Do I sense a lack of enthusiasm for participating in distributed
computing projects here ? ;-) To help you make up your mind here is a
great link describing each of the projects to choose from and how to
join:
How-To: Join Distributed Computing projects that benefit humanity
Also see Glarusm@m's original blog
Lets help the scientists in which he describes the
BOINC open source infrastructure for distributed computing referred to in the title of this thread.
I would have thought that especially the life science projects are
right down the alley of the betterhumans/transhumanist community. Take
the
Rosetta@home project, for example, which I believe is currently the most
promising of the life science projects. They are doing
protein
structure prediction and will shortly begin with
protein design (
design
of an HIV vaccine; cancer related protein design is also in the
pipeline). After all protein design is nanotechnology with a very real
chance to create nanoscale agents (proteins) that will actually perform
useful functions in the body and it isn't just talked about but with
very little effort
you can contribute to make it happen.
Or think of life extension:
Rosetta@home is developing exactly the
tools (designing proteins and enzymes with specific functions) needed to do the
repair work inside the cells to fix the age related changes.
Rosetta@home is currently cpu cycle starved: ten times more
participants (
you) and those tools will be available ten times sooner.
Still not convinced ?
Ray Kurzweil's 'law of accelerating returns' seems to claim that the rate of
technology growth is a non-linear function of the already
available technology, leading to faster than exponential growth and
eventually a 'technological singularity'. If your computer just sits
under your desk idle, it doesn't return anything - so no accelerating
returns. Join
Rosetta@home and
you will potentially speed up the
'singularity' (if that is what you want/believe in).
Final point (this should interest Simon and George), if we manage to
create a betterhumans team at
Rosetta@home or some of the other
projects, large enough to show up on the team pages (dozens of
participants), this would create some welcome visibility for
betterhumans.
__
Hoelder1in