Stephen Hawking and Silicon Valley Tycoon Announce $100 Million Alien Hunt Project

Physicist Stephen Hawking is teaming with Russian billionaire Yuri Milner to look for aliens. Hawking, who was portrayed by Eddie Redmayne in The Theory of Everything, believes that now is the time to look for answers about if there's life beyond earth. Milner is personally funding the project, called Breakthrough Listen, with $100 million over ten years.

"Somewhere in the cosmos, perhaps, intelligent life may be watching these lights of ours, aware of what they mean," Hawking said.

Hawking and Milner launched the project at the Royal Society in London with the Breakthrough Initiatives. The search will involve the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia. They are going to cover more space at a quicker pace than has previously been searched in the hunt for extraterrestrial life.

This amount of money is massive for a space exploration project. Over the last several decades, funding for NASA has been drastically slashed, despite their recent success with the New Horizons Pluto flyby. The SETI Institute, the largest group currently searching for alien life, doesn't get money from the government.

"Irrespective of what the answer is, it's a powerful answer," Milner told the Washington Post about the initiative. "At any given time, we should apply the best technology and use the best instruments available to search for that answer."

Milner is an entrepreneur typically known for his connections with Silicon Valley. He has invested in places like Facebook, Twitter and Spotify. At the Breakthrough Listen launch, he said he wants to take a "Silicon Valley approach" to the search for extraterrestrial life. The data from the initiative will be available to the public for anyone to look through and consider.

Ellen Stofan, NASA's chief scientist, predicted in April that humans are going to find alien life in the next ten to twenty years. NASA has found evidence of many potentially habitable places in space and expect there are at least tiny, living microbes out there.