Yuri Milner, a Russian billionaire and tech entrepreneur, announced today that he’s donating $100 million to a 10-year global effort led by UC Berkeley to make contact with extraterrestrial life.
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In addition to Breakthrough Listen, Breakthrough Initiatives will fund a $1 million competition for the best digital messages to send into space – so put your thinking caps on and write something brilliant for those intelligent, little green men to discover!
British cosmologist Stephen Hawking launched the biggest-ever search for intelligent life in the universe in a 10-year, $100-million project.
“It’s time to commit to finding the answer to search for life beyond Earth”, said renowned physicist Hawkings. “We must know”. “It is important for us to know if we are alone in the dark”. This search will cover about ten times the amount of sky previously surveyed and will process the data nearly 100 times faster. Researchers expect to find noise in the otherwise “calm zone” that is usually concealed by the Earth’s atmosphere.
Funding will come exclusively from Russia’s Yuri Milner, according to The Guardian, who made billions investing in Silicon Valley giants such as Facebook and Twitter. Stephen Hawking even warned against making our existence known to extraterrestrial life forms as they may have the same aggressive and violent behavior as humans. “Our approach to data will be open and taking advantage of the problem-solving power of social networks”, explained Milner.
Two of the world’s most powerful telescopes will be used to scan the cosmos for radio signals from another world. He intends to wade through the entire galactic plane of the Milky Way and beyond to the 100 closest neighboring galaxies. “We have a responsibility to not stop searching”, Milner told the New York Times.
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Rees said: “The search for extraterrestrial life is the most exciting quest in 21st-century science”. Many scientists reasoned that it is very possible that there are many other planets that support life, just like how Earth supports life under its atmosphere. The initiative will be conducted over a ten-year period and will utilize two extremely powerful telescopes to achieve their task.
