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- STEPHEN HAWKING, MILNER UNVEIL $100M INITIATIVE TO ‘DRAMATICALLY ACCELERATE’ SEARCH FOR ALIEN LIFE
Stephen Hawking, Milner unveil $100M initiative to ‘dramatically accelerate’ search for alien life
- By Jamie Lendino on July 20, 2015 at 9:51 am
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Mankind has wondered about life on other worlds for millennia, and Frank Drake began our scientific search for it in earnest in 1960. Now that search is getting a huge boost, courtesy of a $100 million “Breakthrough Initiatives” program from Yuri Milner and Stephen Hawking, unveiled today at the Royal Society in London. Drake, as well as Ann Druyan, Martin Rees, Geoff Marcy, and Pete Worden were also on hand for the announcement; all will have various leadership roles in the initiatives.
The program will consist of two main pieces. The first, Breakthrough Listen, will employ the 100-meter Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, and the 64-meter Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia, two of the most powerful telescopes on the planet, over a period of 10 years. The search will be 50 times more sensitive than any SETI program before it, cover 10 times the sky of previous programs, involve the 1,000,000 stars closest to Earth, and scan five times as much radio spectrum 100 times faster than before. It will also search for laser transmissions.
Yuri Milner and Stephen Hawking announce $100 million Breakthrough Initiatives to dramatically accelerate search for intelligent life in the universe (Credit: Breakthrough Initiatives)
In addition to the above, the telescopes will scan the center of our galaxy, as well as listen for messages from the 100 closest galaxies to us — “closest” being a relative term, since even the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), the nearest, is two million light years away. From the announcement:
- If a civilization based around one of the 1,000 nearest stars transmits to us with the power of common aircraft radar, Breakthrough Listen telescopes could detect it.
- If a civilization transmits from the center of the Milky Way, with any more than 12 times the output of interplanetary radars we use to probe the Solar System, Breakthrough Listen telescopes could detect it.
- From a nearby star (25 trillion miles away), Breakthrough Listen’s optical search could detect a 100-watt laser (energy output of normal household light bulb).
The entire program is open source, and all data will be made available to the public, as well as software for sifting and searching the data. And here we thought SETI@home, the University of California, Berkeley’s famous 16-year-old distributed computing initiative, was awesome — in fact, Breakthrough Listen will join forces with SETI@home so as not to duplicate the same searches.
Later on, the group will also provide details for a second program, Breakthrough Message, a $1 million prize for creating digital messages that represent humanity and planet Earth. Ann Druyan said that the competition is “designed to spark the imaginations of millions, and to generate conversation about who we really are in the universe and what it is that we wish to share about the nature of being alive on Earth.”
It’s safe to say that this push is one of the most significant moments for SETI since it’s inception in 1960 — something Frank Drake clearly understands. “Right now there could be messages from the stars flying right through the room, through us all,” Drake said in a statement. “That still sends a shiver down my spine. The search for intelligent life is a great adventure. And Breakthrough Listen is giving it a huge lift.
“We’ve learned a lot in the last fifty years about how to look for signals from space. With the Breakthrough Initiatives, the learning curve is likely to bend upward significantly,” Drake said.
Stephen Hawking said that he “strongly supports” the Breakthrough Initiatives and the search for extraterrestrial life in general.
Back in April, NASA announced its own coalition of universities and research groups that will also contribute to the search for alien life on exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system.
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