We’re finally listening for alien messages properly thanks to Stephen Hawking, Yuri Milner and $100 million

Jul20

by Sindy Cator on July 20, 2015 at 1:45 pm

Professor Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner, the immensely wealthy Russian tycoon with stakes in Facebook and Alibaba, have announced a $100 million project to search for intelligent extraterrestrial life. The plan has two parts – Breakthrough Initiative (a 10-year study using two huge telescopes to survey 1,000,000 nearby stars) Breakthrough Listen (a wider search using open data and open source software) There is also a $1 million prize for anyone who presents credible evidence of alien life. Essentially, this is all about ensuring that we, as a species, actually have our ears open and are listening for signals that other…