The Great Silence of 2020 Web Design: The ‘Annihilation’ of Algorithmic Comprehensibility

One of my earliest exposures to data science research, or really any research at all, when I was growing up was SETI@Home, which when I was 11 promised a tantalizing possibility: what if you could potentially be the person to (have your computer) discover a signal from alien life. SETI@Home, many people’s first exposure to the kind of distributed processing that today makes up, among other things, cryptocurrency mining, is a pattern recognition project and in 1999 when it launched and I enthusiastically installed it on my 233 megahertz Windows 98 PC, it was my first exposure to the kind of pattern searching in data that I now do as a data researcher. Spoiler alert: my HP Pavilion never found an alien signal. Disappointing, but not remotely surprising. (This is an article about data science, but it’s also about alien first contact narratives — they’re not as unrelated as you think, and I ask that you bear with my layers of metaphors here. The Python code will come eventually!)

For anyone who ever wanted to meet aliens, Fermi’s paradox is a grim problem: shouldn’t we have, by now? Humans have been searching the stars with SETI for nearly half a decade, and have turned up no credible evidence of alien life. As suggested in Sky & Telescope by SETI astronomer Seth Shostak back in 2006, one reason SETI’s quest for extraterrestial intelligence may seem, and ultimately prove, futile, is because of the progress of technology. That is to say: if hypothetical alien…