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 Using some of the world's largest radio telescopes, a team of
scientists handpicked by Milner will oversee an initiative he calls
Breakthrough Listen, a 10-year search for radio signals that could
indicate the existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the
universe.
"It's the most interesting technological question of our day,"
Milner said in an interview, noting that he became fascinated by the
notion of extra-terrestrial life after reading astrophysicist Carl
Sagan's "Intelligent Life in the Universe" as a 10-year-old in
Moscow.
His funds to bankroll the project came from savvy early investments
in startups such as Facebook Inc.
Milner's motivation is his belief that other civilizations could
teach us how to handle challenges such as allocating natural
resources.
"If we're alone, we need to cherish what we have," he said. "The
message is, the universe has no backup."
 Scientists said the project dwarfs anything else in the field, known
as the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence. Globally, less than
$2 million annually is spent on SETI, said Dan Werthimer, an adviser
to Milner's project and the astrophysicist who directs the SETI@home
project affiliated with the University of California in Berkeley.
Today, due to technology improvements, including in computing power
and telescope sensitivity, $100 million will go much farther than in
the early 1990s, the last time SETI had significant funding,
scientists said.
The advances 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.
But any signals the scientists detect will likely have been created
years ago, perhaps even centuries or millennia earlier. Radio
signals take four years simply to travel between Earth and the
nearest star outside our solar system.
In 10 years, with his $100 million, Milner figures scientists can
listen for radio transmissions in the Milky Way galaxy, plus the 100
nearest galaxies.
One of the biggest costs lies in booking time at radio telescopes,
including at Australia's Parkes Observatory in New South Wales and
the Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia. Milner
plans to book about two months a year at each site, a boon to
scientists who normally might get two days a year on the telescopes.
The team, led by scientists such as Peter Worden, who until earlier
this year directed the NASA Ames Research Center, will organizer the
radio signals they find, make the data public, and examine the data
for patterns.
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The goal lies less in understanding the signals than in establishing
whether they were created by intelligent life rather than natural
phenomena.
Scientists say the fact that humans have developed radio signaling
makes it a good bet that others may use it as well.
"It doesn't tell you anything about the civilization, but it tells
you a civilization is there," said Frank Drake, who with Carl Sagan
sent the first physical message into space in 1972, the Pioneer
plaques on board the Pioneer 10 U.S. spacecraft. An adviser to
Breakthrough Listen, Drake is also chairman emeritus of the SETI
Institute.
In addition to checking for radio signals, Breakthrough Listen will
hunt for light-based signals using a telescope at the Lick
Observatory in California.
Milner, creator of the Breakthrough Prize for scientific
achievement, announced the initiative in London accompanied by
scientists such as Stephen Hawking, the physicist and author.
Hawking holds an advisory role on the project.
A physicist by training, Milner joins many successful entrepreneurs
and investors with an interest in space, notably SpaceX Chief
Executive Elon Musk, who has said he would like to colonize Mars one
day.
(Editing by Stephen R. Trousdale and Richard Chang)
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