Physicist Stephen Hawking to ET: Call me

Stargazer… British scientist Stephen Hawking attends a press conference in London.

LONDON (AP) — The search for extraterrestrial life received a major boost Monday with the launch of an ambitious $100 million program, backed by famed physicist Stephen Hawking and tech billionaire Yuri Milner.

“There is no bigger question”…

“We’re committed to bringing the Silicon Valley approach to the search for intelligent life in the universe”, Milner said in a statement.

Mr Macy said: “We learned from the NASA Kepler mission that our Milky Way Galaxy contains tens of billions of Earth-size planets at lukewarm temperatures, any of which might harbor life”.

Milner additionally announced another project called Breakthrough Message, a competition to create digital messages that could give informative recounts about the planet and mankind. (In 1960, Drake became the first person to set up a radio telescope to detect interstellar radio transmissions, and he formulated the Drake equation the year following.) Stephen Hawking was on stage at today’s launch event, saying, “In an infinite Universe, there must be other life”.

“Somewhere in the cosmos, perhaps, intelligent life may be watching”.

“Or do our lights wander a boring cosmos, unseen beacons, saying that right here, on one rock, the Universe found its existence”.

‘There is no bigger question’

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With the funding, scientists can gain access to two of the world’s most powerful radio telescopes, including the Green Bank Telescope in the U.S, and the Parkes Telescope in Australia.

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.

It will also make use of the University of California Berkeley project SETI@home, which uses almost 9 million volunteers throughout the word who donate computer power to search vast quantities of astronomical data for signs of intelligent life.

Astronomer Royal Lord Rees, who will chair the project, said: “We don’t know what we’ll see out there”.

The team behind the project say they will search 10 times more of the sky than previous projects, and will scan at least five times more of the radio spectrum.

In interviews with the New York Times, researchers close to earlier efforts in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, called Milner’s $100M financing both a “miracle” and beyond their “wildest dreams”. The team will rent two of the largest telescopes in the world for their research for the next 10 years. “Our strategy to knowledge can be open and profiting from the issue-fixing energy of social networks”, defined Milner.

The new project dwarfs anything else in the field, known by the acronym SETI for the “search for extraterrestrial intelligence”.