100 million down the black hole as Hawking and Milner boost SETI according to Science (AAAS) News 20 July 2015 and BBC News, 24 July 2015. Physicist Stephen Hawking has launched a new 10 year project in the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) to be funded by Russian venture capitalists billionaire Yuri Milner.
Milner is donating 100 million dollars to the project, which will involve using radio telescopes in Green Bank West Virginia USA and Parkes in Australia, as well as the Automated Planet Finder Telescope at the Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton near San Jose, California. At the launch of the project Stephen Hawking said “It’s time to answer the question of whether there is life beyond Earth”.
British Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees, will be head of the project’s advisory committee. He claims the project will give us better chance of finding if we are alone in the universe.
The project will also work on new signal processing systems to deal with the enormous amount of data collected. Matthew Bailes, an astronomer at Swinburne University of Technology Australia, will head the Australian part of the project. He admits it is a daunting project, and commented: “Unfortunately there’s no manual for how to find aliens”. He went on to say: “It’s much harder to find something when you’re not even sure what it is. There’s going to have to be several hypotheses, and it might be quite easy to get them wrong, and to just let these radio waves from aliens wash past us”.
Editorial Comment: The one plus that should come out of it is an improvement in data analysis systems as Milner spends 100 million dollars on satellite and telescopes rental, and the time and efforts of scientists, technicians and software engineers trying to find “something when you’re not even sure what it is”!
We can answer Hawking’s question for free. Life will only be found where God created it, so their premise that life exists anywhere conditions are right is fatally flawed. There is life beyond earth, but it won’t be detected by Hawking’s telescopes. The Creator of the physical universe is also described as the “living God”. (Deuteronomy 5:26, Psalm 42:2, Hosea 1:10) He also created angelic beings, who are sometimes described as “living creatures”. (Revelation 4:6-9) This same Living God told us what the stars and other lights in the sky were for. They were to serve mankind for signs, times and seasons.
Therefore, we predict that at the end of the ten years Yuri Milner would have been better off sending most of his money down one of Stephen Hawking’s black holes. (Ref. cosmology, aliens, astronomy)