Stephen Hawking Launches $100 Million Initiative To Listen For Aliens! Expand

Scientists are about to embark on the biggest search yet for alien life, sweeping the skies for signals of civilisations beyond our solar system with $A135 million from a Russian billionaire and the backing of physicist Stephen Hawking.

SETI researchers will use the telescopes to listen for broadcast signals from the nearest million stars in the Milky Way, as well as stars in 100 other galaxies closest to us, monitoring several billion radio frequencies at a time.

That being said, the group of esteemed scientists gathered on Monday didn’t make any bold claims about immediately hunting down intelligent life-forms – or ever finding them at all, for that matter.

Man has always wondered about its existence in the universe, and has sought far and wide for signs of life in outer space.

“There is no bigger question,” Hawking said.

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. He also plans to give $1 million as a reward for a “Breakthrough Message” – a method for the best possible communication with alien life. “That means an approach to data that is transparent, that is innovative, and that uses the problem-solving power of social networks”.

Hawking said it is time for questions to be answered.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has been active since 1960, but could not make breakthrough due to very low funding’s from government.

Organizers say powerful telescopes and advances in computing will allow them to collect in a single day the same amount of data that would have taken one year to collect before the program began. These ideas can not explain everything. Over nine million volunteers around the world will donate their spare time to find out if planet Earth has company.

Yes, we are. In some of our minds I am sure “aliens” still look like those green light bulb-looking figures you see in movies.

“We don’t need to assume that civilisation is way more developed than we are”, Milner said.

Prof Hawking added that he believed the search was one of humanity’s most important scientific endeavours.