As announced on livestream, Yuri Milner—a Russian entrepreneur and billionaire with a background in physics—is upping the ante in the search for extraterrestrial life.
Through the Breakthrough Initiatives division of his Breakthrough Prize Foundation, Milner is funding a $100 million program in one of the least funded but most well-known areas of space exploration: the search for extraterrestrial life.
The initiative—known as Breakthrough Listen—will be the largest search ever taken for intelligent life beyond our little blue marble. Using the Parkes Telescope and the Green Bank Telescope (two of the world’s most powerful telescopes), scientists will spend 10 years surveying 1,000,000 of the stars closest to Earth, along with scanning the center of the Milky Way and the entire galactic plane. Outside of our galaxy, the telescopes will be used to listen for messages from the 100 closest galaxies.
A sensitive soul
The program’s technology is 50 times more sensitive than previous programs’—from a star 25 trillion miles away, its optical search can detect the energy output of a normal household light bulb. Also, it will cover 10 times more of the sky than previous attempts, and will scan at least five times more of the radio spectrum, 100 times faster.
Further, all data will be open, and will probably end up being the largest amount of scientific data ever made available to the public. The team will be developing its own software to help sift through the data, and the software will be open source.
Not only will the software and data be available to the public, but the public will be able make their own contributions as well. The software will be compatible with telescopes around the world, allowing others to join in, and scientists will be able to share their own additions to the software to aid in the global search for universal life.
$100 million dwarfs the less than $2 million of annual funding that is normally given to this search, but scientists—including Stephen Hawking—believe it is well worth it. “There is no bigger question. It’s time to commit to finding the answer—to search for life beyond Earth,” he told reporters at the program’s launch.
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