Stephen Hawking, famous British cosmologist, is backing up the biggest ever search for alien life. The new initiative was launched on Monday. The 10-year project to scan the Universe for extraterrestrial life will cost $100-million.
The Breakthrough Listen initiative, as the new project for searching alien life is called, is funded by Yuri Milner, a Russian Silicon Valley entrepreneur. According to reports, this will be the most intensive scientific search for signs of alien civilizations ever undertaken in mankind's history.
Stephen Hawking, who made his beliefs in the existence of extraterrestrial life known in the past, declared again at the launch event that it is very probable there are other occurrences of life in an infinite universe. The Breakthrough Listen initiative was announced in London, at the Royal Society Science Academy.
Life beyond Earth fascinated mankind from immemorial times. Many of today's scientists share Hawking's beliefs that intelligent life may be watching us from somewhere in the Universe.
For our space exploring civilization, according to Hawking, there "is no bigger question" and it is time to commit to the search for life beyond Earth until finding the answer. As Hawking put it, it is important for humankind to know whether or not we are "alone in the dark."
The new project for search of extraterrestrial life will search far deeper into the Universe than ever before, using some of the biggest telescopes on Earth. Laser and radio signals coming from deep space will be monitored.
A previous project, S.E.T.I. could not find concluding proves of alien civilizations, despite some thrills surrounding not fully explained signals that were intercepted as coming from space.
Breakthrough Listen will take to a completely new level the previous initiatives for the search for intelligent life in the universe according to the Russian Silicon Valley entrepreneur Milner, who is funding the project and is also a physicist.
Milner explained that the scan of Breakthrough Listen initiative would collect more data in one day than a year of any previous search. The new project will track the center of our Milky Way galaxy, millions of closest stars, as well as the 100 closest galaxies.
In case that a signal sent for a similarly advanced technology would be sent from the center of the Milky Way, Earth's telescopes would be able to detect it. As Milner said we don't have to assume that alien civilizations are necessarily more advanced than we are.
One of the project leaders, Britain's royal astronomer Martin Rees declared that our modern technology allows much more sensitive searches than ever before, however in order to not be disappointed it is better to not have great expectations of finding intelligent alien life.
The payoff in this "huge gamble" would be huge, but our "chance of success is very small", according to the astrophysicist. However, the possibility of finding life elsewhere in the Universe has increased since the identification of billions of Earth-like planets in our galaxy, Rees said.
