Stephen Hawking seeks life on other planets

“In an infinite universe, there must be other occurrences of life“, Hawking said at the launch of Breakthrough Initiatives. “We must know”, said Hawking at the launch event.

To help answer that question, Breakthrough Initiatives announced their plan to conduct a 10-year worldwide search effort to find life beyond Earth.

The initiative’s supporters claim it to be the biggest scientific search ever done for signs of intelligent life in space.

Advances in technology will allow scientists to monitor several billion radio frequencies at a time, instead of several million, and to search 10 times more sky than in the early 1990s. The team will utilize the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia and obtain observational data in the next 10 years. We now know there are so many worlds and organic molecules are so common, that it seems quite likely that life is out there, ” he said. Hawking, who was portrayed by Eddie Redmayne in The Theory of Everything, believes that now is the time to look for answers about if there’s life beyond earth.

The initiative is led by Lord Martin Rees, a fellow of Trinity College, emeritus professor of cosmology and Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge and a former president of the Royal Society.

“If a civilization based around one of the 1,000 nearest stars is transmitting to us with the power of a common aircraft radar, the Breakthrough Listen telescopes can detect it”, said Breakthrough Listen in a statement. They can explain the light of stars, but not the lights that shine from planet Earth.

Russian billionaire Yuri Milner made his name through investments in social media companies like Facebook.

Milner, like many tech executives and prominent investors, has a longtime fascination with space, and said Silicon Valley is uniquely equipped with the engineers, software and equipment to discover whether other intelligent species exist.

“Breakthrough Listen will dip much more than a glass in the sea, by bringing a completely different scale of technology to the problem”. It will scan the centre of our galaxy and the entire galactic plane. NASA’s Kepler spacecraft has identified billions of potentially habitable planets, in our galaxy alone.