The U.K. will open their ears for signs of alien communication with updated technology and devoted researchers.
Britain plans to begin its own Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), most SETI work is conducted in the U.S, according to BBC News.
The U.K.'s SETI project is asking for one million dollars from funding agencies, even though most extraterrestrial work is funded by private donations.
"If we had one part in 200 - half a percent of the money that goes into astronomy at the moment - we could make an amazing difference. We would become comparable with the American effort," Alan Penny of the University of St. Andrews told the BBC.
"I don't know whether [aliens] are out there, but I'm desperate to find out. It's quite possible that we're alone in the Universe. And think about the implications of that: if we're alone in the Universe then the whole purpose in the Universe is in us. If we're not alone, that's interesting in a very different way," he said.
Researchers from 11 institutions will be working on the project, but this isn't the first time British scientists have participated in SETI work .
From 1998-2003 Project Phoenix searched for extraterrestrial signals from over 1,000 nearby stars, funded by the U.K's Jodrell Bank Center. The project did not find any signs of alien life.
Jodrell bank has worked to update their technology, linking six telescopes across England to their original 76m Lovell radio telescope.
"You could do serendipitous searches. So if the telescopes were studying quasars, for example, we could piggy-back off that and analyse the data to look for a different type of signal - not the natural astrophysical signal that the quasar astronomer was interested in, but something in the noise that one might imagine could be associated with aliens. This approach would get you Seti research almost for free," Jodrell's associate director Tim O'Brien said.
The project hopes to finally make a connection with extraterrestrial life.
"There are billions of planets out there. It would be remiss of us not to at least have half an ear open to any signals that might be being sent to us," O'Brian said.
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