More than a half-century after the first modern search for communicating extraterrestrial life, humanity’s quest to find intelligent beings in the cosmos is getting a much-needed boost. Silicon Valley billionaire Yuri Milner announced a $100 million project that will scan the sky for radio signals from other worlds. Called Breakthrough Listen, it will be the most powerful search for extraterrestrial intelligence ever undertaken on Earth.
“In one day, Breakthrough Listen will collect more data than a year of any previous search,” said Milner, who’s also behind the lucrative Breakthrough Prizes in physics, mathematics and the life sciences. “The scope of our search will be unprecedented.”
Milner announced the 10-year initiative at a ceremony in London that included remarks from theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, who discussed the ubiquity of life’s building blocks in the cosmos, as well as the possibility that Earth’s lights might already be gleaming in alien eyes.
“It’s time to commit to finding the answer to the search for life beyond Earth,” Hawking said. “We are life, we are intelligent, we must know.”
We have the greatest opportunity ever to detect intelligent folks in the Universe,” says astronomer Geoffrey Marcy of UC-Berkeley, who is one of the co-investigators leading the project at Green Bank. Joining Marcy as a co-investigator on the Green Bank portion of the work is astronomer Frank Drake, of the SETI Institute.
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Read full, original post: The New $100 Million Search For Life in the Cosmos
