Russian-born billionaire to spend $100 million on search for aliens

Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, 73, and a Russian millionaire announced the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) initiative of the biggest-ever scale to discover life on other planets.

Russian venture capitalist Yuri Milner, 54, announced to inject 100 million U.S. dollars to the project nicknamed as "Breakthrough: Listen" and held a news conference at the Royal Society of London on Jul. 20, according to Financial Times and other foreign media.

The biggest-ever research fund allows scientists to search for existence of intelligent life on about 100 planets not only in our galaxy but also in 100 neighboring galaxies. Under the project, scientists can harness latest astronomical telescopes and computers for signal analysis for longer time, enabling them to explore 10 times more of the sky.

In addition to two state-of-the-art radio telescopes, Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia in the U.S. and Parkes Telescope in South Wales in Australia, an optical telescope at the Lick Observatory near San Jose in California in the U.S. will be used for the project.

Another project called "Breakthrough: Message" starts together to create a message that can be delivered to aliens. The first prize winner will receive 1 million dollars.

“In an infinite universe, there must be other occurrences of life. It’s time to commit to finding the answer, to search for life beyond Earth," said Hawking at the press conference.

Milner majored in particle physics at Moscow State University in Russia and received an MBA from Wharton in the early 90s after migrating to the U.S. He is known as the biggest individual investor in Facebook. In 2012, the 54-year-old entrepreneur has created the Fundamental Physics Prize Foundation. The foundation gives nine researchers the annual 3 million dollars each, which is more than Nobel Prize’s 1.2-million-dollar award. Currently, he is the CEO of Digital Sky Technology, a venture capital.

Attempts to find alien life was started by scientists including SETI pioneer Frank Drake in the 1960s. But there have been many challenges due to lack of continuous financial support. Funds for such researches ended up with around 500,000 dollars per year around the world.