SPACE-MILNER Billionaire Milner pledges $100 million to find intelligent life in space

Record ID: 146675

  • Title: SPACE-MILNER Billionaire Milner pledges $100 million to find intelligent life in space
  • Date: 20th July 2015
  • Summary: LONDON, ENGLAND, UK (JULY 20, 2015) (REUTERS) ****WARNING CONTAINS FLASH PHOTOGRAPHY*** ENTREPRENEUR AND PHYSICIST, YURI MILNER, PHYSICIST, PROFESSOR STEPHEN HAWKING, ASTRONOMER ROYAL, LORD MARTIN REES, ASTRONOMER AND EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, FRANK DRAKE, PROFESSOR OF ASTRONOMY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, GEOFF MARCY AND CRE
  • Embargoed: 4th August 2015 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: United Kingdom
  • Country: United Kingdom
  • Topics: General
  • Reuters ID: LVA3QZOEYLOZD0H2G7VC2XVNALWS
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: 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 $100 million from a Russian billionaire and the backing of physicist Stephen Hawking.
    ''Today we are launching the most comprehensive search programme ever. Just in one day, Breakthrough Listen will collect more data than a year of any previous search. The scope of our search will be unprecedented,'' said Russian Internet entrepreneur Yuri Milner, who is funding the the ten-year project, dubbed Breakthrough Listen.
    Milner, a physicist by training, made his fortune from savvy early investments in startups such as Facebook Inc.
    Whether we are alone in the universe has engaged minds down the ages, and the recent discovery that there may be tens of billions of habitable planets in our galaxy alone has added urgency to finding an answer.
    ''Mankind has a deep need to explore, to learn, to know. We also happen to be sociable creatures. It is important for us to know if we are alone in the dark,'' Stephen Hawking told reporters at the programme's launch in London on Monday.
    Some of the world's largest radio telescopes will be used to scan for distinctive radio signals that could indicate the existence of intelligent life.
    Astronomers will listen to signals from the million star systems nearest to Earth and the 100 closest galaxies, although they do not yet plan to send messages back into space.
    Hawking said some form of simple life on other worlds seemed very likely, but the existence of intelligence was another matter, and humankind needed to think hard about making contact.
    ''Recent experiments like the Kepler mission have changed the game. 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.
    Milner said he aimed to bring a Silicon Valley approach to "the most interesting technological question of our day".
    Milner became fascinated by the notion of extraterrestrial life after reading astrophysicist Carl Sagan's "Intelligent Life in the Universe" as a 10-year-old in Moscow.
    Royal astronomer, Lord Martin Rees, said at the launch at London's Royal Society, that he hopes the ''huge gamble'' will pay off.
    ''No one will count on success, but the payoff would be so colossal in recognising that there was life elsewhere that this investment is hugely worthwhile and will attract huge public interest, even if the chance of success is small,'' he said.
    The new project dwarfs anything else in the field, known by the acronym SETI for the "search for extraterrestrial intelligence."
    Today, due to technology improvements, including in computing power and telescope sensitivity, $100 million will go much farther than in the early 1990s, the last time SETI had significant funding.
    Milner told Reuters he felt he had to invest in the previously underfunded sector.
    ''This is a worthy cause and it was really underfunded and I saw this as the opportunity to kickstart the new search.''
    The advances 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.
    Any signals the scientists detect will have been created years ago, perhaps even centuries or millennia earlier. Radio signals take four years simply to travel between Earth and the nearest star outside our solar system.
    Breakthrough Listen will book time at radio telescopes, including at Australia's Parkes Observatory in New South Wales and the Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia. Milner plans to book about two months a year at each site, a boon to scientists who normally might get two days a year on the telescopes.
    The team, led by scientists such as Peter Worden, who until earlier this year directed the NASA Ames Research Center, will organise the radio signals they find, make the data public, and examine it for patterns.
    The goal lies less in understanding the signals than in establishing whether they were created by intelligent life rather than natural phenomena.
    Scientists say the fact that humans have developed radio signalling makes it a good bet that others may use it as well.
    In addition to checking for radio signals, Breakthrough Listen will hunt for light signals using a telescope at the Lick Observatory in California.
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