Stephen Hawking backs Russian billionaire's quest to listen for aliens

Yuri Milner and Stephen Hawking at a press conference on the Breakthrough Life in the Universe Initiatives Credit: Getty Images for Breakthrough Initiatives

It's being touted as the biggest-ever search for aliens - a quest so ambitious that Stephen Hawking has given his backing the project.

A team of scientists have been hand-picked and bankrolled to the tune of £64 million by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, and will use some of the world's largest radio telescopes in a 10-year search for radio signals which could indicate the existence of extraterrestrial intelligent life.

In an interview, Mr Milner said he became fascinated by the notion of extra-terrestrial life after reading astrophysicist Carl Sagan's "Intelligent Life in the Universe" as a 10-year-old in Moscow.

Mr Milner is an entrepreneur who made his fortune through investments in technology companies such as Facebook. He said he wants to harness the innovation of Silicon Valley to scan the skies for signs of life, including searching the entire Milky Way and 100 nearby galaxies.

The Breakthrough Listen branch of the project will use the world's finest telescopes to carry out state-of-the-art radio and optical surveys.

The project will look for signs of life on other planets Credit: Breakthrough Initiatives

Using two of the most powerful telescopes in the world – the 100 metre Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, USA, and the 64-metre diameter Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia, the radio search will be carried out alongside a search for optical laser transmissions.

The project will examine the million stars closest to Earth, and will listen for messages from the 100 closest galaxies to our own - covering 10 times more of the sky than previous programmes, and doing so 100 times faster.

The telescopes have the power to detect radio signals with the power of a mere common aircraft radar from the 1,000 nearest stars, and laser beams operating at just 100 watts - the power of a household lightbulb - from up to 25 trillion miles away.

At the launch conference today, Mr Milner called it the "most comprehensive search programme ever", and claimed the project would gather more information in one day than in a year of previous research.

Prof Hawking said he believes the Breakthrough Initiatives are "critically important".