{"id":16171,"date":"2015-07-20T23:23:59","date_gmt":"2015-07-20T15:23:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/100-million-initiative-to-search-for-et\/"},"modified":"2015-07-20T23:23:59","modified_gmt":"2015-07-20T15:23:59","slug":"100-million-initiative-to-search-for-et","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/100-million-initiative-to-search-for-et\/","title":{"rendered":"$100 million initiative to search for ET"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Russian
Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, Astronomer Royal Martin Rees, SETI pioneer Frank Drake, and Ann Druyan, widow of late astronomer Carl Sagan who helped craft interstellar messages carried aboard NASA\u2019s Voyager probes. Credit: Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner is pledging $100 million to fund the most sophisticated search for extraterrestrials ever attempted, a 10-year campaign using radio and optical telescopes, ultra-sensitive detectors and state-of-the-art software to study nearby stars and galaxies for tell-tale signals of alien civilizations, he said Monday.<\/p>\n

Joined by Frank Drake, the U.S. astrophysicist who pioneered the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, famed U.S. planet hunter Geoff Marcy, Astronomer Royal Martin Rees and other luminaries, including physicist Stephen Hawking, Milner said he was inspired to act by the recent discovery that Earth-like planets are commonplace.<\/p>\n

Citing NASA\u2019s Kepler spacecraft, which has detected hundreds of extra-solar planets and, by statistical extension, vast numbers of Earth-like worlds across the Milky Way, Milner said \u201cthat really opened up the conversation around intelligent life, providing us evidence that there are many billions of Earth-like planets in our galaxy alone.\u201d<\/p>\n

Milner announced two programs Monday in London. The \u201cBreakthrough Listen\u201d initiative will focus on the search for optical and radio signals from other civilizations while a \u201cBreakthrough Message\u201d competition will seek suitable responses to a signal if one is detected.<\/p>\n

The latter will feature a pool of prizes totaling $1 million, although officials say there is no commitment to actually send such a message.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a way to learn about the potential languages of interstellar communication and to spur global discussion on the ethical and philosophical issues surrounding communication with intelligent life beyond Earth,\u201d Milner\u2019s organization said in a statement.<\/p>\n

Ann Druyan, who worked with her husband, the late astronomer Carl Sagan, to develop a message from Earth carried on NASA\u2019s twin Voyager spacecraft, said \u201cwe will succeed on this leg of the initiative if we inspire a new degree of self awareness and a sense of consciousness about what it is to be alive on this planet.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIn formulating such a message, whether it be sent or not, you\u2019re forced to really look at who you are, who you share this planet with,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd I think that will be all to the good. I know that these efforts ignite fascination in the young, and this is part of what we have to be doing as a civilization.\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u201cBreakthrough Listen\u201d program will survey the one million closest stars to Earth, across the plane of the Milky Way and toward its center where stars are densely packed and even other nearby galaxies.<\/p>\n

\"Green
Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia is among the observatories to be used under the new SETI initiative announced Monday. Credit: NRAO<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The program\u2019s instruments and detectors will be sensitive enough to discern emissions from Earth-level technologies, like air defense radars, some 2,000 light years away.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe problem, I guess, (is that) they only illuminate a small fraction of the sky,\u201d said Andrew Siemion, director of the SETI Research Center at the University of California at Berkeley. \u201cSo those radars would have to be pointed in our direction (to be detected).<\/p>\n

\u201cBut of course, there are many, many stars along the line of sight towards the galactic plane or the galactic center, so we would have a very good chance of detecting those if we were pointed in that direction,\u201d he said.\u2019<\/p>\n

Providing much-needed outside funding, the Breakthrough Listen project will buy extensive observing time on the football field-size National Radio Astronomy Observatory dish in Green Bank, West Virginia, and the 210-foot Parkes Observatory radio telescope in Australia. The project will cover 10 times more of the sky, with 50 times the sensitivity, of previous searches.<\/p>\n

Equally important, Breakthrough Listen has arranged to use the 2.4-meter Automated Planet Finder Telescope at Lick Observatory in California to search for optical laser signals.<\/p>\n

Marcy said \u201cit\u2019s possible, if the Milky Way galaxy actually has other intelligent species that are sending their spacecraft around the galaxy, maybe setting up colonies on other planets or even around other stars, they may be communicating with all of those sites using lasers.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIndeed, there could, therefore, be a sort of galactic internet \u2026 carried by laser beams crisscrossing the galaxy. And we here on the Earth may serendipitously just happen to fall in one of those laser beams. Moreover, it\u2019s possible they know about us and they\u2019re purposely shining their laser beams at us.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Breakthrough Listen project will take \u201cspectra of thousands of stars and hundreds of galaxies looking for specific wavelengths, single wavelengths, at which there\u2019s a lot of light that would be best interpreted as from lasers from some other civilization,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The data collected will be available to the public and Breakthrough Listen will join and support the SETI@home project, the University of California at Berkeley\u2019s innovative screen saver program that uses idle personal computers to sift through collected data in search of unusual signals.<\/p>\n

Project officials said any signal detection of possible extra-terrestrial origin would be treated like any other scientific discovery, requiring independent verification and peer-reviewed analysis. But they emphasized the program will be conducted \u201cin the open\u201d and that the public would be informed about any potential detections.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s inevitable that there would also be a social dissemination of this information,\u201d Siemion said. \u201cAnd that\u2019s something that would be very difficult for us to control. But I\u2019ll reiterate again, a commitment to openness here to everything that we\u2019re doing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOur intention would certainly not to be to get folks excited about something that might turn out to be interference,\u201d he said. \u201cBut by the same token, we\u2019ll be absolutely open about any discoveries that we make and our level of confidence in them.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, Astronomer Royal Martin Rees, SETI pioneer Frank Drake, and Ann Druyan, widow of late astronomer Carl Sagan who helped craft interstellar messages carried aboard NASA\u2019s Voyager probes. Credit: Getty Images Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner is pledging $100 million to fund the most sophisticated search for extraterrestrials ever […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3754,3755],"class_list":["post-16171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-seti","tag-stephen-hawking"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16171"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16171"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16171\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}