London: Eminent British physicist Proffessor Stephen Hawking on Tuesday launched a new USD 100-million project to hunt for aliens.
The Breakthrough Initiatives programme, funded by United States based billionaire and Silicon Valley technology investor and physicist Yuri Milner, was launched at the Royal Society in London and characterised as the "biggest scientific search ever undertaken for signs of intelligent life beyond Earth.
"We believe life arose spontaneously on earth. So in an infinite universe there must be other occurrences of life. Somewhere in the cosmos perhaps intelligent life may be watching these lives of ours, aware of what they mean," the 73-year-old wheelchair-bound scientist said.
"Or do our lights wander a lifeless cosmos - unseen beacons, announcing that here, on one rock, the Universe discovered its existence. Either way, there is no bigger question. It is time to commit to finding the answer to search for life beyond Earth. We are alive, we are intelligent, we must know," the author of 'A Brief History of Time' noted.
Lord Martin Rees, Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics and University of Cambridge and member of the advisory committee of the initiative, said, "The search for extra-terrestrial life is the most exciting quest in 21st- century science. The Breakthrough Initiatives aim to put it on the same level as the other ultimate scientific questions."
The Breakthrough Initiative is being funded by US-based billionaire and Silicon Valley technology investor and physicist Yuri Milner, who wants to put the entire weight of modern day technology behind this mission.
It plans to cover 10 times more of the sky than previous programmes and scan five times more of the radio spectrum, 100 times faster.
The programme kicks off with 'Breakthrough Listen' to track signals with access to two of the world's most powerful telescopes - Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, the US.
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