by Mark Ollig
Can
cutting-edge technology, $100 million, and the assistance of a world-renowned
physicist finally answer the question, “Are we alone?”
A
bold, new initiative called the “Breakthrough Listen” project, will be funded
by a 10-year, $100 million operating budget through its founder, Yuri Milner, a
Russian entrepreneur and venture capitalist.
It’s
been reported as the most extraordinary scientific research effort for
extraterrestrial life in the universe ever undertaken.
Milner
said he’s also known as “a technology investor from Silicon Valley.”
Yuri
Milner was born in 1961; the same year Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became
the first human in space.
The
reason his parents named Milner “Yuri” was so that he would be inspired by what
Gagarin had accomplished.
In
a well-attended press conference last Monday at The Royal Society in London;
Milner, world-renowned theoretical physicist Professor Stephen Hawking, and
other panel members from the scientific community addressed journalists and
reporters.
“There
is no greater question. It’s time to commit to finding the answer to search for
life beyond Earth. We are alive. We are intelligent. We must know,” Hawking
said, using his computerized voice synthesizer.
“Somewhere
in the cosmos, perhaps, intelligent life may be watching these lights of ours,
aware of what they mean,” he stated before the many members of the press in
attendance.
Geoff
Marcy, a Professor of astronomy at the University of California, in Berkeley,
said new electronic high-bandwidth technology systems being developed will
simultaneously scan 10 billion separate radio wave frequencies using
field-programmable gate arrays and graphical processing units.
Breakthrough
Listen will use advanced technology, such as “optical search,” and will develop
powerful software for examining the search results.
Beyond
our own Milky Way galaxy, they will be listening for messages from the 100
closest galaxies.
Breakthrough
Listen will also be joining and supporting the Search for Extraterrestrial
Intelligence (SETI) community.
The
most powerful telescopes on Earth will examine the center of our galaxy for any
indications or transmission signals representing intelligent life.
This
initiative will search the approximately 1 million stars closest to Earth for
signs of life on the planets orbiting them.
The
100-meter Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) located in West Virginia is
one of the telescopes to be used by Breakthrough Listen.
The
total GBT dish surface area, or parabola, is 2.3 acres; roughly the size of two
football fields.
Their
website is https://science.nrao.edu/facilities/gbt.
Another
telescope to be used to search for signals in space which would suggest signs
of extraterrestrial life is the 64-meter Parkes Radio Telescope in New South
Wales, Australia.
It
is the southern hemisphere’s largest telescope.
The
website for the Parkes Radio Telescope is http://www.parkes.atnf.csiro.au.
The
Hubble Space Telescope has brought us some amazing views of our universe; yet,
it is unable to tell us whether life – or intelligent life for that matter –
exists elsewhere in this celestial ocean we are floating in.
In
addition, the Hubble is no longer being maintained as in years past, via Space
Shuttle visits, and is projected to be operational for just another five or six
years.
The
search for other life in the universe could also be discovered with an
extremely powerful new radio telescope to be placed in outer space soon.
Construction
of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the much improved replacement for the
25-year-old Earth-orbiting Hubble, is nearing completion.
It
is being built by NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space
Agency.
The
JWST is scheduled to launch in October 2018. It will orbit the sun and be
located nearly 1 million miles from the Earth.
This
powerful new telescope will be “the premier observatory of the next decade,”
and will see much further back in time than the Hubble – about 13.5 billion
years, when the universe’s first stars and galaxies began forming.
The
JWST website is: http://jwst.nasa.gov/index.html.
I
refer back to the Breakthrough Listen project.
What
if the folks working on this project do confirm extraterrestrial intelligent
life on some far away planet – and what happens if those distant inhabitants
are technically evolved enough to become aware of us, and make contact?
How
should humanity respond?
Should
we even take the risk of responding?
Breakthrough
Message, a second initiative funded by Milner, will sponsor an “international
competition to generate a message representing humanity and planet Earth, which
might one day be sent to other civilizations,” per Breakthrough Initiatives
website.
A
$1 million prize will be awarded to whoever creates a message which best
characterizes our planet, and the humans living here.
Yours
truly is currently crafting a well-thought-out message for their consideration.
Breakthrough
Initiatives search results for finding extraterrestrial life “out there” will
be made available to the public. You can follow them at http://www.breakthroughinitiatives.org.
This columnist strongly
encourages you to watch this exceptionally-informative and well-organized press
conference at http://tinyurl.com/bitsbytes5.
I end this column regarding the search for extraterrestrial
intelligence, with this sentence by Professor Stephen Hawking, “It is important
for us to know if we are alone in the dark.”
