Moscow-born startup investor Yuri Milner has enlisted the help of the world’s leading scientists, including Stephen Hawking, in a renewed search for alien life using latest technological advancements, on which more than $100 million will be spent over 10 years.





Launched on Monday at the Royal Society in London, with the Cambridge cosmologist Stephen Hawking, the Breakthrough Listen project has some of the world’s leading experts at the helm. Among them are Lord Martin Rees, the astronomer royal, Geoff Marcy, who has discovered more planets beyond the solar system than anyone, and the veteran US astronomer Frank Drake, a pioneer in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (Seti).



Stephen Hawking said the effort was “critically important” and raised hopes for answering the question of whether humanity has company in the universe. “It’s time to commit to finding the answer, to search for life beyond Earth,” he said. “Mankind has a deep need to explore, to learn, to know. We also happen to be sociable creatures. It is important for us to know if we are alone in the dark.”





Leading researchers have secured time on two of the world’s most powerful telescopes in the US and Australia to scan the Milky Way and neighbouring galaxies for radio emissions that betray the existence of life elsewhere. The search will be 50 times more sensitive, and cover 10 times more sky, than previous hunts for alien life.



The Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, the largest steerable telescope on the planet, and the Parkes Observatory in New South Wales, are contracted to lead the unprecedented search that will start in January 2016. In tandem, the Lick Observatory in California will perform the most comprehensive search for optical laser transmissions beamed from other planets.



Operators have signed agreements that hand the scientists thousands of hours of telescope time per year to eavesdrop on planets that orbit the million stars closest to Earth and the 100 nearest galaxies. The telescopes will scan the centre of the Milky Way and the entire length of the galactic plane.





Milner, whose wealth is estimated at $3.4 billion, according to the latest Forbes magazine rankings, has said that he will spend at least $10 million a year for a decade on Breakthrough Listen – a program that will look for and decode potential signs of alien life. He will also institute a $1 million prize for Breakthrough Message, a solution for how to best communicate with extra-terrestrials, though the message itself will be withheld for the moment, to make sure it does not spark alien aggression.





For 53-year-old Milner, this is the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. Born into an academic Russian Jewish family, he completed a PhD in Physics in the USSR, but by his own admission was “not smart enough” to make a name in science. Instead, he became one of the first Soviet citizens to study for an MBA in the US, and pursued business, first building up Russia’s internet giant Mail.ru, before cannily investing in future internet stalwarts such as Facebook and Twitter during their early expansion phase.