Stephen Hawking joins forces with a Russian billionaire to search for alien life

The truth is out there! So says physicist Stephen Hawking, who is teaming up with Russian billionaire and entrepreneur Yuri Milner to search for alien life through their newly announced Breakthrough Initiatives project.

"The scope of our search will be unprecedented — a million nearby stars, the galactic center the entire plane of the Milky Way and 100 nearby galaxies," Milner told The Associated Press.

"We are intelligent, we are alive, and we must know," Hawking added in what is surprisingly not a X Files quote.

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The Breakthrough Initiatives program will be housed at SETI@home, a University of California, Berkeley computing platform. With the help of nine million volunteers loaning spare computing power to the project, Hawking and Milner will have at their disposal one of the largest supercomputers in the world. The program will begin listening for alien life in 2016, using the world's best telescopes and technology.

Milner plans to back the program for a decade, although scientists believe the discovery of aliens could take even longer. Hawking, however, remains optimistic. "We believe that life arose spontaneously on Earth," Hawking said during the program's announcement Monday. "So in an infinite universe, there must be other occurrences of life."