Propose you start the same topic on the SETI forums and see how long that lasts... you might convert a few to more earthly and achievable objective.

--//--

Hello cjslman,
Back in 2005, shortly after joining WCG, I started reading up on the history of Distributed Computing at
http://www.distributedcomputing.info/ . It linked to many interesting sites with information about past problems, false starts and controversies. I do not know if Kirk has been keeping up with the changes over the last 6+ years, but it is worth checking out.

Lawrence

The first Grid computing project that I heard of and I could run has been SETI a long long time ago. I had at that time a small PC and crunching one WU took me more or less 36 hours. I crunched some years later again with SETI but it did not last long because I simply think that it is not the right way to go.
I am very much interested in meeting an extraterrestrial intelligence as I am sure that out there in the vast universe there are many. But if we look at a universe that is 13-15 billion years old, and that our today intelligent life on earth took 4 billion years, there may be some intelligent beings out there with millions of years or a few billion years technological advance. I think that just searching the radio wave spectrum is a too primitive or prehistoric way to go for such an advanced form of intelligence. Maybe they communicate by quantum correlation, or gravitational waves or ???? . Imagine that the whole universe is correlated from the big-bang origin. This would mean that all particles composing this universe are quantum correlated in a way to each other. And there may be an infinite correlation mechanisms which would allow various correlation "channels". A lot of things that we do not know about. But we see from experiments that the size and number of particles that can be correlated together is increasing regularly. Where is the limit? For a photon the universe has no size and it will travel through all of it in no time. What does that mean. This plus correlation and you have the basics for an instantaneous communication system across the whole universe. Seems simple but maybe in a few millions years it could be achievable.

I think many of us came to WCG (and other medical/scientific research) via SETI. For me the excitement evaporated on reading the likelihood of locating other intelligences.

I agree: Let's fix problems here, on this planet, then move outward.