The search just got real

This is very cool - the hair on my arms is standing up as I type.

From WIRED:

A Russian Tycoon is spending $100 Million to hunt for Aliens
Russian billionaire Yuri Milner made his name through savvy investments in social media companies like Facebook. But now the theoretical-physicist-turned-tech-tycoon is sinking $100 million into science’s most quixotic quest: the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Announced today, the ten-year Breakthrough Listen initiative will conduct the most comprehensive sweep of space for signals from intelligent aliens ever.

Of course, that’s no guarantee it will succeed. “We should be asking the difficult questions,” says Milner, echoing President John F. Kennedy’s famous words about going to the moon. At a July 20 event—chosen, of course, to coincide with the anniversary of Apollo 11’s moon landing—Milner announced Breakthrough Listen, flanked by scientific luminaries such as Frank Drake, he of the Drake equation that estimates the number of detectable alien civilizations, and Geoff Marcy, an astronomer who has helped find hundreds of exoplanets. (Eminent physicist Stephen Hawking will be there, too, though he himself is not leading the project.)

The scientific braintrust will have the best technology $100 million can buy. “It’s a dream come true,” says Andrew Siemion, director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center and another leader on the initiative. The key purchase will be thousands of hours per year of observation time on two of the world’s most powerful radio telescopes, the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia. (A specialized optical telescope at the Lick Observatory in California is also involved.) Together, the radio telescopes will cover 10 times more sky than previous searches and scan the entire 1-to-10 gHz range, the so-called “quiet zone” in the spectrum where radio waves are unobscured by cosmic sources or Earth’s atmosphere; presumably, intelligent aliens will know to broadcast in this zone if they want anyone to hear them.

The Parkes observatory was featured in the wonderful 2000 film The Dish.

I participated in the SETI@Home program both on personal equipment and on lab equipment at places I have worked. This is something of great interest to me and this is (finally) the way to go about a real search.