Stephen Hawking announces $100 million hunt for alien life

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  1. SlyPokerDog

    SlyPokerDog Woof! Staff Member Administrator

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    On Monday, famed physicist Stephen Hawking and Russian tycoon Yuri Milner held a news conference in London to announce their new project: injecting $100 million and a whole lot of brain power into the search for intelligent extraterrestrial life, an endeavor they're calling Breakthrough Listen.

    "We believe that life arose spontaneously on Earth," Hawking said at Monday's news conference, "So in an infinite universe, there must be other occurrences of life."


    Breakthrough Initiatives introduces new search for extraterrestrial life(3:36)
    An introductory video set up the announcement by Yuri Milner and Stephen Hawking of "Breakthrough Listen," a new initiative aimed at discovering intelligent extraterrestrial life. (Breakthrough Initiatives)
    Geoffrey Marcy, a University of California, Berkeley, astronomer who found most of our first exoplanets, also spoke at the event as part of the group's brain trust.

    "The universe is apparently bulging at the seams with the ingredients of biology," Marcy explained. Indeed, Marcy and other scientists have found a surprising number of Earth-like exoplanets in recent years — rocky planets the right distance from their suns to support water — suggesting that life as we know it is at least possible, if not probable, all over the universe.


    That being said, the group of esteemed scientists gathered on Monday didn't make any bold claims about immediately hunting down intelligent life-forms — or ever finding them at all, for that matter. But the likelihood of success is about to shoot up exponentially, because right now we're barely trying.

    The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has been active since 1960, when scientist Frank Drake — another of the great minds joining Breakthrough Listen — sought out radio signals from neighboring stars. But even the largest group looking for life, the SETI Institute, doesn't receive any government funding, and this particular aspect of space exploration now relies on dwindling support from universities and private organizations.


    “We would typically get 24 to 36 hours on a telescope per year, but now we’ll have thousands of hours per year on the best instruments,” Andrew Siemion, a scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the group's co-founders, said at the news conference. “It’s difficult to overstate how big this is. It’s a revolution.”


    Milner, best known for investing in technology companies like Facebook and Alibaba, is footing the entire bill for the project. It's the latest endeavor of his Breakthrough Prize Foundation, a Silicon Valley funded group that currently gives the biggest prize — $3 million per laureate — of any scientific award. The prize is funded by investors including Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Google's Sergey Brin, but Breakthrough Listen will start with a $100 million, 10-year budget from Milner's own pocket.

    According to Milner and the scientists joining him, the project will allow scientists to collect as much data on SETI in a day as they now do in a year. The data will be made available to the public, so anyone can help search for the radio signals that could be used to track down alien civilizations. Meanwhile, others at Breakthrough Listen will be working to improve our own signaling techniques, brainstorming the best way to send a message out into the cosmos.

    "I've been thinking about this since I was a child, reading Carl Sagan's book 'Intelligent Life in the Universe,' " Milner told The Post. "The year that I was born, 1961, that was a big year in science — the first man was launched into space, and I was named for him. And Kennedy made his famous speech about putting man on the moon."

    (The first man in space was Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.)

    As far as Milner is concerned, we owe it to ourselves to try to answer the question of whether or not humanity is alone.

    "I don't have high expectations, but the search itself will teach us quite a bit," Milner said. "We could find something we're not even looking for."

    And while his expectations aren't high, he says he has a gut feeling we're not alone.

    "I think it's a low probability but high impact event," he said. "Irrespective of what the answer is, it's a powerful answer. At any given time, we should apply the best technology and use the best instruments available to search for that answer."

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...ng-announces-100-million-hunt-for-alien-life/
     
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  2. santeesioux

    santeesioux Just keep on scrolling by

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    Someone get him in contact with Canzano, he knows PA and NO are Lizard men!
     
  3. e_blazer

    e_blazer Rip City Fan

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    $100 M seems like chump change. That's one NBA player on a max contract.

    For that matter, he could save himself some money and just go with Sam Cassell as proof of alien life.
     
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  4. MarAzul

    MarAzul LongShip

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    I expect that statement to become true.

    Funny how men, widely acknowledged for their intellect can totally ignore the plethora of evidence before them. After all this time, life has not been observed anywhere outside Earth.
    No man on Earth, knows how to take the final step in creating life from the biological building materials readily available. But then they may indeed find something they were not looking for.
    And it may be worth far more than a paltry 100 million, they could even come to understand that final step in the life creation process and accept the significance of the finding.
     
  5. speeds

    speeds $2.50 highball, $1.50 beer Staff Member Administrator GFX Team

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  6. riverman

    riverman Writing Team

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    illegal aliens.jpg OK...I found some. I want to be paid in 2o dollar bills
     
  7. dviss1

    dviss1 Emcee Referee

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    Because of NASA we have many inventions that are used daily. MRIs for example.
     
  8. ripcityboy

    ripcityboy Well-Known Member

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    If they ever do find life on other planets than I pray to all that is holy that they never make contact with humanity. Kind of funny that we define ourselves by something we don't have.
     
    Last edited: Jul 23, 2015

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