Russian billionaire Yuri Milner announced Monday that he will invest $100 million in a search for intelligent life existing beyond Earth over the next decade. This is within a project announced in London called Breakthrough Listen, which in partnership with Stephen Hawking, will have a team of researchers and astronomers scanning the cosmos for signs of alien civilization.
A big chunk of the fund will be used to rent the world's most powerful telescopes and use an open and data software to scan the skies for signals that can confirm that "we are not alone" in the universe, according to Re/code. Particularly, the project will use the Green Bank Telescope located in West Virginia and the Parkes Telescope in Australia. This will augment a search for laser signals to be conducted by the Lick Observatory's Automated Planet Finder Telescope, according to GeekWire.
The team of experts includes big names in the scientific community such as Lord Martin Rees, former director of the NASA Ames Research Laboratory and Frank Drake, the founder of Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program, The Verge reported.
The cache of funds made available to the initiative has triggered great excitement from astronomers. Dan Werthimer, a SETI researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, said, "This is beyond my wildest dreams" in an interview with the New York Times.
Speaking about the new technological capability, Breakthrough Listen stated that, "If a civilization based around one of the 1,000 nearest stars is transmitting to us with the power of common aircraft radar, the Breakthrough Listen telescopes can detect it," according to Re/code.
Milner, who made his fortune in the Internet and technology investments such as Facebook and Twitter is also behind the Fundamental Physics Prize, a competition giving out $3 million in prizes annually organized with three other tech titans, which include Sergey Brin, Google co-founder; Anne Wojcicki, Brin's wife; and, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder.
