By Brandon Engel
On July 20th, 2015, the Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner and the British physicist Stephen Hawking announced the establishment of the Breakthrough Listen Initiative. Over the next ten years, scientists will use powerful radio telescopes to survey the ten closest galaxies closest to ours and the million closest stars. Searching for laser transmissions and radio signals that can’t be chalked up to known natural causes, the radio telescopes will be sensitive enough to detect transmissions comparable to those of standard aircraft radar from any of the thousand closest stars. Similarly, the optical search will be able to pick up optical laser transmissions of 100 watts (comparable to a standard light bulb) from a relatively close star 25 trillion miles away.
Milner has pledged $100 million to support the project. Other scientists charged with the Initiative’s success include UK Astronomer Royal Martin Rees, Pete Worden, former director of the NASA Ames Research Center, and Geoff Marcy, a distinguished professor responsible for finding over 70 planets beyond the solar system. A related project, Breakthrough Message, will fund a worldwide contest to create the messages and greetings that might one day be sent to aliens.
Hawking’s involvement in the Initiative may come as a surprise to people. In the past, he has expressed a belief that aliens advanced enough to have interstellar space travel may view humans as little more than pesky bacteria. Our interactions with them, he said in 2010, “would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.” Hawking essentially warned that mankind’s own violent history is no cause for optimism; over time, whenever two cultures encountered one another, the stronger, more technologically advanced culture typically enslaved or slaughtered the weaker counterpart. Now he seems to be singing a much different tune.
Various “unconventional” theorists continue to maintain that we have already come into contact with extraterrestrials. Some even claim that we have already obtained a wealth of information from their cultures, particularly in regards to technology. Over the past half-century, it’s clear that we’ve undergone a period of rapid technological change – witnessing numerous breakthroughs that would have been unimaginable just several generations ago. Many of these discoveries, such as ground lasers, fiber optic internet, and advanced nanotechnology, are supposed proof of back-engineered alien tools. While these claims may be rooted in fantasy, they nevertheless provide additional incentive to reach out to our cosmic brethren.
An advanced search for extraterrestrial life began in 1960 with Dr. Frank Drake’s Project Ozma in which he used radio telescopes to monitor two nearby stars. He also devised the Drake Equation to try to calculate the number of advanced civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy. Drake helped found SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence).
In 1977, Drake, Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan worked with colleagues on Voyager 1 and 2. These NASA space probes were designed to explore the cosmos. Each one also carried golden records that contained information about the human race for the benefit of any aliens that might find them. The records included greeting in 55 languages, 27 musical compositions and 118 pictures.
Breakthrough Listen will be the largest project of its type, and it will have the most advanced technology so far developed. Milner is a billionaire, and he has pledged to provide financial support for Breakthrough Listen for at least the next ten years. Funding, therefore, won’t be a problem in the near future.
The Initiative will make their data publically available to allow and encourage amateur enthusiasts and citizen scientists to help with the search. In a similar vein, it will work with SETI@home, a project that uses people’s home computers to crunch data. (The computers’ owners voluntarily connect their machines to SETI.)
The big question, is what happens if Breakthrough Listen and Breakthrough Message succeed? We will, after all, be dealing with beings with technology vastly superior to ours. Will their intentions be malicious, as Hawking feared, or peaceable? If they are hostile, it may very well spell doom for comprehend what it is they’re trying to share with us. Perhaps the best outcome we can hope for is one that helps us better understand ourselves.
