to invent running and walking creatures from leverages and wheels via genetic algorithms. I can't remember project name neither .edu domain connected to it.