Extraterrestrial Intelligence: Stephen Hawking launches an ambitious research program – BFMTV.COM

The scientific community and stargazers are in turmoil. As project sponsor, the eminent scientist Stephen Hawking has indeed presented on Monday at the Royal Society of London, the mission presented as the most ambitious ever launched in search of extraterrestrial life.

Funded by the Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner at 100 million, the project Breakthrough Listen listen and space in search of potential radio signals from advanced civilizations and that, beyond of our solar system.

Together with Stephen Hawking, one finds When Martin Rees, an astronomer at the direction of the Royal Society, Geoff Marcy, who discovered more planets than anyone, and the astronomer American Frank Drake, a pioneer in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and project founder SETI . “Humanity has a deep need to explore, to learn, to know. And it also happen to be social creatures. It is important for us to know if we are alone in the dark. “Hawking said.

To complete their project, the research team has obtained an agreement to use, from January 2016, two of the most powerful telescopes in the world to scan the Milky Way and nearby galaxies. The telescopes will not only be attached to the millions of stars that make up our galaxy, but also all the other stars of the 100 galaxies closest to the Earth.

Listening to the “other”

Listen Breakthrough Breakthrough project will be linked to Message, an international competition to develop a message that extraterrestrial civilizations would allow to identify our humanity, like plate Pioneer or Arecibo message . Unlike those space missions that could have come in contact with another civilization, Breakthrough Message will not send signals into space at this stage of research because scientists believe that humans have more to gain by simply listening “others”.

So at the conference, Stephen Hawking has warned against the cries of humanity in the cosmos. “A civilization which would receive one of our messages could be billions of years ahead of us. If that were the case, they would be much more powerful than us and might consider ourselves as valuable as a bacterium “he said.

” It is our responsibility as’ Humans use the best equipment we have to answer one of the biggest questions. Are we alone? “said the enthusiastic investor Yuri Milner. “We can not afford not to do it.”