Steven Hawking Leads $100 Million Effort to Find Intelligent Alien Life

No government money-- the project is being funded by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner.

Well, I guess that's a lot of Russian government money siphoned off, probably. But none of your money.

The project will just listen, not send out signals. Because, no seriously, you cannot simply assume these will be peaceful, Reeces Pieces eating ETs.

Hawking famously revealed his worry that any aliens advanced enough to contact earth would be "looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they could reach" during a 2010 episode of the miniseries Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking.

And he clearly hasn’t changed his mind completely. "If you look at history, contact between humans and less intelligent organisms have often been disastrous from their point of view, and encounters between civilizations with advanced versus primitive technologies have gone badly for the less advanced," he told reporters at the Breakthrough announcement. "A civilization reading one of our messages could be billions of years ahead of us. If so, they will be vastly more powerful, and may not see us as any more valuable than we see bacteria."

The project will undertake to scan the million stars closest to us.

posted by Ace at 03:01 PM

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