The best road to progress is freedom's road. - JFK
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Breakthrough Initiatives is a program founded and funded by Yuri Milner to search for extraterrestrial intelligence over a span of at least 10 years. The program is divided into two components. Breakthrough Listen will comprise an effort to search over 1,000,000 stars for artificial radio or laser signals. A parallel project called Breakthrough Message is an effort to create a message "representative of humanity and planet Earth".[1]
The Breakthrough Initiatives were announced to the public on July 20, 2015 at London's Royal Society. Physicist Stephen Hawking, Russian tycoon Yuri Milner, and others created the Initiatives to search for intelligent extraterrestrial life in the Universe and consider a plan for possibly transmitting messages out into space.[2][3] The announcement included an open letter co-signed by multiple scientists, including Hawking, expressing support for an intensified search for alien radio communications. During the public launch, Hawking said: "In an infinite Universe, there must be other life. There is no bigger question. It is time to commit to finding the answer."[4][5]
The US$100 million cash infusion is projected to markedly up the pace of SETI research over the early 2000s rate, and will nearly double the rate NASA was spending on SETI research annually in approximately 1973–1993.[3]
Breakthrough Listen is a ten-year initiative with $100 million funding begun in July 2015 to actively search for intelligent extraterrestrial communications in the Universe, in a substantially expanded way, using resources that had not previously been extensively used for the purpose.[2][4][6] It has been described as the most comprehensive search for alien communications to date.[4]
Announced in July 2015, the project will use thousands of hours every year on two major radiotelescopes, the Green Bank Observatory in West-Virginia and the Parkes Observatory in Australia.[7] Previously, only about 24 to 36 hours of telescope per year was used in the search for alien life.[4] Furthermore, the Automated Planet Finder of Lick observatory will search for optical signals coming from laser transmissions. For processing of the massive data, the experience of SETI and SETI@home will be used.[7] SETI founder Frank Drake is one of the project's scientists.[2][4]
Breakthrough Message
The Breakthrough Message program is to study the ethics of sending messages into deep space.[8] It also launched an open competition with a US$1 million prize pool, to design a digital message that could be transmitted from Earth to an extraterrestrial civilization. The message should be "representative of humanity and planet Earth". The program pledges "not to transmit any message until there has been a global debate at high levels of science and politics on the risks and rewards of contacting advanced civilizations".[9]