Stephen Hawking Backs Hunt for Alien Life Begun by Russian Billionaire

First Posted: Jul 20, 2015 02:07 PM EDT

We may be on the trail of aliens. Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking has teamed up with a Russian billionaire to launch a new effort to listen for aliens in the search of extraterrestrial life.

Hawking has actually offered his services to back the $100 million project. The project, dubbed Breaththrough Listen, will fund telescope time in both North America and Australia as well as data processing to look for radio signals in distant solar systems. This could potentially be a way to uncover alien life.

The program will survey the 1,000,000 closest stars to Earth in hopes of finding conditions suitable to life, searching the entire galactic plane of the Milky Way and beyond.

"The scope of our search will be unprecedented," said Yuri Milner, tech billionaire, during a press conference at the Royal Society in London. "A million nearby stars, the galactic center, the entire plane of the Milky Way and 100 nearby galaxies."

In fact, this will be the largest search to death for alien life. It will be 50 times more sensitive than earlier searches for life and will cover 10 times more of the sky.

That's not all, either. The project will also rely on open-source software so any findings can be shared throughout the world.

Milner has already promised to back the program for at least 10 years.