Three of the richest and smartest people on the planet will join hands in a $100 million project to search for extraterrestrial life.
Three men among the richest and smartest people in the world hope to be the first to discover alien life: Yuri Milner (center), Stephen Hawking and Mark Zuckerburg – Photo: Dailymail
According to Dailymail, a trio of world-famous figures including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg, Russian billionaire businessman Yuri Milner and physicist Stephen Hawking have just revealed to this newspaper their plan to search for alien life. planet on “Earth 2.0” – a planet similar to Earth and also at a “closer” distance to Earth.
In fact, the official name of “Earth 2.0” is Proxima b, a rocky planet that is believed to have all the conditions for life to exist and is only four light years from Earth.
The trio jointly contribute funds to an ambitious $100 million project called Breakingthrough Listen, using the world’s most powerful telescopes to listen to alien messages.
Last month astronomers discovered clear signs that our closest star Proxima Centauri is the sun of another Earth-like planet.
Billionaire Milner shared: “This information comes just a few months after Stephen Hawking and I, with the support of Mark Zuckerburg, launched the Breakingthrough Starshot project, a project to launch a small spacecraft to Earth. star Alpha Centauri within one generation.
“At that time we hoped there would be a planet in the Alpha Centauri system, but we didn’t know if there was or not. Now we have a definite target. That makes our mission even more important.” more specific”.
There have been thousands of extrasolar planets found before, but unlike other planets, scientists think Proxima b is within reach.
Although a distance of four light years is a long distance (40 trillion km), new generations of future super-fast spacecraft could help humans reach that planet in the next few decades.
And that’s also the reason why physics professor Stephen Hawking thinks we may find aliens before they find us.
Early next month the team of experts in the Breakingthrough Listen project will begin searching for radio frequencies other than natural background sounds using the Parkes Observatory in Australia.
This is also the observatory that was used to receive images transmitted directly from the Apollo 11 spacecraft when it landed on the moon in 1969.