Stephen Hawkins Backs $100 Million Challenge To Find Alien Life

[Guest]

 

Professor Stephen Hawking has lent the credibility of his name to a wild new project. 

On Monday, famed physicist Stephen Hawking and Russian tycoon Yuri Milner held a news conference in London to announce their new project: injecting $100 million and a whole lot of brain power into the search for intelligent extraterrestrial life, an endeavor they're calling Breakthrough Listen.

"We believe that life arose spontaneously on Earth," Hawking said at Monday's news conference, "So in an infinite universe, there must be other occurrences of life."

An introductory video set up the announcement by Yuri Milner and Stephen Hawking of "Breakthrough Listen," a new initiative aimed at discovering intelligent extraterrestrial life. 

Geoffrey Marcy, a University of California, Berkeley, astronomer who found most of our first exoplanets, also spoke at the event as part of the group's brain trust.

"The universe is apparently bulging at the seams with the ingredients of biology," Marcy explained. Indeed, Marcy and other scientists have found a surprising number of Earth-like exoplanets in recent years — rocky planets the right distance from their suns to support water — suggesting that life as we know it is at least possible, if not probable, all over the universe.

That being said, the group of esteemed scientists gathered on Monday didn't make any bold claims about immediately hunting down intelligent life-forms — or ever finding them at all, for that matter. But the likelihood of success is about to shoot up exponentially, because right now we're barely trying.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has been active since 1960, when scientist Frank Drake — another of the great minds joining Breakthrough Listen — sought out radio signals from neighboring stars. But even the largest group looking for life, the SETI Institute, doesn't receive any government funding, and this particular aspect of space exploration now relies on dwindling support from universities and private organizations.

“We would typically get 24 to 36 hours on a telescope per year, but now we’ll have thousands of hours per year on the best instruments,” Andrew Siemion, a scientist at the University of California, Berkley, and one of the group's co-founders, said at the news conference. “It’s difficult to overstate how big this is. It’s a revolution.”

Milner, best known for investing in technology companies like Facebook and Alibaba, is footing the entire bill for the project. It's the latest endeavor of his Breakthrough Prize Foundation, a Silicon Valley funded group that currently gives the biggest prize — $3 million per laureate — of any scientific award. The prize is funded by investors including Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Google's Sergey Brin, but Breakthrough Listen will start with a $100 million, 10-year budget from Milner's own pocket.

According to Milner and the scientists joining him, the project will allow scientists to collect as much data on SETI in a day as they now do in a year. The data will be made available to the public, so anyone can help search for the radio signals that could be used to track down alien civilizations. Meanwhile, others at Breakthrough Listen will be working to improve our own signaling techniques, brainstorming the best way to send a message out into the cosmos.

"I've been thinking about this since I was a child, reading Carl Sagan's book 'Intelligent Life in the Universe,' " Milner told The Post. "The year that I was born, 1961, that was a big year in science — the first man was launched into space, and I was named for him. And Kennedy made his famous speech about putting man on the moon."

As far as Milner is concerned, we owe it to ourselves to try to answer the question of whether or not humanity is alone.

"I don't have high expectations, but the search itself will teach us quite a bit," Milner said. "We could find something we're not even looking for."

And while his expectations aren't high, he says he has a gut feeling we're not alone.

"I think it's a low probability but high impact event," he said. "Irrespective of what the answer is, it's a powerful answer. At any given time, we should apply the best technology and use the best instruments available to search for that answer."

 

 

Edited July 20, 2015 by Guest

[Ice_nine]

good luck!

[Luigi]

How many homes for homeless people could be built with $100 million? How many hungry people could be fed for $100 million? How many people could go to college for $100 million?

Why don't they spend money on the lives they see around them rather on possible lives 'somewhere out there'?

Sheesh!

[veritasluxmea]

I am currently accepting donations for my education fund if Stephen Hawkins and Yuri Milner want to actually do something meaningful with their money. 

Edited July 20, 2015 by veritasluxmea

[puellapaschalis]

I am currently accepting donations for my education fund if Stephen Hawkins and Yuri Milner want to actually do something meaningful with their money. 

Idem ditto my student loan debt.

[Guest]

I think the antichrist and the final deception will have something to do with aliens.

[Maggyie]

There were plenty of Spaniards starving, I imagine, when Isabela funded Columbus. Exploration is always worth it!

[superblue]

 

I am currently accepting donations for my education fund if Stephen Hawkins and Yuri Milner want to actually do something meaningful with their money. 

/ good point, could you imagine if he just put up a website and it read , hey i am really really bored, show me a receipt or proof of concept, or a mortgage bill, or a movie or something you want to go to and i will cut you a check.

 

it is pretty cool that Stephen Hawking,

 is putting up hard cash to find E.T / But part of me thinks he is doing this just to save his own skin, like in the back of my mind i wonder if he thinks that if someone can find E.T that these Aliens will like fix him some how....

But i do not think the money is enough and that he went around the wrong way of doing it if he was serious.... He should have held a scientific conference of sorts, seeking out the brightest minds in science available and come up with an actual plan to make the thing happen. THEN find out how much it would cost, and realize it would be more than 100 million dollars, and then i dunno go eat some pudding and watch Wheel Of Fortune.

Plus worrying about money and the poor, those are two entities that will never cease to be. There are not too many " rich people " giving money to help others but there are some, ya just have to know where to look.

It would be nice if this bounty money did actually come up with a win. But the best chance of real intelligent life is probably in Andromeda , and you can't beat math and science / like Einstein science.....    Best bet is creating something to catch E.Ts attention so much so, that they just flat out come buzzing over here, and land in someones front yard in the middle of the day, or in the middle of time square or something of the sort. something just so flat out in your face, no one can say  it is fake.

[Luigi]

If they're out there, they'll find us soon enough,or we'll find them soon enough. And given our abominable record of not getting along with each other here on Earth, I don't see much advantage to finding other groups to compete-with-struggle-with-oppress-exploit (whether we're doing it to them or they're doing it to us). I mean, like what if they don't accept gay marriage or they still practice slavery or they pray in their schools or something?!?!

[He is Risen!]

Can I have my $100 million now?  In small bills please.

[Luigi]

There were plenty of Spaniards starving, I imagine, when Isabela funded Columbus. Exploration is always worth it!

Right - the Spanish royalty invested in Columbus as a way to get rich. And it worked. I have to wonder about Hawking & Milner, too.