Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, along with theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, recently announced that they will be funneling $100 million into Breakthrough Listen, an endeavor aimed at finding intelligent alien life in space, as previously reported on HNGN.
Now, they are is asking the public to join in the search by simply downloading an app on their smartphones.
So, how does this work?
The 10-year Breakthrough Listen plan will make use of two massive telescopes to search for alien life. The 100-meter Green Bank telescope is located in West Virginia, while the 64-meter Parkes telescope is found in New South Wales, Australia. However, both will require a lot of computer power to operate to full capacity, so some of this power will have to come from the smartphones.
Users who want to participate must then download the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) app at Google Play Store. This is a crowdsourcing platform set up so that scientists will be able to tap into the processing power of smartphones around the world.
The app is free to download and runs only on Wi-Fi. It will not be downloading any personal data from someone's phone, however. "BOINC computes only when your device is plugged in and charged, so it won't run down your battery," as indicated in the Google Play Store description.
The app, however, is not available for iOS devices, so Apple users will not be able to crowdsource.
"In searches such as this, the more eyes you can get on the prize the better," said CompTIA president Todd Thibodeaux via Forbes. "Harnessing the personal interests of possibly hundreds of thousands of people makes sense and couldn't be accomplished cost effectively any other way."
Meanwhile, Milner said that he doesn't have any high expectations for this million-dollar project. "But the search itself will teach us quite a bit," he told Washington Post. "We could find something we're not even looking for."
