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this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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I hate this sentence with a burning passion for two reasons.
Firstly its position on an article like this implies that SETI@home not finding anything is a failing of distributed computing, but they could have run that code on a supercomputer and still not found anything.
But more importantly it speaks to a big misunderstanding of science that is not only ubiquitous among the general public, but is also common among funders of science and even scientists themselves. Science isn't about discoveries, it's about investigation. Don't get me wrong, discovering something new is amazing and it's what we would all want even if our funding didn't hinge on it, but the fact that SETI haven't found anything is still an important result and not a failure. I genuinely think this focus on discoveries will be the downfall of modern science if we're not careful, it means that important things like the sustainability of scientific software or reproducibility of research are being left by the wayside because they don't lead directly to discoveries.
Sorry, went off on a massive tangent there...
This reminds me of the plastics and fossil fuel industries telling consumers to recycle to fix the pollution problem.
Distributed computing for science research is like 0.01% of the wasted computing electricity while the idiocy of cryptocurrency where people literally waste electricity to create proof that their fiat imaginary coin has value to the suckers in their bigger fool scam.
Last I heard the world has a second UKs worth of burned fuel to make electricity for that ongoing scam.