Hawking to look for extraterrestrial life

“Or do our lights wander a lifeless universe?”

“We are going to conduct the biggest ever search for extra terrestrial intelligence, taking advantage of the huge advances in computing and signal processing technology in the last couple of decades since the last biggest search of this kind”, he said. Hawking added that it was “time to commit to finding the answer to search for life beyond Earth“.

Are there other life forms out there in our mystifying universe is perhaps one of the most fascinating questions we can ask ourselves and that science works endlessly to discover. The project is the largest of its kind (looking at 10 times more of the sky and five times more of the radio spectrum than any past program) and is backed by Stephen Hawking.

Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and Australia’s Parkes Telescope will both be used for this objective, along with help from the U.C. Berkeley-based project called SETI@home to comb through gathered information. “It is important for us to know if we are alone in the dark”. The Bay Area has always been ground zero in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. During the press conference, Worden said that he and his colleagues will request reviews of project-related work from the field’s top scientists.

Yuri Milner, the Russian billionaire who made his stake in Silicon Valley with early bets on Facebook and Twitter, is personally funding an ambitious new effort to search for intelligent alien life. Milner also announced a $1 million competition, Breakthrough Message, to create messages that can be sent to aliens. It will give scientists access to powerful technology, including some of the best telescopes in the world. “A million nearby stars, the galactic center, the entire plane of the Milky Way and 100 nearby galaxies”.

The public will be invited to participate in efforts to find a signal from another world through the SETI project.

What did Milner say about the Breakthrough Initiatives project?

The first one is called “Breakthrough Listen”, which is set to explore the universe and look for signs of life.

Astronomers believe that there are billions of planets in our own galaxy where conditions are suitable for other life to evolve.