Co-founder of Mail.ru will search for aliens

Co-founder Mail.ru Group Yuri Milner decided to invest one hundred million dollars in a project to search for extraterrestrial civilizations.

As the entrepreneur told at a press conference in London, the idea is to search for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations with the help of the most powerful telescopes on Earth combined into a large-scale computer system.

“The scope of our research will be unprecedented,” Milner said.

According to him, when the system starts to operate, more information will be collected in one day of research than in a whole year with past approaches.

Milner named physicist Stephen Hawking as the ideologist of the project, and Frank Drake and Jeff Marcy as its “scientific leaders.” As Milner previously told the Vedomosti newspaper, all of them will take part in the project as research coordinators.

“I’m here because I think this initiative is extremely important,” said Hawking, who was present at the press conference. “The time has come to look for life beyond Earth. There must be evidence of life in the universe."

Milner intends to finance the project from personal funds, since the states are hesitant to invest in such research. In particular, the businessman plans to pay for the rental of telescopes and computer networks.

Project participants will try to identify two types of signals - radio waves (in the range from 500 MHz to 15 Hz) or laser radiation.

It is expected that the project will help expand the coverage of such studies by more than a hundred times.