Extraterrestrial life: Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner to help

He said the academics and researchers working on the project would be given access to two of the world’s most powerful radio telescopes, the Green Bank and Parkes observatories in the US and Australia.

Turns out they found us by downloading a smartphone app. mad.

You heard it right.

The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing app will serve as the center where crowd-sourcing is to be done to give scientists the capacity to use the spare processing power of mobiles all over the world.

Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner are now ready to face the life that may exist beyond ours.

A Jewish billionaire is donating $100 million to answer the question we have been asking since the beginning of the past century – and certainly since ET cycled onto our screens in 1982: is there intelligent alien life out there?

The project will record thousands of hours of data, to which the usual 36 recorded hours annually pale in comparison, and processing all of it will require a lot of computing power.

The Breakthough Initiatives division at the Royal Society – the U.K’s national academy of science – said it would be “the most powerful, comprehensive and intensive” such search ever conducted. “Harnessing the personal interests of possibly hundreds of thousands of people makes sense and couldn’t be accomplished cost effectively any other way”.

Those anxious about chewing through personal data can rest easy knowing the app only works when connected to Wi-Fi. Another aspect of this app is that it will work only when your device is fully charged, not bothering you about consuming battery life of your phone.