
Co-founder of Mail.ru will invest $ 100 million in the search for aliens
[ Source ]
Mail.ru Group co-founder Yuri Milner decided to invest $ 100 million in a project to search for extraterrestrial civilizations. As the entrepreneur said at a press conference in London, the idea is to use the most powerful telescopes on Earth, combined into a large-scale computer system, to search for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations. “The scope of our research will be unprecedented,” Milner said. According to him, when the system begins to operate, more information will be collected in one day of research than in the whole year with previous approaches.
Milner named the physicist Stephen Hawking as the ideologist of the project, and Frank Drake and Jeff Marcy as his “scientific leaders”. As Milner told the Vedomosti newspaper earlier, they will all take part in the project as research coordinators.
“I am here because I consider this initiative to be extremely important,” Hawking, who was present at the press conference, said. “The time has come to seek life outside the Earth.” There must be evidence of life in the universe. ”
Milner intends to finance the project from personal funds, since the states do not dare to invest in such research. In particular, the businessman plans to finance the rental of telescopes and computer networks.
Participants in the Milner-financed project will try to identify two types of signals - radio waves (in the range from 500 MHz to 15 Hz) or laser radiation.
The project is expected to help expand the reach of such studies by more than 100 times.
According to Milner, Vedomosti writes, funds will be spent in three directions. First, unique five-year agreements have already been made with the operators of the two largest radio telescopes in the world (Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia (USA) and Parkes Telescope in Australia), as well as with the Lick Observatory optical telescope in California on their rental for “a significant part »Time for space observations. “The initiative is also open for joining other telescopes, including the Russian Millimetron, after putting it into operation,” Miller said. In the area of priority attention are 1 million stars closest to the solar system, the central part of the Milky Way (where the maximum concentration of stars is observed) and 100 galaxies closest to the Milky Way.
Another part of the funds will be invested in the processing and storage of incoming information, which will be measured in petabytes of data; at the first stage, Milner promises to use the computer capacities of the Berkeley research center for this, and about 9 million computers combined into a single SETI @ home network to process information. These data will be posted on the Internet and free access will be organized: all experts, scientific organizations, as well as amateur astronomers who wish to participate in the analysis of the data, will be able to do this.
Not so long ago I wrote an article that even Ethiopian billionaires are investing in the space programs of their countriesand ours ... Today we can say that ours supported the initiative! Rarely do they give reason to be proud of their actions, but this is just the case! Honestly, I didn’t expect it.
It is particularly interesting that the observational data will become the common property and any of us can contribute to the search for extraterrestrial civilizations!