If aliens exist it’s really likely we will find out soon, after Stephen Hawking teamed up with a super-rich Russian entrepreneur, who has pledged a whopping 100 million US dollars (£64 million) to search for them.
The legendary physicist has put his name to billionaire Yuri Milner’s Breakthrough Initiatives project, which will focus on searching for extraterrestrial intelligence over the next 10 years.
What did Prof Hawking say about the Breakthrough Initiatives Project?
He said: “I believe the Breakthrough Initiatives are critically important.
“To understand the universe you must know about atoms. About the forces that bind them, the contours of space and time. The birth and death of stars, the dance of galaxies, the secrets of black holes.
“But that is not enough. These ideas cannot explain everything. They can explain the light of stars, but not the lights that shine from planet Earth.
“To understand these lights you must know about life, about minds. We believe that life arose spontaneously on Earth so in an infinite universe there must be other occurrences of life.
“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 our rock, the universe discovered its existence?
“Either way, there is no bigger question. It is time to commit to finding the answer to search for life beyond Earth. The Breakthrough Initiatives are making that commitment. We are life, we are intelligent, we must know.”
Who is Yuri Milner and how on earth has he got this much money to spend?
The Russian is an entrepreneur who made big bucks by investing in tech companies like Facebook. He owns quite a few investment firms. He was named after the first man in space, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.
So what exactly is the Breakthrough Initiatives project and how will it search for alien life?
It will actually be a branch of the project called Breakthrough Listen that will use the world’s finest telescopes to carry out state-of-the-art radio and optical surveys. Milner called it the “most comprehensive search programme ever”, and claimed the project would gather more information in one day than in a year of previous research. He also said he will harness the innovation of Silicon Valley to scan the skies for signs of life, including searching the entire Milky Way and 100 nearby galaxies.
All the information will be available to the public. As well as amazing telescopes, nine million personal computers will be used via the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) network.
What did Milner say about the Breakthrough Initiatives project?
At the launch he said: “The scope of our search will be unprecedented – a million nearby stars, the galactic centre, the entire plane of the Milky Way and 100 nearby galaxies.
“Thanks to Kepler mission it is now estimated that there are billions of potential habitable planets in our galaxy alone.
“As another leader of the search, Jill Tarter, said, if you dip the drinking glass into the sea once and came out without a fish, would you conclude that there are no fish in the sea?
“Breakthrough Listen will dip much more than a glass in the sea, by bringing a completely different scale of technology to the problem.”
He added: “Breakthrough Listen takes the search for intelligent life in the universe to a completely new level.
“It is the most comprehensive in scope, it is faster and more sensitive than any previous search and will cover the broadest ever spectrum.”
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