Posted on 02/20/2018 11:46:35 AM PST by nickcarraway
Scientists searching space for intelligent life already have a difficult job, but some are now saying their task is being made even tougher because of digital currencies like Bitcoin.
“We’d like to use the latest GPUs (graphics processing units)… and we can’t get ’em,” Dr. Dan Werthimer told the BBC. The chief scientist of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI Project, says the surging demand for GPUs from cryptocurrency miners is leaving the computer chips in short supply.
“This is a new problem, it’s only happened on orders we’ve been trying to make in the last couple of months,” Dr. Werthimer added. “That’s limiting our search for extra-terrestrials, to try to answer the question, ‘Are we alone? Is there anybody out there?'”
Graphics processing units are high-performance chips used for processing large amounts of computer data. They have also been used for powering high quality video games and are now being stacked together by cryptocurrency miners to “farm” the online cash.
For SETI, the GPUs are needed to process all the different frequency channels the group monitors in outer space. “We don’t know what frequency ET will be broadcasting on and we want to look for lots of different signal types,” Dr. Werthimer explains. SETI’s telescope and lab at UC Berkeley reportedly uses around 100 GPUs to crunch all of the data coming in from space.
The boom in cryptocurrency’s popularity hasn’t just meant smaller supplies of GPUs available, it’s also sent the price soaring as well. “Strong demand in the cryptocurrency market exceeded our expectations,” tech company Nvidia’s CFO Colette Kress said, via Ars Technica.
“We’ll be able to weather it but it is coming out of our contingency budget.” said Prof. Aaron Parsons of UC Berkeley. “We’re buying a lot of these things, it’s going to end up costing about $32,000 extra.” Prof. Parson and his team were reportedly buying their GPUs for a radio telescope in South Africa. Since his team initially priced the chips at around $500 in 2017, the price has doubled to over $1,000 each.
Or “Living in a Van Down By the River”.
I thought they had ended that; but here it is:
https://setiathome.berkeley.edu
(website down temporarily, though)
Maybe they’re looking for the same thing.
I have no idea what Bitcoin is or how it works so I looked it up here:
Being a ‘geezer’ is comforting;)
Pointless research complaining about market forces
Too bad soooo sad
Cryptocurrency is actually helping the SETI@Home/BOINC projects: http://www.gridcoin.us
Also helping the Stanford “Foldiing@Home” project:
https://curecoin.net
and
https://foldingcoin.net
If advanced life is out there, and wants us to know it’s there, it would have contacted us already.
SETI is a total fraud.
It is based on the assumption that somewhere out there an advanced civilization would give away their location with signals on the electromagnetic spectrum.
Only humans are _that_ stupid.
The first one that comes up on that search says "sold out".
That tells you everything you need to know. He's worried about his budget.
So you've never observed that things go in cycles?
In your universe everything remains static forever?
If advanced life were out there, it would be way, way out there - it might send a radio message in response to detecting our own radio emissions, but even that would take years of travel time. A goodly number of years, actually, for the round trip.
Why not pass a law requiring them to?
—
That would be racist and the Dems would have yet another election issue to scream across the MSN
Can you prove that?
I’ve seen no proof that there is.
There’s certainly no evidence of it thus far. Those who say there’s no such thing are on firmer ground than those who insist that there is.
That just means we can’t definitively say there is/isn’t then.
Christianity and belief in alien beings are mutually exclusive. If one is true, the other isn’t.
The least they could do would be to make
earth an alien free zone, or at maybe limit
immigration to 10 million a year.
And what about all those alien children brought
here by their parents...
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