Search for alien life on nearby Earth-like planet begins

Mark Zuckerberg, Yuri Milner, Stephen Hawking’s $100m plan to look for signals on Proxima b

Three of the world’s richest and most intelligent men are hoping to be the first to find alien life.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner and physicist Stephen Hawking have revealed exclusively to MailOnline that they will be listening to signals from ‘Earth 2.0’.

Officially named Proxima b, the rocky planet is believed to have the right conditions to harbour life and is just four light years from Earth.

The trio are funding an ambitious $100 million (£76 million) project known as ‘Breakthrough Listen’, which will use the world’s most powerful telescopes to listen to messages from Extraterrestrial Intelligence (ET).

Last month, astronomers found clear evidence that our nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is the sun to another Earth-like world.

“It came only a few months after Stephen Hawking and I, with Mark Zuckerberg’s support, launched our Breakthrough Starshot project, which aims to launch a tiny spacecraft to Alpha Centauri within a generation,” Milner told MailOnline.

“At the time, we hoped there was a planet in the Centauri system, but we didn’t know. Now we have a definite target. That makes the mission feel more tangible.”

Thousands of exoplanets have been discovered before, but unlike the others, scientists say Proxima b is within our reach.

While four light years is a long way – more than 25 trillion miles – future generations of super-fast spacecraft could conceivably travel to the planet within the next few decades.

Much further in the future the planet may even be colonised by space travellers from Earth.

Early next month, the Breakthrough Listen team will look for radio emissions that differ from the natural background noise using the Parkes Observatory in Australia.

The same observatory was used to receive live televised pictures of the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969.

“It is difficult to predict how long the search will take, but we know that all the conditions necessary for life to arise on Earth are ubiquitous in the universe,” Andrew Siemion, Director of Berkeley SETI (Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Research Center told MailOnline.

The team hopes to avoid a repeat of the false ‘alien’ signals that were picked up by the RATAN-600 radio telescope in Zelenchukskaya, Russia – but doing so may be tricky.

“Terrestrial technology is a challenging problem,” said Siemion.

“Our notion of what types of emission are produced by technology is informed by our own technology…our own technology presents a significant interfering background.”

It comes as one of the backers of the project, Professor Hawking, says we should be wary of contacting aliens if we find them.

The Breakthrough Listen team has already collected data on other star systems using the Green Bank Radio Telescope in West Virginia and Lick Observatory’s Automated Planet Finder in California.

Studies carried out so far by the project include most of the stars within 16 light years of Earth.

Breakthrough Listen can collect data over a 10-year period from a network of the world’s most powerful radio and optical telescopes to yield vast, full-sky signal monitoring.

Search capacity is 50 times more sensitive, cover 10 times more of the sky, five times more of the radio spectrum, and at speeds 100 times faster.

*Adapted from DailyMailUK Online