Physicist Stephen Hawking is convinced now more than ever that there are aliens out there and that we should be cautious in answering signals and announcing our existence to them. Despite the caution, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner, and Hawking pooled $100 million to search and listen for signals from Proxima b, commonly known as Earth 2.0.
In an exclusive interview with MailOnline, the giants of science and technology revealed the 10-year mission. Named as "Breakthrough Listen," the search will be aided by two of the world's most powerful telescopes that will give them better sensitivity, access to farther skies, higher radio spectrum, and faster mobility.
"Breakthrough Listen" will be targeting Earth 2.0 as it has been found to have the ability to sustain life and is a whopping distance of four lightyears away from our planet.
"It came only a few months after Stephen Hawking and I, with Mark Zuckerberg's support, launched our Breakthrough Starshot project, which aims to launch a tiny spacecraft to Alpha Centauri within a generation," said Milner.
The news of the trio's efforts to reach out to aliens came just a few days after Hawking's short film "Favorite Places" was released through CuriosityStream. In the film, Hawking welcomes his audience aboard the CGI SS Hawking to travel the universe to his favorite destinations. One of those destinations is a planet called Gliese 832c, and he expresses his hopes of receiving a signal back from a planet like it.
"We should be wary of answering back," he said, as reported by USA Today. "Meeting an advanced civilization could be like Native Americans encountering Columbus. That didn't turn out so well."
With Hawking's firm beliefs that aliens exist combined with Zuckerberg and Milner's efforts, the "Breakthrough Listen" project will collect data for a period of 10 years. Next month, the team will use the Parkes Observatory in Australia to search for radio emissions that differ from the natural background noise.
"I've always been fascinated by the existential questions of life and the universe," said Milner. "It is fundamental to understanding our place in the big scheme of things. You can't know who you are without having others to compare yourself to."
