Less than two weeks after I boasted about my all-time computational rankings, SETI@home announced it would be "hibernating" the program at the end of March.
True to their word, new tasks stopped being distributed, and slowly but surely each of my servers working on the data began to run out of things to do. By the end of April, it was all over.
The first systematic search for intelligent life among the stars had failed.
Evidently there needs to be at least a bit of intelligence on the receiving end for it all to work.
Oops.