[leokennis]

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?

[keepamovin]

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

[gamer191]

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

[andsoitis]

> system that probably has led to scientific advances in other fields

Did it though?

[Izkata]

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.

[p-e-w]

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.

[MontyCarloHall]

>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.

[0] https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/245562

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0610377.pdf

[netsharc]

Probably due to the Great Filter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjtOGPJ0URM

[Waterluvian]

It’s all mostly all for nothing.

[blitzar]

It’s all mostly all for REDACTED

[keepamovin]

Well, except for Vogon poetry

[wongarsu]

(Re)search is still valuable, even if the result turns out to be negative.

[Cthulhu_]

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.