Russian philanthropist Yuri Milner is going to allocate $ 100 million for a program to search for extraterrestrial life. Besides Milner, the British scientist Stephen Hawking, as well as several other prominent researchers, expressed their desire to participate in this initiative.
Called Breakthrough Listen, the new project will allow researchers to explore the skies in search of extraterrestrial life for more than 10 years to come. During this time, it is planned to study more than 1 million stars and more than 100 galaxies outside the Milky Way. The new initiative will be a kind of replacement for SETI, which has been experiencing funding problems for a long time.
According to The New York Times, two-thirds of Milner's money will be invested in building and building new equipment and hiring astronomers. The remainder of the funding will go to lease the world's two largest radio telescopes located in West Virginia (USA) and Australia.
Access to these telescopes for researchers has always remained limited, but with Milner's money, research opportunities will multiply.
Instead of looking for unreasonable extraterrestrial life, scientists working on this project will primarily focus their attention on finding electromagnetic signals that may be given by extraterrestrial life. That is, scientists will be looking for intelligent extraterrestrial life.
The research team will include scientists from the University of California at Berkeley, Martin John Rees from the University of Cambridge, former head of the NASA research center, and other leading astronomers in the world. Frank Drake, an American astrophysicist and founder of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program, was hired as an advisor.
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Interestingly, anyone who wishes can help outstanding scientists. The received data will be analyzed through distributed computing systems.
“The project will be completely apolitical. We are not going to hide anything. It is likely that an amateur astronomer will eventually find the aliens,”Milner comments.
“Even if we do not find aliens, it will still be a very interesting scientific experiment, worthy of its implementation. He may not prove that we are not alone in the universe, but he will be able to significantly narrow the search radius,”adds Hawking.
