Professor Stephen Hawking backs new search for aliens

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

“There is no bigger question,” Hawking said, using a computer-generated voice to communicate because of his motor neurone disease.

Organizers say the “Breakthrough Initiatives” project, also endorsed by other prominent British scientists, is the biggest ever scientific search for alien life. “We are alive, we are intelligent, we must know”, the author of “A Brief History of Time” noted. We must know. The project is called Breakthrough Listen and uses telescopes at the Green Bank in West Virginia, the Parkes Observatory in Australia, and the Lick Observatory’s optical telescope in San Jose, California to scan the universe for signals between 1 GHz and 10 GHz. Researchers expect to find noise in the otherwise “calm zone” that is usually concealed by the Earth’s atmosphere.

Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, best known for early investments in Facebook and Twitter, has announced plans to spend 0 million hunting for alien civilizations.

All transmissions received during the project’s 10-year run will be released to the public. That will lead into Breakthrough Message, which will task itself with developing the content of messages to be sent from humans to intelligent life collectives elsewhere.

Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking sits in front of a presentation image during a press conference in London, Monday, July 20, 2015. “Our approach to data will be open and taking advantage of the problem-solving power of social networks”. Dan Werthimer, an engineer and astrophysical scientist at Berkeley, told the Chronicle that Milner’s donation is “a spectacular decisions that’s far beyond our wildest dreams”.

These telescopes are said to possess 50 times greater sensitivity than normal apparatuses will be used to monitor possible radio emissions by extraterrestrial life.The initiative which was launched at the Royal Society, will see Prof. According to project organizers, Breakthrough Message aims “to learn about the potential languages of interstellar communication and to spur global discussion on the ethical and philosophical issues surrounding communication with intelligent life beyond Earth“. The Breakthrough initiatives are making that commitment.

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.