Milner also announced a $1 million competition called Breakthrough Message, asking people around the world to put together submissions for a message that represents what life is like on earth that we could ostensibly beam out to our alien neighbors. “Somewhere in the cosmos, perhaps, intelligent life may be watching”, Hawking said at the launch event at the Royal Society science academy in London.
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Man has always wondered about its existence in the universe, and has sought far and wide for signs of life in outer space.
Speaking at the launch of the project in London, Mr Hawking said there was no bigger question to be answered. “It’s time to commit to finding the answer – to search for life beyond Earth“, he said.
Advances in technology will allow scientists to monitor several billion radio frequencies at a time, instead of several million, and to search 10 times more sky than in the early 1990s.
Two-thirds of the money will be used to build the equipment and hire astronomers, while the rest will be to rent out two of the world’s largest telescopes, one in West Virginia and the other in Australia. Whether or not aliens are out there, and whether or not they know we are here, Hawking said, is something that “we must know”. Marcy and Hawking believe that these discoveries not only show that alien life is possible but very likely probable. They can explain the light of stars, but not the lights that shine from planet Earth.
These telescopes will point to the closest stars and galaxies from Earth all while listening for noise in the signal, which could indicate alien life.
Milner, best known for investing in technology companies like Facebook and Alibaba, is footing the entire bill for the project.
All transmissions received during the project’s 10-year run will be released to the public.
“We don’t need to assume that civilisation is way more developed than we are”, Milner said.
“Thanks to Kepler mission it is now estimated that there are billions of potential habitable planets in our galaxy alone”.
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If a civilization transmits from the centre of the Milky Way, with any more than 12-times the output of interplanetary radars we use to probe the Solar System, Breakthrough Listen telescopes could detect it.
