SETI & Crunching news

Richard Lawn has posted another interesting article to "SETI Perspectives". This one is titled Seeing the Unseeable: The Black Hole Image and is about the Event Horizon Telescope's image of the black hole in M87.

An article by Ben Lindbergh in The Ringer discusses the history and status of SETI@home as it turns 20.

Happy Anniversary! On this date in 1999, SETI@home came online. Since then millions of our volunteers have helped us sift through petabytes of data from multiple radio telescopes. ET still hasn't shown up to the party.

We're not discouraged. We're able to examine less than a tenth of a percent of the radio spectrum, over only 1/3 of the sky and a limited number of additional stars. But our capabilities are increasing every day. In 1999 it took up to a week to process a single workunit on a home PC. Now, on a machine with a GPU, it might only take a few minutes to do a far more detailed and more sensitive analysis. Who knows what the next 20 years will bring?

Richard Lawn has written a new article, this one on the Panoramic Optical SETI effort, PANOSETI. As a bonus he includes a bit of an update on 'Oumuamua.

An update on the SETI@home back-end data analysis is here.

We had to recover the master database on oscar from a backup taken today on carolyn. Oscar is now back to being the master DB and carolyn is once again the replica DB. Things will be a bit slow as the database becomes resident in memory.

Richard Lawn has given us a new SETI Perspectives article to think about. This one is about the Drake Equation.

This time the primary database machine crashed and hasn't automatically recovered. We've fallen back to the replica machine, and the only symptom should be a few extra hours of outage.

I'm glad we have the replica.