Yuri Milner – Breakthrough Listen Search for Alien Life
Breakthrough Listen is an international research program searching for intelligent life beyond Earth. We use a combination of radio and optical telescopes to search the nearest million stars, across 100 galaxies, for artificial signals from civilizations like our own. Particularly interesting targets include sun-like stars and the small red dwarfs around which “super-Earth” exoplanets seem especially abundant.
It’s a big universe: Breakthrough Listen will listen as hard as possible to hear evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. And, of course, should we detect an alien signal that matches all the criteria needed to conclude it’s likely artificial in origin, more follow-up work would be needed to make a rigorous scientific assessment.
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Our scientific search for life beyond Earth is only just beginning. We now have enough power to scan the entire northern sky, from planet Earth’s nightside to its dayside – or as far as our detectors can see. But still, our survey is tiny compared to what we could do; we’re unlikely to directly detect anything interesting by listening alone since intelligent life would have started long ago if that were so. Instead, we must anticipate the discovery of alien intelligent life indirectly: perhaps a “message” broadcast at us.
We’re taking advantage of a recent revolution in telescope and computational power to search for that sign. Until recently, most searches for radio signals from other civilizations were performed by a few dedicated scientists who had to beg or borrow telescope time from giant facilities such as the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico or the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico. These astronomers have found nothing so far: no transmissions at all have been observed in what is the most obvious and “natural” place to look – around nearby stars.
Original source to learn more : https://yurimilnermanifesto.org/