Billionaire’s US$100m fund to find ET
Print Edition
Wondering if we are alone in the universe has engaged minds through the ages. Add to the list Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, who announced yesterday he plans to spend US$100 million to explore the idea.
Using some of the world’s largest radio telescopes, a team of scientists handpicked by Milner will oversee an initiative he calls Breakthrough Listen, a 10-year search for radio signals that could indicate the existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.
“It’s the most interesting technological question of our day,” Milner said in an interview, noting that he became fascinated by the notion of extra-terrestrial life after reading astrophysicist Carl Sagan’s “Intelligent Life in the Universe” as a 10-year-old in Moscow.
His funds to bankroll the project came from savvy early investments in startups such as Facebook Inc.
Milner’s motivation is his belief that other civilizations could teach us how to handle challenges such as allocating natural resources. “If we’re alone, we need to cherish what we have. The message is, the universe has no backup.”
Scientists said the project dwarfs anything else in the field, known as the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence. Globally, less than US$2 million annually is spent on SETI, said Dan Werthimer, an adviser to Milner’s project and the astrophysicist who directs the SETI@home project affiliated with the University of California in Berkeley.
Today, due to technology improvements, including in computing power and telescope sensitivity, US$100 million will go much farther than in the early 1990s, the last time SETI had significant funding, scientists said.
The advances allow scientists to monitor several billion radio frequencies at a time, instead of several million, and to search 10 times more sky than in the early 1990s.
Milner, creator of the Breakthrough Prize for scientific achievement, announced the initiative in London accompanied by scientists such as Stephen Hawking, the physicist and author. Hawking holds an advisory role on the project.
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