Zuckerberg, Hawking kini buru makhluk asing
26 September 2016
NEW YORK - AMERIKA SYARIKAT. Bagi merealisasikan matlamat untuk menjejaki makhluk asing, tiga individu hebat di dunia melabur sebanyak AS$100 juta (RM411.4 juta) dalam projek yang dinamakan Breakthrough Listen bagi memburu makhluk itu di planet Proxima b.
Memetik laporan Mail Online, Mark Zuckerberg, Yuri Milner dan Stephen Hawking berkata, pelaburan itu akan membolehkan mereka melengkapkan misi itu bagi pembelian teleskop tercanggih di dunia bertujuan untuk mendengar isyarat-isyarat dari angkasa lepas.
"Kami mempunyai sasaran tepat yang membuatkan misi ini lebih jelas," ujar Milner.
Planet berbatu Proxima b yang digelar sebagai Earth 2.0 dipercayai mempunyai persekitaran yang boleh menampung kehidupan dan terletak kira-kira 40 trilion kilometer dari bumi.
Kini pasukan Breakthrough Listen telah pun mengumpulkan data dari sistem bintang lain menggunakan teleskop Radio Green Bank di West Virginia dan Pusat Pemerhatian Pencarian Planet Automatik Lick di California.
Projek yang bermula pada Januari lalu ini akan mengumpul data mengenai planet Proxima b dalam tempoh 10 tahun.
Dengan penggunaan kelengkapan tercanggih, kapasiti carian akan menjadi 50 kali lebih sensitif, 10 kali lebih dekat dengan langit, dan dengan kelajuan pencarian 100 kali lebih pantas.
Stephen Hawking, Mark Zuckerberg and Yuri Milner begin £76million search for alien-life
THE hunt for aliens received a major boost as three of the world's richest and most intelligent men are ploughing money to see if there is life on a distant Earth-like planet.
By Vickiie Oliphant
PUBLISHED: 09:40, Sat, Sep 24, 2016 | UPDATED: 09:45, Sat, Sep 24, 2016
Physicist Stephen Hawking, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner hope to be the first men to find aliens by looking for signals on a planet four light years away.
Named Proxima b, the rocky planet could have the right conditions to host life - much like our very own Earth.
The £76 million project ($100 million) known as Breakthrough Listen will use the world’s most powerful telescope to listen out for messages from potential extra-terrestrial life.
So it’s only fitting the three billionaires will be helping to fund the costly scientific mission.
Proxima b is four light years away - around 25 trillion miles |
Mr Milner told the Daily Mail: “It came only a few months after Stephen Hawking and I, with Mark Zuckerberg’s support, launched our Breakthrough Starshot project, which aims to launch a tiny spacecraft to Alpha Centauri within a generation.
“At the time, we hoped there was a planet in the Centauri system, but we didn’t know.
“Now we have a definite target. That makes the mission feel more tangible.”Thousands of new planets have been discovered before but Proxima b - although four light years or 25trillion miles away - is believed to be the closest to our solar system.
Professor Hawking says he is backing the project as he believes we should find aliens before they find us.
Although adding we should be wary of reaching out to extra-terrestrial life if we find it, he said: “As I grow older I am more convinced than ever that we are not alone.”
But Milner has a more celebratory response, saying if he did hear signals from an alien civilisation he would “take a bottle of champagne out of the fridge and start thinking about the message back.”
Hawkings said we should be wary about contacting aliens |
Milner said he would crack open the champagne if they found alien life |
Researchers hope to avoid a false alarm similar to the ‘alien’ signals picked up by the RATAN-6000 telescope in Russia, but they say this could be trickier than it sounds.
Andrew Siemion, Director of Berkeley Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence Research Centre, said: “Our notion of what types of emission are produced by technology is informed by our own technology...our own technology presents a significant interfering background.”
The Breakthrough Listen team has already collected data on other star systems using the Green Bank Radio Telescope in West Virginia and Lick Observatory's Automated Planet Finder in California.