Posted on 07/20/2015 3:24:26 PM PDT by LibWhacker
Russian billionaire Yuri Milner announces most comprehensive hunt for alien life.
You could say that the silence has been deafening. Since its beginnings more than half a century ago, the dedicated search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has failed to detect the presence of alien civilizations. But at London’s Royal Society today (20 July), Russian billionaire Yuri Milner announced a shot in the arm for SETI: a US$100-million decadal project to provide the most comprehensive hunt for alien communications so far.
The initiative, called Breakthrough Listen, will see radio telescopes at Green Bank in West Virginia, the Parkes Observatory in Australia, and the Lick Observatory's optical telescope in San Jose, California, scanning around one million stars in the Milky Way and a hundred nearby galaxies. Milner is also releasing an open letter backing the idea of an intensified search; it has been co-signed by numerous scientists, including physicist Stephen Hawking. “In an infinite Universe, there must be other life,” Hawking told luminaries at today's launch event. “There is no bigger question. It is time to commit to finding the answer,” he said.
“We would typically get 24–36 hours on a telescope per year, but now we’ll have thousands of hours per year on the best instruments,” says one of the project leaders, Andrew Siemion, a SETI scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. “It’s difficult to overstate how big this is. It’s a revolution.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nature.com ...
Hawking needs something to keep himself relevant these days. Very doubtful though that they’ll find anything.
Hehe, I know. Green slimy things don’t sound very appetizing to us. Would red slimy things sound any more appetizing to little green men?
So there’s that working in our favor.
 |
||
| · join · view topics · view or post blog · bookmark · post new topic · subscribe · | ||
| Google news searches: exoplanet · exosolar · extrasolar · | ||
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.