Stephen Hawking: it is time to hunt for alien civilisations

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Stephen Hawking: it is time to hunt for alien civilisations

The new project, called Breakthrough Listen, is chaired by Lord Rees the astronomer royal and backed by Professor Stephen Hawking

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The project will search for, but not make contact with, alien civilisations








By Sarah Knapton, Science News

2:35PM BST 20 Jul 2015



26 Comments


Professor Stephen Hawking said it was ‘time to commit to finding the answer to life beyond Earth’ as he launched a $100 million project to hunt for intelligent aliens.

The astrophysicist joined Lord Martin Rees, the astronomer Royal and Russian philanthropist Yuri Milner to announce the project at the Royal Society in London.






The initial 10 year programme will survey the 1,000,000 closest stars to Earth, scanning the entire galactic plane of the Milky Way.


Beyond our galaxy it will listen for messages from the 100 closest galaxies at 10 billion different frequencies.


“To understand the universe you must know about atoms, about the forces that bind them, the contours of space and time, the birth and death of stars, the dance of galaxies, the secrets of black holes. But that is not enough." he said.


Stephen Hawking launched the landmark hunt for alien life at The Royal Society

“These ideas cannot explain everything. They can explain the light of stars but not the lights that shine from planet earth. To understand these lights you must know about life, about minds.

“We believe that life arose spontaneously on Earth. So in an infinite universe there must be other occurrences of life.

“Somewhere in the universe intelligent life may be watching the lights of ours aware of what they mean.

“Either way there is no better question. It is time to commit to finding the answer to life beyond Earth. We are life, we are intelligent, we must know.”

The new project, called Breakthrough Listen, is chaired by Lord Rees and will cover 10 times the amount of sky which has been scanned by previous programs dedicated to the search for extra-terrestrial life.

The scientists estimate that if a civilisation based around one of the 1,000 nearest stars transmits to us with the power of an aircraft radar then the new array will be able to detect it.

“It’s a huge gamble of course, but the pay off would be colossal,” said Lord Rees, “The chance of finding life has risen a billion fold when we realised that Earth-like planets are not rare, but there are literally billions of them, within our own Galaxy.

“We don't know what we will see, it may be organic life or machines created by a long dead civilisations, but it would transform our view of the universe.”


Lord Martin Rees is chairing the advisory panel for the project
The project will be joining forces with SETI@home, University of California, Berkeley’s ground breaking distributed computing platform, with 9 million volunteers around the world donating their spare computing power to search astronomical data for signs of life.

Collectively, it already constitutes one of the largest supercomputers in the world.

One of the project leaders is Frank Drake, the American astrophysicist who first calculated that alien life is inevitable given the size of the universe.

“Right now there could be messages from the stars flying right through the room, through us all," said Drake. "That still sends a shiver down my spine. The search for intelligent life is a great adventure. And Breakthrough Listen is giving it a huge lift.

“We’ve learned a lot in the last fifty years about how to look for signals from space. With the Breakthrough Initiatives, the learning curve is likely to bend upward significantly.”

Milner, who was named after Yuri Gagrin, the first man in space, said he was committed to bringing the ‘Silicon Valley’ approach to hunting for intelligent life in the Universe.

“We are launching the most comprehensive search project ever,” he said. “Breakthrough (Listen) in one day will collect more data than one year.”


Russian billionaire Yuri Milner says the 'Silicon Valley’ approach will help in the hunt for intelligent life in the Universe
However the team will not be attempting to communicate with alien civilisations, even if they do pick up signs that they exist.

Professor Hawking added: “We don't know about aliens, but we know about humans. If you look a history then contact between humans and less intelligent organisms have often been disastrous from their point of view.

“The civilisations reading one of our messages could be billions of years ahead. If so they will be vastly more powerful and may not see us as any more valuable than we see bacteria.

“It only took five hundred million years for life to evolve on Earth, but it took two and half billion to get to multicellular organisms, and technological intelligence has appeared only once, so it may be very rare.

“When it does evolve we only need to look in the mirror to knew that it can be fragile and prone to self-destruction.”


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