Hailing back to the campfires of ancient nomadic hominids and their sky gods, the question of whether or not we’re alone in the universe is among the oldest that still goes unanswered.
But recently, New Yorkers and Stephen Hawking were asked to help the world search for other inhabited ones with their magnificent tenacity in a $100 million program set to scan the cosmos for extraterrestrial life.
STEPHEN HAWKING JOINS RUSSIAN BILLIONAIRE
The eminent astrophysicist Professor Stephen Hawking, Russian billionaire Yuri Milner agreed to fund a decade-long program named Breakthrough Listen that will search for advanced civilizations on other worlds by listening for radio signals.
Extremely powerful radio telescopes worldwide will coordinate while the data is analyzed with the supercomputing power of millions of PCs in homes and offices in every nation on Earth.
HOW ALL OF US CAN SEARCH FOR ET
The team of scientists led by Peter Worden (former NASA Ames Research Center director) will organize gathered signals, release them to the public, and analyze the data for traces of patterns endemic of intelligence.
Every telescope is expected to create massive banks of data, all of which will be immediately released to the public at large who will be able to download a computer program that will automatically sift through the cosmic waves alongside the most gifted scientific minds for minds from another planet.
OLD IDEA, NEW MEANS
And yes, it’s well known that other organizations have tried this before, so Breakthrough Listen is going to join the University of California in Berkeley’s Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) @home initiative , unifying new technology with good ol’ California grit (and is there any adjective less Californian than grit?).
The software to be used to sift through this cosmic data can actually be rewritten for improvements, so that anyone can customize their own SETI-style apps.
“Breakthrough Initiatives are also developing powerful software for analysing this data. All this software will be open source. The hardware and software used in Listen project will be compatible with other telescopes around the world, enabling them to join the search for intelligent life…[a]nd scientists and members of the public can develop their own apps to sift the data for phenomena of interest.”
WARY OF RUSSIAN BILLIONAIRES?
Yuri Milner Russian billionaire made his riches by making a series of wise investments in technology start-ups like Facebook, and he’s opined that other civilizations could probably teach us ways to handle some of our greatest social antagonisms, like how to allocate natural resources.
The world spends less than $2 million on SETI every year, which is pathetic, so this new source of relatively infinite funds from Breakthrough Initiative is a welcomed boon to the cause.
THE LIMITS OF PHYSICS, THE DRIVE OF LIFE
However, the limits of physics do rain on ET’s parade–any signal detected will almost certainly have been sent many years ago, possibly hundreds or thousands of years ago. It takes four years for a radio signal to travel from the Earth to the nearest solar system. Consequently, direct communication will not be available. Even if we find a signal, we will not be able to respond, except in kind, by radio, which would take just as long to reach them.
In one decade, Milner believes that his $100 billion will be enough for scientists to monitor not only the entire galaxy, but surrounding galaxies, as well.
“It’s the most interesting technological question of our day. If we’re alone, we need to cherish what we have. The message is, the universe has no backup,” said the Russian billionaire.
Professor Stephen Hawking fully condones and supports Milner’s project, but he is still starkly wary about the implications about making contact with a more intelligent species.
“We believe that life arose spontaneously on Earth, so in an infinite universe there must be other occurrences of life. Somewhere in the cosmos perhaps intelligent life may be watching these lights of ours, aware of what they mean.”
Stephen Hawking continues:
“It’s time to commit to finding the answer to search for life beyond Earth. The Breakthrough Initiate is making that commitment.”
