SETI@home Needs your Help - email from Sir Arthur C. Clarke.
Posted: Thu Mar 16, 2006 7:14 pm
Anyone else get this:
(quote)
SETI@home needs your help. But before we tell you why - and how you can help -
Dan and I would like to thank you for your role in the SETI@home success story.
We would first like to thank you for your participation in SETI@home
(http://setiathome.berkeley.edu). During the first SETI@home project you
personally assisted us by searching for extraterrestrial signals in 10073 data
chunks and providing 8.519 years of computing time. We want you to
know we appreciate your efforts and the efforts of the other 5.4 million
volunteers who have donated over 2.4 million years of processing time.
When we started, people thought our projection of 100,000 users to be
overly optimistic! You helped us prove that public participation in
scientific computing could work. You also helped us to see that this type
of community effort deserved to be more common. That's why we developed the
Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing or BOINC. BOINC has the benefit of
allowing our volunteers the option of sharing their processing power with other
worthy projects in addition to SETI@home. These projects range from looking for
gravitational waves to searching for cures to diseases.
But all these successes are just a beginning. As you are aware, SETI@home
has successfully transitioned to operating under BOINC. Because of this,
new searches are on the horizon for SETI@home. We are releasing a new
version of our processing software that increases the sensitivity of our
search by a factor of two or more. We are building and installing a new
data recorder at Arecibo. This data recorder operates in conjunction with
a newly installed receiver that has the capability to observe seven places
on the sky simultaneously. It also increases our sensitivity by another
factor of five. These increases in sensitivity mean that SETI@home will
have capability of detecting signals that are three times more distant
than we could before. The region of space we can search will expand by a
factor of thirty. That's thirty times the chance that your computer will
detect that faint signal from another star.
This increase in capability isn't without cost. Following the "dot com"
bust, the commercial support that kept SETI@home running has largely
disappeared. Because of this loss of support, we can no longer count on
matching funds from the University of California. We are rapidly
approaching the end of what funds we do have. We we will need to raise
about $750,000 to pay for these new capabilities and to keep SETI@home
operating for the next year. Without this support SETI@home may be forced
to shut down (http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/sah_budget.php).
We hope that you will consider making a donation to SETI@home
(http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/donate.php). You can make a secure
donation by credit card by clicking this link. Instructions for donation
by check or money order are there as well. Unless you specify otherwise,
your donation will be noted by a star icon next to your username on the
SETI@home pages and your username will appear on our list of donors. If
you do not wish to have this recognition you may indicate that as well.
Please be assured that regardless of whether or not you choose to have
your donation be anonymous, SETI@home will not share your address with
other organizations.
You can check on our fundraising progress by visiting our main site at
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu
Thank You,
Sir Arthur C. Clarke (Author and Futurist)
Dan Werthimer (Chief Scientist, SETI@home)
For more information about how to donate:
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/donate.php
(/quote)
OK PEOPLE.
We have 301 members in the UBT SETI Team.
And only 2 green stars !! (Respect: "Seti-Cruncher" and "UBT - Damon Birch" )
Please show how generous you are by making even a small donation and let's get some green stars on OUR team.
Suggestion: (edit) SETI suggests $25 is the minimum - about £15 - but you can actually donate as little as $10 - enter it into the box to the right on the donation page (which is basically a few "pints")
If every SETI cruncher on our team donates at least $10, then we raise $3,000+ (/edit), to the project. If you don't want to do it directly, then you can give me your credit card number (I have a Merchant Account to do cc transactions) and I'll do it on behalf of the group. BUT then you won't get a green star !!.
regards,
Tim
(quote)
SETI@home needs your help. But before we tell you why - and how you can help -
Dan and I would like to thank you for your role in the SETI@home success story.
We would first like to thank you for your participation in SETI@home
(http://setiathome.berkeley.edu). During the first SETI@home project you
personally assisted us by searching for extraterrestrial signals in 10073 data
chunks and providing 8.519 years of computing time. We want you to
know we appreciate your efforts and the efforts of the other 5.4 million
volunteers who have donated over 2.4 million years of processing time.
When we started, people thought our projection of 100,000 users to be
overly optimistic! You helped us prove that public participation in
scientific computing could work. You also helped us to see that this type
of community effort deserved to be more common. That's why we developed the
Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing or BOINC. BOINC has the benefit of
allowing our volunteers the option of sharing their processing power with other
worthy projects in addition to SETI@home. These projects range from looking for
gravitational waves to searching for cures to diseases.
But all these successes are just a beginning. As you are aware, SETI@home
has successfully transitioned to operating under BOINC. Because of this,
new searches are on the horizon for SETI@home. We are releasing a new
version of our processing software that increases the sensitivity of our
search by a factor of two or more. We are building and installing a new
data recorder at Arecibo. This data recorder operates in conjunction with
a newly installed receiver that has the capability to observe seven places
on the sky simultaneously. It also increases our sensitivity by another
factor of five. These increases in sensitivity mean that SETI@home will
have capability of detecting signals that are three times more distant
than we could before. The region of space we can search will expand by a
factor of thirty. That's thirty times the chance that your computer will
detect that faint signal from another star.
This increase in capability isn't without cost. Following the "dot com"
bust, the commercial support that kept SETI@home running has largely
disappeared. Because of this loss of support, we can no longer count on
matching funds from the University of California. We are rapidly
approaching the end of what funds we do have. We we will need to raise
about $750,000 to pay for these new capabilities and to keep SETI@home
operating for the next year. Without this support SETI@home may be forced
to shut down (http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/sah_budget.php).
We hope that you will consider making a donation to SETI@home
(http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/donate.php). You can make a secure
donation by credit card by clicking this link. Instructions for donation
by check or money order are there as well. Unless you specify otherwise,
your donation will be noted by a star icon next to your username on the
SETI@home pages and your username will appear on our list of donors. If
you do not wish to have this recognition you may indicate that as well.
Please be assured that regardless of whether or not you choose to have
your donation be anonymous, SETI@home will not share your address with
other organizations.
You can check on our fundraising progress by visiting our main site at
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu
Thank You,
Sir Arthur C. Clarke (Author and Futurist)
Dan Werthimer (Chief Scientist, SETI@home)
For more information about how to donate:
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/donate.php
(/quote)
OK PEOPLE.
We have 301 members in the UBT SETI Team.
And only 2 green stars !! (Respect: "Seti-Cruncher" and "UBT - Damon Birch" )
Please show how generous you are by making even a small donation and let's get some green stars on OUR team.
Suggestion: (edit) SETI suggests $25 is the minimum - about £15 - but you can actually donate as little as $10 - enter it into the box to the right on the donation page (which is basically a few "pints")
If every SETI cruncher on our team donates at least $10, then we raise $3,000+ (/edit), to the project. If you don't want to do it directly, then you can give me your credit card number (I have a Merchant Account to do cc transactions) and I'll do it on behalf of the group. BUT then you won't get a green star !!.
regards,
Tim