In a new initiative announced today in London, well known Russian tech investor Yuri Milner said he was spending $100 million to “discover whether intelligent life exists beyond Earth.”
While begging the question whether intelligent life lives here right now (see: Reddit, Donald Trump, etc), Milner held a conference call today with big-name theoretical physicist and professor Stephen Hawking at the Royal Society in London to tout the worldwide effort called Breakthrough Listen.
In an interview, Milner said it was a “low-probability, high-impact experiment” that only the private sector could now take on. “The government got out of this business in the 1990s, but I think it is really critical to probe the universe to see if others are out there.”
Named after Milner’s series of science prizes, the 10-year project will use open data and software, along with two powerful telescopes — the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Parkes Telescope in Australia — to scan the sky in hopes of receiving signals from others who might be out there.
“If a civilization based around one of the 1,000 nearest stars is transmitting to us with the power of a common aircraft radar, the Breakthrough Listen telescopes can detect it,” said Breakthrough Listen in a statement. “If they are transmitting from the center of the Milky Way, with any more than a dozen times the output of the interplanetary radars we use to probe our own Solar System, Breakthrough Listen telescopes could detect them.”
Along with a number of prominent scientists that Milner has wrangled into the effort, the project will also use a distributed platform called SETI@home from the University of California at Berkeley that uses the computers of nine million volunteers to search astronomical data for signs of life.
While the first step in the initiative will be Breakthrough Listen, Milner also announced Breakthrough Message, a competition to create messages to send out to other civilizations.
Milner made his fortune here on terra firma, with investments in companies like Facebook, Twitter and many others globally.