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.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
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."
-
Starbucks workers are planning their ‘biggest strike’ everThe Explainer The union said 92% of its members voted to strike
-
‘These wouldn’t be playgrounds for billionaires’Instant Opinion Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
-
The 5 best nuclear war movies of all timeThe Week Recommends ‘A House of Dynamite’ reanimates a dormant cinematic genre for our new age of atomic insecurity
-
Nobody seems surprised Wagner's Prigozhin died under suspicious circumstancesSpeed Read
-
Western mountain climbers allegedly left Pakistani porter to die on K2Speed Read
-
'Circular saw blades' divide controversial Rio Grande buoys installed by Texas governorSpeed Read
-
Los Angeles city workers stage 1-day walkout over labor conditionsSpeed Read
-
Mega Millions jackpot climbs to an estimated $1.55 billionSpeed Read
-
Bangladesh dealing with worst dengue fever outbreak on recordSpeed Read
-
Glacial outburst flooding in Juneau destroys homesSpeed Read
-
Scotland seeking 'monster hunters' to search for fabled Loch Ness creatureSpeed Read
