Parkes Observatory radio telescope in Australia will be used for the search Getty Images

A pioneering new $100m (£64m) attempt to search the skies for signs of intelligent life has been unveiled by Russian tech investor Yuri Milner, Professor Stephen Hawking and Lord Martin Rees.

Funded by Milner, the Breakthrough Initiative was launched at the Royal Society in London as the largest-ever effort to search for alien civilisations.


The 10 year project will use open data and software, and work with teams at the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, United States, and the Parkes Telescope in Australia to try to find signals that might be being broadcast by civilisations across the galaxy, whether from planets or machine-based AI.

The Breakthrough Initiative will be a 10-year study using two of the world's largest telescopes, with a $1m (£642,000) prize for anyone able to find evidence of aliens. A larger component, Breakthrough Listen, will widen the search using open data and open source software.

Read next This is what life on Venus might look like – and how we’ll find it This is what life on Venus might look like – and how we’ll find it

Andrew Siemion, a director at the University of Berkeley’s SETI research centre, said the new search was between 50 and 100 times more powerful than previous attempts.

It is important for us to know if we are alone in the dark. Professor Stephen Hawking


"This was once a dream, it is now a truly scientific quest," Milner said. "In the 21st century we will find out about life at a galactic scale." The $100m investment is separate to Milner's $160m funding of the Breakthrough Prize, a high-profile science award that recognises major advances.

If a civilisation was broadcasting anything with the power of a "common aircraft radar" from the closest 1,000 stars, the Breakthrough Listen team believe they will find it. "We believe that 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 lights of ours, aware of what they mean," said Professor Hawking at the launch. "It’s time to commit to finding the answer to search for life beyond Earth. The Breakthrough Initiate is making that commitment." "It is sure to bear fruit," Hawking said. "If a search of this scale and sophistication finds no evidence of intelligence out there it will be a very interesting result. It will not prove that we are alone, but it will narrow the possibilities." "It is important for us to know if we are alone in the dark."

Getty Images

At the launch, Astronomer Royal Lord Rees described the project as a "huge gamble" and said "no one would count on success", but said the payoff "would be colossal". He speculated any alien life discovered could he organic, or "machines created by long long-dead civilisation". "The chance of success is small," he said -- but there are good reasons why the project could succeed where previous attempts -- such as the 55-year SETI project -- have so far failed.

In order to see this embed, you must give consent to Social Media cookies. Open my cookie preferences. So here are a few planets that we are already searching for signals of intelligence life http://t.co/lt1YMHlZW0 #SETI pic.twitter.com/DgO5TN6xCn — Prof. Abel Méndez (@ProfAbelMendez) July 20, 2015


"Technology allows much more sensitive searches than could be done before and the latest instrumentation, not biggest telescopes, will be able to hugely extend what's been done [before]," he said. "The chance of finding life has risen a billion-fold when we realised that Earth-like planets are not rare, but that there are literally billions of them in our own galaxy [...] This is a time when citizen science and social media allow the project to have a real global reach in a way it never could before."

Frank Drake, who famously used a 85-foot radio telescope in the first large-scale attempt to find signals from alien life, and founded SETI, said the new project was "important in a very profound sense". He said "major developments in digital technology" meant the project was the best-ever chance to find signs of life. "It is a great, great milestone, it might take a long time but it's our best chance," he said.

Announcing the project, Milner said a separate initiative called Breakthrough Message would be launched to study the ethics of sending messages into space, and depending on the results to create and send messages to other civilisations in space.