Since the 1960s, radio telescopes have been sweeping the skies on a shoestring budget, hoping to stumble across a message from ET. That search is now set to be transformed by a high-profile, multi-million dollar initiative called Breakthrough Listen, which will use some of the biggest telescopes on Earth to probe far deeper into the universe.
At the initiative's launch, British cosmologist Stephen Hawking expressed the optimism of many in the scientific community, telling the media: 'In an infinite universe, there must be other occurrences of life. Somewhere in the cosmos, perhaps, intelligent life may be watching.'
Does that mean we're bound to find something if we just keep looking long enough? Not necessarily, says astrophysicist and astrobiologist Paul Davies.
Professor Davies is a supporter of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI)—in fact, he's chair of the SETI Post-Detection Science and Technology Task Group, the body charged with responding if Earth is contacted by aliens. However, he thinks we may need some radically new thinking to have a chance of finding anything other than 'eerie silence'.
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