Prius owners are forward thinking people conscious of personal and social costs to humanity. For this reason, I tend to believe a lot of you would be interested in helping SETI (Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence) in its mission to prove we aren't alone In the universe. If intelligent life were discovered it would be possibly the greatest single milestone for mankind since the creation of the wheel--- it would create instant social change and open minds to new possibilities outside our "bubble" earth. (Yes there would be negatives, too. But most progress comes with negatives--lots of people get run over by wheels for example.) Anyway--SETI relies on a computer program that runs on volunteers computers when the screensaver is on. This program gets bits of signal data from large radio telescopes and processes each bit sending the results back to a central computer. This basically helps them do their work without spending money on supercomputers which are extremely expensive to buy, run, and maintain. Recently china partnered with SETI- providing massive amounts of data from their Tianyan ("eye of heaven") radio telescope. SETI can't keep up with the data with the current volunteer computers and they are asking people to donate money or volunteer their computers (or phones) by installing their software called SETI@home. I already volunteer my computer....mine is extremely powerful so I volunteer 75% of the power at all times. If I need to use the full power of the computer I simply pause seti@home. This software is developed and run by University of California Berkely- it is very trustworthy. If you want to volunteer or donate $ please visit Setiathome.berkely.edu It will have you install software called BOINC (Berkely Open Infrastructure Network Computing) which will run the seti@home project. (You can use BOINC to volunteer computer power to other projects as well---like human genomics, mathematics, atmospheric modeling etc. Etc) Feel free to ask me any technical questions about installation and settings. I hold certifications in computer networking and Information Security. I'd be happy to help. You can also install an android app called BOINC that will use your phone's processor only when it is charging at night. I would be careful about this, though, and make sure your phone is in a cool place and doesn't have a heavy case that would make it get very hot.
I used to be part of the project from 2001-2007. It was kind of mesmerizing and entertaining watching the screen as my computer churned through the packets of info. Then I started having too many problems with the program and my machine so I finally just walked away from it. I briefly looked at it again a few years later and saw they had a "boatload" of data users have sent back that hasn't been followed up on at their end. They simply had too much volume received over the years. Has the backlog gotten any better?
I used SETI@Home on my Macs, but when I got a PC, Folding@Home was better supported. Folding@Home helps understand Proteins and treatments for illnesses involving mis-folding by Proteins. It runs on Windows, Linux and MacOS, with versions for the Chrome Browser and some Android devices. Folding@home – Fighting disease with a world wide distributed super computer. Just like SETI@Home is a project at Berkeley, Folding@Home is a Stanford project. My strong advice is to do the express install, and watch for firewall questions, and allow them. It needs to contact the University.
We notably lack an overview of this and other appeals to un-reimbursed public computational power. All (probably) are motivated by good goals. Some successes are occasionally reported. Seti@home says they have >3 teraFLOpS. Folding@home does not make their public-computation status easy to know. Several others also exist. Making no judgement about value of various stated goals. I only wonder about who's got the FLOpS. How many public computational FLOpS are there? With that known, could move on to hashing to claim (mine) cryptocurrencies. With that known we could construct a very interesting pie chart of global public computational resources. What is it? (entire pie) What slice is donated to gratis public-computational projects as here? What fraction is monetized for cryptocurrency mining? Everything else is what we do with these appliances we've purchased. Very few decades ago, none of this existed. The world has recently vastly changed.
SETI was a good idea, but I've grown tired of the search. It has turned into a lifelong career for Seth, so I understand why he wants to continue. It is clear that the ETs don't use radio like we do or we would have heard something already. If I were in charge of research budgets, I'd follow the reports of Charles Hall about how the Tall White vessels operate. Miles of fiber optic coils energized by a zoo of subatomic particles. Start with ordinary photons of various energy levels. See the APPENDIX A of "Millennial Hospitality IV: After Hours". One of the reports is that a deep space craft was damaged while traveling at superluminal speed, and they communicated their problem at an even higher speed.
Folding@home stats report Is the most clear Folding@home stats report List of distributed computing projects - Wikipedia
Folding@Home offers a better future if it succeeds, and it has succeeded some. Other projects offer more pure science, more knowledge, less results. On the other hand, it supports 'big pharma'. It is mostly looking for treatments, not cures.
Look into "Ayurveda" if the desire is to progress from treatment to cures. Actually, however, there is no such thing as cure, since the physical body is made of elements that will in due course of time disintegrate eventually. Ayurveda provides good guidelines to understand the different body types and how to live in harmony with the natural cycles of day/night, seasons etc with the aim to live a relatively pain free life as long as the machine (bag of bones) endures. Hare Krishna!
There are several animals that do not degrade with age. Lobsters just grow larger until they're eaten. Goggle "immortal animals", for example Immortal Animals: 7 Animals That Live Forever | Reader's Digest
I started crunching for SETI on May 20, 1999. (way before BOINC) For quite a while, I was in the top 0.001% of the world in returned results and had approx 9,000 cores on several platforms doing work. I did my bit for little green men and then some including Folding and others. It was fun and the team competitions were fun. I still have an active account. Alas resources were needed elsewhere.
