Bengaluru: Yuri Milner, the Russian billionaire investor, has sought India's help in finding alien life on other worlds similar to our planet Earth.

The billionaire technology investor recently announced a $100 million investment in 'Breakthrough Listen', an initiative with theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking to search for signals from alien civilization.

Milner, who is in the country currently, urged Indian scientists, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to help him in his ambitious project.

The billionaire, at an event here hosted by him on Thursday, said that data related to alien research will be made public.

“All data will be open to the public and users can access it through a distributed platform. SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is a scientific area whose goal is to detect intelligent life outside Earth.

One approach, known as radio SETI, uses radio telescopes to listen for narrow-bandwidth radio signals from space. Such signals are not known to occur naturally, so a detection would provide evidence of extraterrestrial technology” Milner was quoted as saying.

One approach, known as radio SETI, uses radio telescopes to listen for narrow-bandwidth radio signals from space. Such signals are not known to occur naturally, so a detection would provide evidence of extraterrestrial technology.”

The event was attended by who's who of India's investor community and startup ecosystem where they were served a gala dinner at a five-star hotel followed by the screening of a documentary film “Are We Alone? Alien Planets Revealed”, reports an English Daily.

It was then followed by a panel discussion that included Milner, Pete Worden, chairman of the Breakthrough Listen project and ex-director of NASA, and Sujan SenGupta of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics.

Born into a Jewish family in Moscow, Milner was the second child of Russian intellectuals. He studied theoretical physics at Moscow State University, graduating in 1985.

He went on to work at Lebedev Physical Institute in the same department as the future Nobel Prize winner Vitaly Ginzburg. In 1990, Milner became the first non-emigre from the Soviet Union to go to the United States to receive an MBA at the Wharton School of Business.

Milner founded investment firms Digital Sky Technologies (DST), now called Mail.ru Group and DST Global.

Milner is an investor in Facebook, Zynga, Twitter, Flipkart, Spotify, ZocDoc, Groupon, JD.com, Planet Labs, Xiaomi, OlaCabs, Alibaba and many others.