"The Dish", CSIRO's famous radio telescope in Parkes, New South Wales. Credit:Parkes Visitors Centre Astronomers will use cutting-edge technology developed in Silicon Valley – including the electronics that power modern video games – to scan ten billion radio frequencies simultaneously for signs of intelligent life. And the millions of terabytes of data generated by the project will be made available to the public, for anyone to scrutinise and claim what would be the biggest discovery in human history. "There is no bigger question," Professor Hawking, an advisor to the project, said on Monday. Science has explained the 'light of stars' but not the lights that shine from Earth, he said. "Somewhere in the cosmos, perhaps, intelligent life may be watching these lights of ours, aware of what they mean. Or do our lights wander a lifeless cosmos – unseen beacons, announcing that here, on one rock, the Universe discovered its existence?

Russian billionaire Yuri Milner is bankrolling the project. Credit:Getty Images "It's time to commit to finding the answer… we must know." Professor Hawking said it was "quite likely that life is out there, but intelligence is a great unknown". Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, who will play an advisory role on the project. Green Bank will start listening in January and Parkes will join the project around September 2016.

One of the project's leaders, Astronomy Professor Geoffrey Marcy of University of California, Berkeley, told Fairfax he was particularly excited that Parkes was involved – partly because it was one of the best radio telescopes in the world, partly because it had a wonderful history in receiving the first TV signals from the Moon landing in 1969 – but also because he was a big fan of the movie The Dish. "It was inspirational, and it was spot on showing the often makeshift ingenuity that goes into science," he said. Parkes has a prime location, he said – the centre of the Milky Way goes right overhead. For two months each year the telescope will point straight at the dense clusters of stars near the centre of the galaxy, listening for signs of life. And there is a good chance that life is there. "That's 'Downtown'," Professor Marcy said. "When advanced alien civilisations decide where they want to live, you would live in the galaxy's exciting 'downtown', that's where the action is, more energy, and more stars."

The universe is "apparently bulging at the seams" with the ingredients for life, Professor Marcy said. He would "bet my house" that single-celled life could be found on at least one of the nearest 100 stars to Earth. But it was harder to work out whether intelligence had evolved, and how often. "We have no idea whether we are ten light-years or 10 million light-years away from the nearest technological civilisation," he said. Frank Drake, author of the famous 'Drake Equation' that expresses how likely it is that there is alien intelligent life in the universe, said it was hard to say whether the project would succeed The biggest variable is how long civilisations endure that send the sort of signals that we are able to detect and interpret. They may evolve to a different form of communication, or they may self-destruct.

"We can't tell how long it will take until we have succeeded," he said. "We just simply have to explore." Professor Hawking warned that it might not be a good idea to send our own signals, to let our neighbours know we are around. "We don't know much about aliens but we know about humans," he said. Historically, contacts between humans and less intelligent life forms, or between civilisations with different levels of technology, "have gone badly for the less advanced". "A civilisation reading one of our messages could be billions of years ahead. They will be vastly more powerful and may not see us as any more valuable than we see bacteria." But any conversation with aliens would move very slowly, because even if they were relatively close, there would be decades or centuries between sending a message and it being received.

Lord Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal and chair of the project, said it was a "huge gamble" – but recent discoveries mean the chances of finding life have risen "a billion-fold". Astronomers now believe there are billions of planets in our own galaxy where the conditions are right for life to evolve, Lord Rees said. Organic molecules, the building blocks of life, have been detected in interstellar material such as comets. Lord Rees disagreed with Professor Hawking on whether aliens would be hostile or dangerous, saying if they did exist they were probably well-aware of humanity's existence. In tandem with the sky-search, the Breakthrough Initiative will run a world-wide competition to find a message considered worth sending back to an alien civilisation. Professor Drake said previous crowd-sourced messages had come up with "nonsensical" proposals to send sentences in human language. The only thing that made sense was to send pictures, he said.

Mr Milner made his fortune with Mail.ru, Europe's biggest internet company at the time, and in recent years has become a leading investor in internet companies such as Facebook, Twitter and Airbnb. At Monday's launch at the Royal Society in central London, Mr Milner said he was born in the year that Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, and his mother had called him Yuri because "she wanted me to be inspired". "The search for intelligent life in the universe is going to a completely new level," he said. "It is time to open our eyes, our ears and our minds to the cosmos." with Reuters