The Green Bank Telescope, located in West Virginia and the Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia, will help in the surveying of ten times the amount of sky scanned in previous efforts for this kind of experiment.
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“It’s time to commit to finding the answer… we must know”.
The programme will spend at least $100 million in the next decade to search for signals from alien civilisations.
The initiative was launched on the 46th anniversary of the first manned Moon landing. He added that if life arose spontaneously on Earth, the occurrences of life in other universes can not be ruled out. As Hawking put it, it is important for humankind to know whether or not we are “alone in the dark”.
Frank Drake – one of the pioneers of the SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) movement – said, “right now there could be messages from the stars flying right through the room, through us all”.
The British Professor has openly lent his support to Milner’s project called Breakthrough Listen Initiative, which aims to fund scientists engaged in the search for extraterrestrial life. “Somewhere in the cosmos perhaps intelligent life may be watching these lives of ours, aware of what they mean”, the 73-year-old wheelchair-bound scientist said.
“Meeting a more advanced civilization, at our present stage, might be a bit like the original inhabitants of America meeting Columbus”.
In London Monday, Russian billionaire Yuri Milner pledged $100 million to SETI, also known as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, a program based out of the University of California Berkeley. Signals such as radio spectrum and laser will be searched for far into the universe.
Stephen Hawking has started the biggest project to date to search for intelligent life outside of planet Earth.
With the influx of cash, the researchers will reportedly be able to collect more data in one day than they previously collected in a year.
The payoff in this “huge gamble” would be huge, but our “chance of success is very small”, according to the astrophysicist. All pledged their support of a renewed effort to find and contact life out in the universe beyond that of Planet Earth.
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All data will be shared with the public.
