Yuri Milner, the co-founder of Mail.ru Group, decided to invest 100 million dollars in the SETI project, Joinfo.ua reports with reference to BBC.
Milner himself tells that the main aim of his project is the organization of collection, processing and dissemination of information on possible signals coming to the Earth from space.
Milner names the physicist Stephen Hawking as the ideologist of the project, and Frank Drake and Geoff Marcy as its “scientific leaders.” The businessman claims that both of them agreed to participate in the project as research coordinators.
Milner intends to finance the project personally because the state does not dare to invest in such a search for aliens. In particular, the businessman is planning to finance the rental of telescopes and computer networks.
Participants of the project are going to explore much more of the stars and galaxies with weaker signals, and in a wider range of frequencies than it has been done so far. It is expected that the project will help expand the reach of these studies in more than 100 times.