Searching for ET: Hawking to look for extraterrestrial life

The internet mogul has gifted the massive sum in instalments over the next decade to two projects – one called the Breakthrough Listen in which two high power telescopes will be pointed at various spots in the universe which have been touted as possible hotspots for alien activity. “There has never been a better moment for a large-scale worldwide effort to find life in the Universe”.

As part of the initiative, scientists would have access to the Green Bank Telescope located in West Virginia – the world’s largest radio telescope – and the Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia, to detect and study candidates likely to harbor extraterrestrial life.

The rest will be split between acquiring equipment and hiring people.

“We are launching the most comprehensive search programme ever”, said Milner.

Today, due to improvements in technology, including in computing power and telescope sensitivity, $100 million will go much farther than in the early 1990s, the last time SETI had significant funding, scientists said.

Hawking said: “Somewhere in the cosmos, perhaps, intelligent life may be watching these lights of ours, aware of what they mean”.

“We are intelligent, we are alive, we must know”, said Hawking.

Milner is a Silicon Valley-based venture capitalist who invested in Facebook, Twitter and many other tech start-ups around the world.

DST Global Founder Yuri Milner speaks as he attends a press conference on the Breakthrough Life in the Universe Initiatives, hosted by Yuri Milner and Stephen Hawking, at The Royal Society in London, England, on July 20, 2015.

However, the possibility of finding life had effectively risen a billionfold through the identification of billions of Earth-like planets in the Milky Way, he said.

In addition, the Lick Observatory in California will conduct a deeper-than-ever search for optical laser transmissions.

“Either way, there is no bigger question”.

He said the search will be entirely transparent and will rely on open- source software so findings can be shared throughout the world.

What did Milner say about the Breakthrough Initiatives project? A linked “Breakthrough Message” programme will fund an global competition to generate messages representing humanity and planet Earth, which might one day be sent to other civilisations. “Our approach to data will be open and taking advantage of the problem-solving power of social networks”, explained Milner.

“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?”