Billionaire Milner will spend $ 100 million on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence – RBC

Joint press conference Yuri Milner and Stephen Hawking in London

Photo: Photo courtesy of Breakthrough Initiatives

On Monday, July 20 it was announced at a joint press conference Milner and Stephen Hawking in London. Hawking investor called “ideological leader” of the project: in operations, he will not participate (RBC Milner interview available here).

The money for the search for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations in ten years will be allocated through the Foundation with the participation of Milner issuing premium in the field of science – Breakthrough Prize Foundation. At this stage, will only invest Milner, but he did not rule out that in the future the project can join other businessmen. The Fund has signed agreements on the use of the Earth’s largest telescopes, including Green Bank telescope in America and Parkes telescope in Australia. Telescopes have joined the specially designed software and servers.

According to Milner, the new technology will process the signal with a much higher rate than in previous similar projects. “This will mean that during the day we will process the same amount of information as early in the year,” – said the investor RBC. The project team expects to increase the sensitivity of the signals 50 times and reach ten times the heavenly space. As part of this project will develop two main areas – Breakthrough Listen (search for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations) and Breakthrough Message (creation of messages from the Earth).

Yuri Milner thus going to revive and bring a new level of project SETI ( English. Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, «The search for extraterrestrial intelligence”) – established name of projects and activities on the search for extraterrestrial civilizations, primarily signals from these civilizations. The beginning of the project is considered to be the publication in 1959 in the journal Nature article from Cornell University physicists Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison “The search of interstellar messages.” Later, in 1960, astronomer Frank Drake started the experiment “Ozma” Observatory Green Bank, but has not yet achieved positive results. Drake will participate in the new project Milner.

Photo: Eugene Basyrova RBC

SETI developed on public money, but in the 1990s, public funding has been curtailed. Since 1995, projects in SETI run on single private donations – the largest amount, about $ 30 million, allocated co-founder of Microsoft, Paul Allen. But, according to Milner, “the last time, it all came to naught, in both the public and private context».

Yuri Milner is known primarily as an investor of Internet projects. He founded, together with investment partners Digital Sky Techologies became the basis of the current Mail.Ru Group, created with Alisher Usmanov DST Global invested in Western companies and only IPO Facebook earned about $ 2 billion.

However, an investor and businessman graduated from the Physics Department of Moscow State University, he worked at the Physics Institute of the Academy of Sciences (FIAN), and went into business in the early 1990s. Later, Milner continued to support science: in 2012 he established the annual award for outstanding achievement in the field of fundamental physics in the amount of $ 3 million, in 2013 – “Award for breakthrough in mathematics” in the amount of $ 3 million, as well as co-founded the “Award for a breakthrough in the field of medicine “together with the head of the board of directors by Art Levinson, Apple, Google founder Sergey Brin and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. In 2015, Forbes estimated the state Milner at $ 3.2 billion.