Pop culture capitalizes on all things alien. The movies which we are used to watching describes aliens as villainous invaders pouring all their strength out on mankind’s annihilation. In many ways, we are greatly obsessed by this unknown Extraterrestrial life. We are certain that someday we will find evidence of Extraterrestrial life.
Since years, theories for UFO and aliens have been doing rounds. People claim to have seen weird flying objects in the sky, but so far we do not have any substantial proof about it, so we consider it as a normal folklore and something to laugh about. The search for aliens has been a fascinating topic for us, and a subject of pursuance for researchers. It looks like we’ve taken a leap in the search for alien life.
Biggest Search For Alien Life
Russian Entrepreneur, Yuri Milner, has given $100 million dollars to (SETI), The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. According to Professor Hawking, to get a complete idea of the universe, we must know about atoms that are building blocks of every element on the universe, the force which binds the atom together, life of stars; birth and death, the outline of time and space, the black hole mysteries and the galaxy profile. This is still not enough; ideas do not explain the entire theory, they definitely explain about the star lights, but not about the light that shines from our planet Earth. To understand about these lights, we must understand about life on Earth.
He further quotes that, somewhere in the entire cosmos, the intelligent life might be watching our light. It is possible that our lights can be wandering lifeless around the cosmos; unseen, announcing that it is a rock on which universe found its existence.
The hopes for discovering the Extraterrestrials have rarely been high. Thanks to such a huge amount of donation that finally we will be able to have the most reliable, enduring and powerful search ever.
This surely does not alter the fact that we haven’t found anything yet, because let us just accept the fact that finding alien was never going to be an easy and straight-forward task. If aliens had been looking out for us with the help of a radio telescope, they would have probably ended up finding nothing during the period of the first 4.5 billion years; of course Earth had dinosaurs and microbes, but we became detectable only by the time of Second World War, after the invention of radar.
What is Breakthrough Listen Program?
It is a ten-year effort, which consists of two parts. The first one will harness the largest telescopes present on the Earth, to all the data from the Milky Way, nearest million stars and 100 galaxies. It will have two of the Earth’s most powerful telescopes, which is the Green Bank Telescope and the other one at the Parkes Observatory.
Breakthrough Listen will be fifty times more sensitive and precise than previous other programs dedicated to the SETI research, it will cover 10 times more sky, and will scan radio spectrum around 100 times faster.
Listen will engage in the world’s broadest and deepest search mission for optical laser transmission with Automated Planet Finder Telescope in tandem, in California.
Breakthrough Listen is going to survey approximate 1 million closest stars to Earth; it will scan the center of our entire galaxy, the Milky Way. The program is going to go through messages from the 100 nearby galaxies.
The optical search will be able to analyze and detect a laser of 100 W, from a star which is 25 million miles far from us.
For the general public, the entire generated data will be open, and the Breakthrough team will develop mighty software to analyze it. The second initiative program will sponsor an international competition to compile messages representing planet Earth and humanity that might be used to send to other civilizations, which is the Breakthrough Message. Prizes will be $1 million.
It will be interesting to note the outcomes of this new initiative. Yet, the most difficult question to get through is, we know how does star emits light, but do we know where the light which earth emits comes from?
We are making a huge leap in research about the existence of alien life and space, but how do we know that they are powerful in terms of technological advancements and can be significant to our quest? There is a possibility that they might not even have embarked the journey to evolution.
