Unfortunately in reality, despite listening to sky for more than half a century, you could say that the silence has been deafening. Since its beginnings SETI has failed to detect the presence of alien civilizations. Enthusiasm and the government funding for the project have dried out. The project has gotten minuscule 24-30 hours of radio-telescopes time a year (!) from thousands the had before.
SETI projects traditionally search for radio or optical signals that seem to be from an artificial source, for instance because they are focused in frequency and repeat in a regular manner. But funding has been patchy: in the early 1990s, NASA sponsored some searches, but dropped that support in 1993. “In recent years, the total worldwide support for SETI was about half a million dollars, mostly in the United States, and all from private gifts,” says Frank Drake, one of the pioneers of modern SETI, who is also on the Breakthrough Listen team.
But this may change now. On 20th of July 2015 at London’s Royal Society Russian billionaire Yuri Milner announced a shot in the arm for SETI: a US$100-million for 10 years to provide the most comprehensive hunt for alien communications so far.
The initiative, called Breakthrough Listen, will see radio telescopes at Green Bank in West Virginia, the Parkes Observatory in Australia, and the Lick Observatory's optical telescope in San Jose, California, scanning around one million stars in the Milky Way and a hundred nearby galaxies. Milner is also releasing an open letter backing the idea of an intensified search; it has been co-signed by numerous scientists, including physicist Stephen Hawking. “In an infinite Universe, there must be other life,” Hawking told luminaries at today's launch event. “There is no bigger question. It is time to commit to finding the answer,” he said.
Milner, who is funding the project, made his fortune through investments in Facebook and other Internet businesses (particularly Maul.ru, Russian-speaking versions of Facebook, Amazon and other online services modeled after American original ones), and in 2012 established lucrative ‘Breakthrough’ prizes to reward excellence in the life sciences, fundamental physics, and mathematics. A particle-physics graduate, he jokes that his interest in SETI began in 1961, the year of his birth; he was named after Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, instilling a life-long fascination with space and the possibility of alien life.
