How Russian billionaire Yuri Milner is changing the way we see space initiatives, the universe, and ourselves with massive undertakings like Breakthrough Listen and the lesser-known Breakthrough Message.

What are the Breakthrough Initiatives?

What does the term “space initiative” mean to you?

Is it a group like NASA? Bill Nye and the Planetary Society? Everyone’s neighborhood hero SpaceX?

Yuri Milner, famed Russian billionaire who won big investing in Facebook, Twitter, and other goldmines through his venture capitalist firm DST Global, is hoping to change the way we hear “space initiative”.

Yuri Milner and Stephen Hawking after the 2016 Starshot announcement.

This is through the recently developing Breakthrough Initiatives—five high-profile, state-of-the-art missions each with a different purpose for humanity.

Announced in 2015, initiatives include Breakthrough Listen, Watch, Starshot, Message, and Discuss. With board members like Mark Zuckerberg and the late Stephen Hawking, half the battle is already won—that being funding and publicity.

These five programs can effectively be grouped into two categories: exploratory and societal, by the way each are setting out to help humanity, respectively.

Along the way Milner and his programs hopes to unify the people of Earth by raising problems that provoke unified answers; on the front of the Breakthrough Initiatives website, you are greeted right away with things such as “We are here“, and “Are we alone?“.

That gives a clear image of the direction these initiatives are taking.

Take them as clues to Milner’s big picture, a picture much like our asteroid crisis—things we don’t have a plan for.

Exploring the Universe: Listen, Watch, Starshot

Listen

Fast-burst listening expert: CSIRO Parkes Radio Telescope

SETI is an acronym for the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, and encompasses all the efforts humans have taken to finding intelligent life in the universe.

According to NASA, in 1959 the SETI era was born with Frank Drake conducted the first ever official search for extra-terrestrials. In 1992 NASA welcomed a more intensive SETI search program, only to be shut down by Congress in less than a year.

Breakthrough Listen is the next evolution of SETI searching being done on an unprecedented scale. The search will survey the 1,000,000 closest stars to Earth for evidence of any civilization that may be there.

“The radio surveys cover 10 times more of the sky than previous programs. They also cover at least 5 times more of the radio spectrum – and do it 100 times faster. They are sensitive enough to hear a common aircraft radar transmitting to us from any of the 1000 nearest stars.” Official Breakthrough Listen website

Alpha Centauri (Credit NASA)

Milner and the Listen team want to stress one thing—we haven’t been looking all that hard for signs. SETI deserves a revamp, and Breakthrough Listen is it. The project’s official page claims this search is powerful enough to detect radar signals of other systems down to the size of a common aircraft signal.

That’s an insane level of accuracy from right here on Earth.

The stats don’t stop there—Listen can work through its search covering 5 times more of the radio spectrum, under 10 times more of the sky, doing the work 100 times faster than previous SETI hunts.

The project employs the following highly-sensitive telescopes from around the world:

MeerKAT radio telescope site in South Africa.

Looking for Biosignatures

Biosignatures are anything that indicates or suggests the presence of a biological process pointing to life. In the context of Breakthrough Listen, running the world’s biggest and deepest SETI search means knowing what to look for, and that is exactly what the Listen team wanted to revolutionize

Something we’ve long theorized existed, but never looked for, are biosignatures and technosignatures.

Conventional scans are general and radio-based in few spectrums, and are incapable of seeing these signatures the way we have been trying to in the past.

Like biosignatures, technosignatures are evidence of technology that indicate the presence of a civilization.The Listen team has taken into account what would be most probable—any civilization advanced enough (a surprisingly low bar) will likely be using technology that does not reveal itself to ours, meaning our search cannot be simple surveys in conventional frequencies.

“Detecting industrial pollution in the atmospheres of earth-like exoplanets,” is a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters (Volume 792, No. 1). You can find it here.

Authors collaborating on the paper include that NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope will be capable of picking up two very exciting things: tetrafluoromethane and trichlorofluoromethane. These are the two easiest chlorofluorocarbons to detect, produced by industrial activities. Finding either on an exoplanet could (possibly) point to a civilization running activities similar to us on Earth.

Though official papers prefer to stay away from the science-fiction polluted “technosignatures”, it is becoming more and more probable and possible for us to attempt a search for them.

The Data Dump

The 100-Meter Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia

Enter Breakthrough Listen, June 2019.

You may have heard about Listen through the recent headlines, “Search for space aliens comes up empty, but extraterrestrial life could still be out there” like from SETI.org. Hype-raising title are fine and good for science, but it doesn’t outline the fact that over 1,000 terabytes of search data (1,000,000 gigabytes!) were publicly released into the world following.

And that’s just 1,300 of 1,000,000 stars—0.13% of the search, so scientists haven’t killed their optimisms just yet. Did I mention this is a $100 million program?

The project encourages the public to download and use the data (here) by any means, and if you’re qualified, help speed up and improve algorithms.

Breakthrough Listen continues to probe the skies in the most comprehensive search for life ever conducted. It earns a spot on the Exploratory list, for being alien-centric and centered around the unknown.

Watch

Breakthrough Watch is keeping an eye out for Earth-sized planets around our nearest star 4.3 light years away, a triple system named Alpha Centauri, and exoplanets of other systems within 20 light years of Earth.

Observing platform on the top of Paranal mountain four 8.2-m Unit Telescopes and installations marking ESO’s VLT Interferometer. (ESO)

Related: NASA’s archive of every confirmed exoplanet.

The Watch team—lovingly called “Pale Red Dot“—will be in the biosignature business, too.

Our Earth, a common pale blue dot to those looking in, appears this way due to our oxygen atmosphere. This means Breakthrough Watch will be looking for atmospheric traits and compositions as a biosignature in itself.

According to the official project Instruments page, Watch teamed up with the European Southern Observatory in 2016 for a deeper look at Alpha Centauri, its two Sun-like stars, and its two planets.

This project is considered a bridge between the other Initiatives, because any positive biosignatures will be prime targets for Breakthrough Listen to hone in on, the target of Starshot to begin with, and a Message we will need to send as people of Earth.

It’s a rabbit hole of heavy speculation and the word “if”, but a revolutionary one if found.

It earns its place on the Exploratory list for holding unprecedented exoplanet ambitions.

Starshot

Artist depiction of Breakthrough Starshot receiving propulsion from ground based light beam.

Announced live by Yuri Milner and board member Stephen Hawking in 2016, Breakthrough Starshot is the epitome of exploration—a light sail probe that will be the first craft to travel to another star system.

It has seen a number of challenges since its conception, even debating on sending a small fleet of tiny light-sailing probes, rather than just one, to the project’s 4.3 light year destination: Alpha Centauri. When the ESO discovered an Earth-size planet in the habitable zone of the star-next-door, Starshot was created to be its first visitor.

Astronomers have been on the hunt for exoplanets next door for over 15 years, so Proxima B is our best chance at seeing something truly groundbreaking.

Depiction showing Breakthrough Starshot’s lightsail receiving propulsion from Earth.

Essentially, Breakthrough Starshot is a light-powered craft that will be launched and shot with a massive laser (light beamer) that will propel it to speeds upwards of 100 million miles per hour. These are what Milner calls “nanocraft”, so weightless that the power of ground based photons alone will make its journey a short 20 years

Starshot has been making some headway in the face of challenge, however, with the successful testing of nanocomputer “Sprites” that will communicate for the craft.

Starshot tops the list of Exploratory list for spearheading the world’s current pinnacle of exploration.

Uniting the World: Message and Discuss

Message

Can one message unite the world? Yuri Milner and the Breakthrough Message team certainly thinks so.

Breakthrough Message is meant to bring the people of Earth together as one world. If we made first contact, what would we say?

Would we say anything at all?

These are questions scientists and science fiction authors have addressed and pondered in speculation, but never enacted in a program.

Via the official Message project page, the program is a $1,000,000 competition that must be in digital format and represent all the people of Earth, no exceptions.

It is to be a global discussion of ethics, philosophy, and leadership. According to the project page, “Developing a message that could both speak for us and be understood by alien intelligences is a hard problem. It may require insight in fields from mathematics and physics to linguistics, psychology and art.”

Those are interesting categories, especially the inclusion of mathematics. Can you imagine the people are doing in mathematics to form a message aliens could decipher? It’s theoretical, it’s bizarre, and it’s great.

Or perhaps we wouldn’t send anything at all. In that case Milner hopes people will have reached the decision as one voice, one world.

Breakthrough Message is designed for high level discussion across all walks of life, and therefore earns a spot on the Breakthrough societal list.

Discuss

Breakthrough Discuss is not so much a branch, but an invite-only conference with an annual theme. The Discuss 2019 conference was themed “Migration of Life in the Universe”, held April 11-12 at UC Berkeley.

Other hosts of the event feature the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and NASA Astrobiology Institute and NASA Ames Research Center.

These discussions are designed to facilitate advanced discussion and serious idea-bouncing among some of the highest minds in each field. Politics, science, and the arts all have an equal place in this yearly universal talk.

Related: Breakthrough Discuss 2019 talks can be found here.

Its humanitarian roots wrap up both items on the societal list, and all five of Yuri Milner’s Breakthrough projects!

Bringing Space Home

The Breakthrough Initiatives contain the world’s highest operating hunt for life, extrasolar trip, and unity efforts.

Everything about them stays big—big ideas, big research, big budgets. With each program still in their infancy, the best is yet to come as we listen in, look up, and figure out what to say.

So take a minute and look up today. You may not see any exoplanets or alien signals, but you’ll remember for a moment where we are in all of this. Your eyes are a telescope too, you know.

And besides, Breakthrough Listen hasn’t found any yet either.

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