You know of this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal

SETI at Home was a screensaver that was looking for signals like that via distributed searching and they didn't find anything (but they do have telescope time for tackling the 92 highest priority follow-up scans).

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

Did it though?

I'm not arguing a position on the theory, just saying it's very active and has the old-school qualities that were present in the 90's.

https://foldingathome.org/2024/05/02/alphafold-opens-new-opp...

Some of these projects could occupy entire regions of cloud compute in some cases for awhile, some even more depending on the problem. But running that for even a short time or decades needed would cost more money than anyone has to do.

Academic HPCs existed long before cloud compute options and for certain problem spaces could also be used even in non-distributed memory cases to handle this stuff. But you still needed allocation time and sometimes even funding to use them, competing against other cases like drug design, cancer research, nuclear testing… whatever. So searching for ET could be crowdsourced and the cost distributed which is something that made it alluring and tractable.

I used to run a small academic cluster that was underutilized but essentially fully paid for. I’d often put some of these projects running as background throttled processes outside scheduler space so the 90% of the time no one was using them, the hardware would at least be doing some useful scientific research since it’s after-all funded largely from federal scientific research funding. There was of course some bias introduced by which projects I chose to support whereas someone else may have made a more equitable choice.