Phone Home: Russian billionaire commits $100 Million in search for intelligent alien life

Russian billionaire Yuri Milner committed $100 million to the most comprehensive search for intelligent life form in the universe.

The project, called Breakthrough Listen, considers the money from the Silicon Valley magnate Milner a miracle, because getting funds for the search of alien life form has become very hard to find these days. This line of work is also very challenging because critics question the significance of this venture. Meanwhile, researchers have never really got any concrete proof of life from alien planet. The search for alien life form is called SETI or Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Experiments in this field of research detect electromagnetic waves not normally found in the cosmos that would indicate alien civilization.

Yuri Milner became a prominent personality in the US venture-capital scene after being one of the early investors of Facebook and Twitter. His $100 million will go to a research team at the University of California, Berkeley. The group will rent two of the biggest telescopes in the world over the next 10 years to scan the cosmos. According to the chair of Berkeley's SETI Geoff Marcy, their search will be 100 times better than the precious attempt to search for intelligent life forms in the universe. The team will survey a billion stars closest to Earth and listen to signals to the 100 closet galaxies outside of this Milky Way.

SETI scientist at the University of California Andrew Siemion said, "We would typically get 24-36 hours on a telescope per year, but now we'll have thousands of hours per year on the best instruments." He even considered the $100 million funding for the search of intelligent alien life a revolution.

Space.com's Frank Drake said they have yet to detect intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, and there are no guarantees that Breakthrough Listen will find ET in the next decade. But answering the question "are we alone" is all worth it.