Scientists are about to embark on the biggest search yet for alien life, sweeping the skies for signals of civilisations beyond our solar system with $A135 million from a Russian billionaire and the backing of physicist Stephen Hawking.
"It's time to commit to finding the answer to search for life beyond Earth," said renowned physicist Hawkings. "The Breakthrough Initiatives are making that commitment. We are alive, we are intelligent, we must know."
Breakthrough Initiatives is the project of tech entrepreneur Yuri Milner.
"The scope of our search will be unprecedented - a million nearby stars, the galactic centre, the entire plane of the Milky Way, and a hundred nearby galaxies," he said.
Some of the world's largest radio telescopes will be used to scan for distinctive radio signals that could indicate the existence of intelligent life.
Astronomers will listen to signals from the million star systems nearest to Earth and the 100 closest galaxies, although they do not yet plan to send messages back into space.
Hawking said some form of simple life on other worlds seemed very likely, but the existence of intelligence was another matter, and humankind needed to think hard about making contact.
''Recent experiments like the Kepler mission have changed the game. We now know there are so many worlds and organic molecules are so common, that it seems quite likely that life is out there,'' he said.
Advances in technology will allow scientists to monitor several billion radio frequencies at a time, instead of several million, and to search 10 times more sky than in the early 1990s.
Another key figure in the project is astronomer Geoff Marcy.
"We will listen to a cosmic piano every time we point the radio telescopes. A piano not with 88 keys but with ten billion keys. Our electronics will be designed to pick out any note with a frequency that is ringing consistently true against the background noise of the ten billion notes out there," he said.
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