Hawking Spearheads New Hunt for Intelligent Aliens

On Monday, famed theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking announced the launch of a new $100 million effort to track down an alien civilization within the next decade.

Funded by US-based tech billionaire Yuri Milner, the initiative, called “Breakthrough Listen,” will take a “Silicon Valley approach” to discovering aliens, using two powerful radio telescopes and leveraging the problem-solving power of social networks. Frank Drake, the father of modern SETI who started the hunt for alien transmissions with "Project Ozma" in 1960, was also in attendance at the announcement with Hawking and other participating astronomers.

“Somewhere in the cosmos, perhaps, intelligent life may be watching these lights of ours, aware of what they mean,” said Hawking. “Or do our lights wander a lifeless cosmos — unseen beacons, announcing that here, on one rock, the Universe discovered its existence. Either way, there is no bigger question. It’s time to commit to finding the answer — to search for life beyond Earth.

“We are alive. We are intelligent. We must know.”

According to Breakthrough Listen, this will be the biggest scientific search for intelligent extraterrestrial life, a survey that will cover 10 times more of the sky than previous programs, monitoring 5 times more of the radio spectrum, 100 times faster, reports BBC News.

Breakthrough Listen is the first half of the group's mission. The second, "Breakthrough Message," will consist of an international competition to compile a global message that will one day be transmitted to another civilization.

Breakthrough Listen will take observational data from the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia, and the public will be asked to participate in the SETI@home project, the stalwart alien-hunting software that first appeared in 1999 to leverage the distributed computer power of computers connected to the internet all over the world.

But will it be successful at eking out an alien radio signal? Well, that’s anybody’s guess. Searching for extraterrestrial intelligence(s) is a minefield of unknowns, some of which are explored by Trace and myself during this very special TestTube Plus+ video. Check it out:

From Discovery News