Famed physicist Stephen Hawking wants to believe that we aren’t alone in the universe. And to find out if there really is other intelligent life out there, he’s joining up with Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner to push a new $100 million initiative aimed at locating alien life on other planets.
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Per Scientific American, Hawking and Milner on Monday announced an initiative called Breakthrough Listen “will allow new state-of-the-art radio and optical surveys to take place using the world’s premiere telescopes, creating the most ambitious and robust SETI program yet performed.”
Wired informs us that these telescopes will be able to cover 10 times as much space as they could before and that they’ll be able to scan different frequencies than any they’ve previously scanned.
There’s no guarantee this initiative will find anything, of course, but it’s still intriguing nonetheless. Then again, there’s the question of whether actively searching for alien life is a good idea, especially if it’s a more advanced civilization with superior weaponry than what we have… but that’s a concern for another day.
