Hawking’s final frontier: the search for alien life
Astrophysicist launches project to scan a million stars for evidence of intelligent life forms
STEPHEN HAWKING said yesterday it was “time to commit to finding the answer to life beyond Earth” as he launched a £75 million project to hunt for intelligent alien life.
He joined Lord Rees, the Astronomer Royal and Yuri Milner, a Russian philanthropist, to announce the project at the Royal Society in London.
The 10-year programme will survey the million closest stars to Earth and the entire galactic plane of the Milky Way. It also will listen for messages from the 100 closest galaxies at 10 billion different frequencies.
Prof Hawking said: “We believe that life arose spontaneously on Earth. So in an infinite universe there must be other occurrences of life.
“Somewhere in the universe intelligent life may be watching the lights of ours aware of what they mean.”
The new project, called Break- through Listen, is chaired by Lord Rees and will cover 10 times the area scanned by previous programs dedicated to hunting for extraterrestrial life.
The scientists estimate that if a civilisation based around one of the 1,000 nearest stars transmits to us with the power of an aircraft radar then it will be detectable.
“It’s a huge gamble of course, but the pay-off would be colossal,” said Lord Rees. “The chance of finding life has risen a billion-fold when we realised that Earth-like planets are not rare but there are literally billions of them within our own galaxy.
The project will be joining forces with SETI@home, University of California, Berkeley’s ground-breaking distributed computing platform, which has 9 million volunteers around the world donating their spare computing power to search astronomical data for signs of life.
One of the project’s leaders is Frank Drake, the American astrophysicist who first calculated that alien life is inevitable given the size of the universe.
“Right now there could be messages from the stars flying right through the room, through us all. That still sends a shiver down my spine,” he said.
However the team will not be attempting to communicate with alien civilisations even if they do pick up signs that they exist.
Professor Hawking added: “We don’t know about aliens but we know about humans. If you look at history then contact between humans and less intelligent organisms have often been disastrous from their point of view.
“The civilisations reading one of our messages could be billions of years ahead. If so they will be vastly more powerful and may not see us as any more valuable than we see bacteria.
“It only took five hundred million years for life to evolve on Earth but it took two and half billion to get to multicellular organisms … When it does evolve we only need to look in the mirror to knew that it can be fragile and prone to self-destruction.”