Alien Intelligence Search Gets Major New Push

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Entrepreneur and former physicist Yuri Milner talks about the just-announced $100 million Breakthrough Listen Project to search for extraterrestrial technological civilizations.

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Are we alone in the universe?

“Well, ‘’ is one of the oldest questions, and numerous generations of scientists and just people are curious looking at the sky.”

Entrepreneur and former physicist Yuri Milner, founder of the Breakthrough Prizes in Fundamental Physics, Life Sciences and Mathematics.

YM: “So the 20th of July—this is the day [46th anniversary] of the Apollo [11] landing on the moon—we’re , which is designed to be the most comprehensive and significant search for extraterrestrial intelligence so far.”

SM: Last week in a New York City restaurant, Milner spoke about the $100 million plan with editor-in-chief Mariette DiChristina.

YM: “We will have signed the deals with the biggest telescopes in the world to allow for the best scientists and analysts to be able to accumulate a significant amount of information and to be able to look through that information for the signals of extraterrestrial nature.”

MD: “Tell us which telescopes they are and what kind of data they’ll be collecting.”

YM: “Well, we will start with three telescopes, the largest steerable telescope in the world is in Greenbank, Virginia, and the largest telescope in Australia, called Parkes. Those will be used for radio search. And then Lick Observatory will be our partner in optical search.”

MD: “I have one other question about that data that you’re gathering, you’re doing something very unusual about that data, aren’t you?”

“Well, the idea is really to combine the best of what Silicon Valley can offer with the access to the best telescopes in the world to create an environment where all the data will be made available to the scientists and the public. In addition, all the software will be open-source and we’ll be targeting to create a platform for developers to build their own applications on top of this platform to allow for more efficient analysis of the data.

“Now, in addition to that, we will hope to engage the community of , that is about nine million people, to be able to process this vast amount of data that we’ll be collecting.”

SM: Audio from today’s announcement and press conference at the Royal Society in London, featuring Stephen Hawking, Frank Drake of the Drake Equation for estimating advanced civilizations in the universe, and other prominent researchers, will be available later today as a Science Talk podcast.

—Steve Mirsky

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