The future is now. Why does Milner spend $ 100 million in search of aliens?

Today, July 20, in London, the Russian billionaire and investor Yuri Milner announced the new stage of searching for traces of extraterrestrial civilizations: over the next 10 years, he will invest $ 100 million in attempts to catch a signal from reasonable creatures, which can be reached from the other land of the galaxy. The Breakrthrough Listen project, presented by Milner and Professor Stephen Hawking Royal Society, can be confidently called the most expensive and large -scale attempt to find extraterrestrial life.

The largest, but far from the first. For more than half a century, quite serious and mentally healthy scientists have been looking for signals that aliens may send us. The Seti (Search for Extratorterrestrial Intelligence) project, uniting attempts by different scientists to discover an extraterrestrial mind, appeared back in 1959, since then it was attended by NASA, the University of California and dozens of other scientific organizations, including the Milner’s native institution, in which the entrepreneur worked at the end 1980s, before the start of his business career.

Until recently, the largest Seti project was the Allen lattice (Ata). With its help for more than 10 years, scientists have been trying to hear signals that may reach us. The Allen Telescope Array is such a giant telescope, consisting of 42 satellite antennas, installed in a clean field of 470 km from San Francisco. The plates are quite large - six meters in diameter, and together they work like a telescope from an antenna hundred meters. Such a large size of the antenna is necessary in order to, day and night, watching the radiation of hundreds of thousands of stars, try to catch any meaningful signal. So far, of course, in vain, and it is unlikely that in the foreseeable future there is a chance to get more impressive results.

Actually, the technical achievement was not so much in the amount of the antenna in which the plates were combined, but in the algorithm, which allowed to cover a billion frequency in the range from 0.5 to 11.2 gigahertz.

ATA is a joint project of SETI and a radio -astronomical laboratory of the University of California in Berkeley, named after Paul Allen, co -founder of Microsoft.

Russian billionaire Yuri Milner and British scientist Stephen Hawking during a press conference in London. Milner and Hawking announced the launch of the program to search for extraterrestrial civilizations

EPA / andy rain

Now Milner and his $ 100 million have connected to the case. Over the next ten years, it is planned to scan a million stars closest to the ground, which is ten times more than in previous programs. It will also be checked five times more frequencies and it will be done a hundred times faster than before. To do this, two other telescopes will be used: Green Banks Telescope in Western Virginia and the Australian Parks radio response, which together will cover the northern and southern hemispheres. The algorithm, which was developed by scientists from Berkeley, will allow scanning and processing at the same time signals of 1.5 billion frequencies.

“It’s like if you set up your radio not one wave, but immediately listen to 1.5 billion radio stations,” Jeff Marsi, one of the scientific leaders of Breakthrough Initiative, said at today's press conference. For comparison: the Seti Institute is able to listen only to four “radio stations” at the same time. - This is a giant technological breakthrough. A team from the University of Berkeley will build a set of modules necessary for this. ”

Now it is just right to answer the question of how great the chances are that the new project, orders more powerful (and expensive) than the previous ones, will be more successful. And this, to put it mildly, is a difficult question.

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