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Stephen Hawking Announces Plan To Hunt For Alien Life
Yournewswire
Stephen Hawking has held a news conference in London to announce his plans of investing $100 million into a project that aims to search for alien life.
The project, named Breakthrough Listen, will search for extraterrestrial life and will allow scientists to collect one year’s worth of data in just one day – in a move that Hawking hopes will speed up the search.
Washingtonpost.com reports:
“We believe that life arose spontaneously on Earth,” Hawking said at Monday’s news conference, “So in an infinite universe, there must be other occurrences of life.”
Geoffrey Marcy, a University of California, Berkeley, astronomer who found most of our first exoplanets, also spoke at the event as part of the group’s brain trust.
“The universe is apparently bulging at the seams with the ingredients of biology,” Marcy explained. Indeed, Marcy and other scientists have found a surprising number of Earth-like exoplanets in recent years — rocky planets the right distance from their suns to support water — suggesting that life as we know it is at least possible, if not probable, all over the universe.
That being said, the group of esteemed scientists gathered on Monday didn’t make any bold claims about immediately hunting down intelligent life-forms — or ever finding them at all, for that matter. But the likelihood of success is about to shoot up exponentially, because right now we’re barely trying.
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has been active since 1960, when scientist Frank Drake — another of the great minds joining Breakthrough Listen — sought out radio signals from neighboring stars. But even the largest group looking for life, the SETI Institute, doesn’t receive any government funding, and this particular aspect of space exploration now relies on dwindling support from universities and private organizations.
Be AWARE truthisscary.com
Source: http://truthisscary.com/2015/07/stephen-hawking-announces-plan-to-hunt-for-alien-life/
