What do you do when you have more money than you could ever humanly spend? You start spending it on the search for extraterrestrial life, it’s the only logical thing to do.

A billionaire called Yuri Milner announced yesterday at The Royal Society in London that he will pledge $100 million over the next ten years to search for extraterrestrials. The project has been dubbed ‘Breakthrough Listen’, will employ around 25 people and use three massive radio telescopes in the hope of picking up messages from afar. BusinessInsider reports:

Milner will rent the telescopes out and point them at likely homes for life all around the cosmos. Teams of researchers will process the results. Milner’s teams will share their data, and their software, with the world so amateurs can help.

One telescope is in the Northern Hemisphere. It’s called the Green Bank Telescope [pictured above]. It’s in West Virginia. It’s so sensitive that Federal law prohibits the use of cellphones within 100 miles of it…

The other telescope is on the other side of the globe in Australia. It’s called the Parkes Telescope [pictured above]. It’s only slightly smaller, with a 64-meter diameter.

The third telescope is the Lick Observatory in California. It will look for messages sent by laser from elsewhere in the Milky Way.

So how do these massive telescopes help make this the most extensive search ever undertaken for life out there beyond the Milky Way? Milner outlined some pretty impressive stats to drive home his point:

…this search would cover 10 times as much of the sky as any previous search. He said it would process five times as much of the radio spectrum as has ever been scanned before. It will do so 100 times as quickly.

It will survey the 1 million closest stars to Earth and the center of the Milky Way. Beyond that, it will listen to 100 galaxies farther afield.

I suppose if you’ve got it spend it right? I’m all for finding what lies out there in the great unknown, but if I so much as hear the word ‘probe’ mentioned Milner has plenty to answer for.

[source:businessinsider]