Time to find answer to Search for Life beyond Earth

Professor Stephen Hawking is backing a project being funded by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner. The project named Breakthrough Listen will find out signs for advanced civilizations on other worlds with the help of radio signals.

For the research, quite advanced and powerful radio telescopes will be used. The data will be analyzed with the help of supercomputing power. Peter Worden (former NASA Ames Research Center director) will be heading the project.

He along with his team will collect signs and signals; assess the data for signs of patterns endemic of intelligence. People have been asked to volunteer to help in the project. It is said that every telescope will be creating good amount of data.

Best part of the project is all the information will be available for public. They will be able to download a computer program. Breakthrough Listen will join hands with the University of California in Berkeley's Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) @home initiative.

The software to be used to sift through the cosmic data has the feature of being rewritten. So, it can be said that customization option is available.

"Breakthrough Initiatives are also developing powerful software for analyzing this data. All this software will be open source. The hardware and software used in Listen project will be compatible with other telescopes around the world", said experts.

Researchers and public will be able to develop apps on their own to sift the data. Stephen Hawking said that it is the time to find an answer to search for life beyond earth.