Makes you wonder how much cumulative energy has been wasted by computers running SETI.
On a related note, did the crowd-compute schemes for protein folding ever produce anything worthwhile, relative to the energy used?
Whilst the value of SETI@Home's goals can be debated till the cows come home, SETI pioneered the practical application of grid computing at scale, which is worth something. BOINC has a list of papers published by BOINC Projects.
Perhaps those results could have been found more efficiently in a purpose-built supercomputer rather than random people's computers (some running more efficiently than others), but if you don't have time allocated on a supercomputer, then it's a valuable resource compared to nothing.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
