Renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has joined forces with Russian billionaire Yuri Milner to back a new project that will search for extraterrestrial life outside the solar system. Over the next 10 years, The Breakthrough Listen project will use the latest technological advancements in science to search for alien life and create messages intelligible to them at a cost of $100 million. Hawking is an advisor while Milner is funding the project.
Yuri Milner, the Russian billionaire and entrepreneur who amassed his fortune by betting early on Facebook, Twitter, and other tech companies, believes that modern technology had reached a point at which humanity now has “a real chance” to find out whether intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe. He is the co-founder of the Breakthrough Prize initiative, which rewards and funds scientific endeavours, including a $1 million prize for Breakthrough Message, a solution for how to best communicate with extra-terrestrials. The message itself will be withheld for now, to make sure it does not spark alien aggression.
The Breakthrough Initiatives program has its headquarters at SETI@home, a University of California, Berkeley computing platform. With the help of nine million volunteers loaning spare computing power to the Listen project, Hawking and Milner have at their disposal one of the fastest supercomputers in the world. The program will begin listening for alien life next year, using the world’s best telescopes and communication technology. Among them are the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Csiro Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia – two of the most powerful radio telescopes in the world. A third telescope, at the Lick Observatory in California, will perform the biggest and deepest search yet for extra-terrestrial optical laser transmissions.
“It is time to commit to finding the answer to search for life beyond Earth.” Hawling said of the project. “There is no bigger question.” [blockquote cite=”Stephen Hawking” type=”left”]”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. “We are alive. We are intelligent. We must know.”[/blockquote]
But the British scientist also warned that contact with alien life could spell disaster for the human race.
“If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the American Indians.”
Milner promised that all the information gathered from the Listen project will be open source. The software and hardware used will be compatible with telescopes all over the world so that they can join the search.
