Russian Billionaire, Stephen Hawking Launch $100M Search For Aliens

Russian tech billionaire Yuri Milner is funding an ambitious $100 million science project to discover whether intelligent extraterrestrial life exists. Milner, known for his successful investments in Facebook, Twitter, Alibaba, Flipkart and Ola, launched a non-profit initiative — Breakthrough Listen — with cosmologist Stephen Hawking in London on July 20.

The 10-year-project, set to start in 2016, will see the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) scientists and researchers based in University of Berkeley come together to work on two of the world’s most powerful telescopes — Green Bank Telescope and Parkes Telescope — that will survey 1,000,000 closest stars to Earth as well as listen for messages from the 100 closest galaxies. In tandem with a radio search, Automated Planet Finder Telescope at Lick Observatory in California will undertake world’s deepest and broadest search for optical laser transmissions.

“There is no bigger question. Science has explained the ‘light of stars’ but not the lights that shine from Earth. Somewhere in the cosmos, perhaps, intelligent life may be watching these lights of ours, aware of what they mean. Or do our lights wander a lifeless cosmos – unseen beacons, announcing that here, on one rock, the Universe discovered its existence? It’s time to commit to finding the answer… we must know,” Stephen Hawking told reporters. “We believe that life arose spontaneously on Earth. So in an infinite universe, there must be other occurrences of life.”

Breakthrough Listen will be joining and supporting SETI, University of California, Berkeley’s ground breaking distributed computing platform, with 9 million volunteers around the world donating their spare computing power to search astronomical data for signs of life.

“The reason I was interested in launching this initiative was because there is a big, philosophical question which people have been asking for years, are we alone in the universe? I thought it is a big enough question for someone to do something about. This project is combining what science can offer in terms of the amazing machines which we have access to with what Silicon Valley would offer in terms of data processing. We will also do some innovative things in science which have not been done before. For example we’ll take the enormous amounts of data which we will accumulate and open this data to the public. Anyone would be able to come and look at this data and maybe find a signal himself/herself if we miss it,” Milner told the Times of India. “Over 55 years people have been trying to do this. What we will do is get more information in one day than they were able to do in a year. This project will be hundred to thousand times more powerful than anything done before.”

The project will allow scientists to collect as much data on SETI, active since 1960 and the largest group looking for an alien life, in a day as they now do in a year. The data will be made available to the public, so anyone can help search for the radio signals that could be used to track down alien civilizations. Others at Breakthrough Listen will work to improve our own signaling techniques, brainstorming the best way to send a message out into the cosmos, Milner added.

At Monday’s launch at the Royal Society in central London, Milner said he was born in the year that Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, and his mother had called him Yuri because “she wanted me to be inspired”. “The search for intelligent life in the universe is going to a completely new level. It is time to open our eyes, our ears and our minds to the cosmos,” he remarked.

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