Russian Billionaire Funds Search For Alien Life

/
stephen hawking nasa 50th, Photo by Nasa HQ

stephen hawking nasa 50th, Photo by Nasa HQ

RUSSIA - Yesterday, Russian billionaire Yuri Milner announced that he will spend $100 million to further the search for life beyond Earth. His plan, called "Breakthrough Listen," uses radio telescopes and a handpicked team of scientists to conduct a ten-year search for radio signals that would be indicative of life. Milner's estimate is that during the span of the project, radio transmissions can be collected from the Milky Way as well as 100 other nearby galaxies. Scientists will then look for patterns in the data and figure out what radio signals came from natural causes and what, if any, came from intelligent life. (Source: Reuters)

The financial backing behind "Breakthrough Listen" is unprecedented. Typically, the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI) receives less than $2 million a year.

Most of the money will be spent in renting time to use radio telescopes, including those at Australia's Parkes Observatory in New South Wales and the Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia.  Astronomers must pay top dollar to use these telescopes and most can only afford to reserve a few days of sky-watching time. Milner plans to book the telescopes for two months every year -- admittedly an inconvenience for other scientists jockeying for time at the observatories.

Advising Milner and his team are Frank Drake, former partner of Carl Sagan and chairman of SETI, and physicist Stephen Hawking.

NASA has long known that there are "Goldilocks planets" -- Earthlike, potentially habitable planets. The term references the Goldilocks fairy-tale's quest for something "just right" -- for instance, an atmosphere that isn't too hot to cause all water to evaporate nor too cold for water to become inaccessibly frozen. Breakthrough Listen will find out if anything on these planets has something to say.

CONTRIBUTING JOURNALIST: @SJJakubowski
LINKEDIN: Sarah Jakubowski

UFOs in China | Stephen Hawking

/
UFOs in China | Stephen Hawking

And therefore as a stranger give it welcome. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." ~ Hamlet Act 1, scene 5, 159–167 Popular American culture is replete with UFO sightings and conspiracy theories. Now it would appear that the phenomenon has spread to China. Just a week after an unidentified flying object (UFO) shut down the Xiashan Airport in Hangzhou, China, another one was spotted Thursday in the city of Chongqing.

As a fan of astrophysics, astronomy and the universe, I often ponder the possibility of extraterrestrial life, if not in a humanoid form, then at least primitive oceanic life forms. I eagerly await the new mission to Jupiter's icy moons, the Europa Jupiter System Mission (EJSM), is proposed for a launch in 2020. Who knows what more we will learn?

"To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational," Hawking says in a new Discovery Channel series called Stephen Hawking's Universe. "The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like."

Read More