He’s recruited big names including Stephen Hawking, Cambridge University’s Lord Martin Rees, NASA veteran Peter Worden, and Ann Druyan, co-creator of the TV show “Cosmos” and the widow of Carl Sagan.
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LONDON (AP) The search for extraterrestrial life received a major boost Monday with the launch of an ambitious $100 million program, backed by famed physicist Stephen Hawking and tech billionaire Yuri Milner.
“Hawkings continued, “‘Are we alone in the Universe?’ is one of the most profound questions in science.
The internet mogul has gifted the massive sum in instalments over the next decade to two projects – one called the Breakthrough Listen in which two high power telescopes will be pointed at various spots in the universe which have been touted as possible hotspots for alien activity.
He went on: “To understand these lights you must know about life, about minds”.
Biggest scientific search ever undertaken for signs of intelligent life beyond Earth. “Somewhere within the cosmos maybe clever life could also be watching these lives of ours, conscious of what they imply”, the seventy three-yr-previous wheelchair-sure scientist stated.
“There is no bigger question,” Hawking said.
This pioneering quest will cover a 10 times larger patch of space than any other search, whilst zeroing in on areas of interest with a resolution 50 times greater than anything achieved before.
But the British theoretical physicist has got way more enthusiasm (and money) than all of us that he chose to fund a search mission for extraterrestrial life.
The financial commitment for Breakthrough Listen totals $1 million.
Frank Drake, who sent messages into space in the 1970s, said: “We know there are people who are afraid that sending is going to endanger us”.
Many astronomers have raised concerns about the effect that a search for alien life could have on humans.
Dan Werthimer, co-founder of SETI@home, said that because some of the stars to be surveyed were much older than our own sun, the planets orbiting them could be home to civilisations billions of years more advanced than ours.
All the data collected will be open to the public, and the hardware and open-source software will be compatible with telescopes around the world so other countries and researchers can join the search.
He said the scan would collect more data in one day than a year of any previous search, tracking the million closest stars, the centre of our Milky Way galaxy and the 100 closest galaxies.
Scientists said the project dwarfs anything else in the field, known as the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence.
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This “Breakthrough Light” plan will also hunt for light-based signals using a telescope at the Lick Observatory in California, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.
