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The SETI Project is well known, especially its @home effort which essentially is a huge distributed computing effort that aims to make effective use by stealing some CPU cycles from temporarily unused computers to do bits of computation.There is yet another extremely large pool of processing power of which only about (or so we're told by shady books on the subject) 10-20% is used. That's obviously the collective brains of adult humans (we'll leave out children for they seem to putting it to use by playing and learning).
Perhaps our brains could be tapped from time to time while we're gossiping, watching inane programmes or films, staring at visuals and consequently not doing any conscious work. Maybe they could be used even while we are working, if it could be non-intrusive. Surely, this thought isn't practical today and will easily be controversial ;-) (don't want you peeking into my neurons & synapses, thank you). But the worst scenario of all would be if statistics about what we do with all the power available at our disposal thanks to our massive mom's-womb-endangering brains were made available. D'oh!
3 comments:
The SETI project reminded me of Chrysalis a few yrs back in COEP..two of my friends gave a presentation on SETI and our very own Sapkal sir(u wud b knowing him right?) asked some questions which werent even remotely related to wht SETI/the presentation addressed..it was awfully stupid..guess his brains were also processing something else!
SETI @home is an impressive system. I am proud to announce that I closely work with the person who thought of it, put it together and put SETI on the map of Popular Science.
Infact just last week I was standing face to face with the racks of Sun stations which power the whole system at the Space Science Lab in UC. Berkeley.
schrodinger: would that be Seth Shostak? (He's the only name I know w.r.t SETI - he usually used to be its de facto spokesman)
Either way, quite wonderful for you to be in the midst of all that.
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