For more than a century, from George Melies’ A Trip to the Moon to Stephen Spielberg’s E.T. and Close Encounters to this summer’s blockbuster sequel to Independence Day, mass media, and the general public, have pondered what will happen if we ever came into contact with extraterrestrial life forms. Carl Sagan’s book Contact, and Jodie Foster’s movie of the same name, explores one possible scenario in which a Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) scientist (played by Foster) discovers a signal repeating a sequence of prime numbers originating from star system Vega, the 5th brightest star visible from Earth. Even if Contact’s version of an alien encounter is more likely than that presented in Spielberg’s E.T., the possibilities are worth pondering.
And yet experts believe that the odds of receiving a radio transmission composed of prime numbers or encountering intelligent extraterrestrial life in the near future are "astronomical." even with Hillary Clinton's promise that if elected President, she would open up the “X-files” (Area 51).
But the odds may be increasing due to continuing advances in technology and money. At a press conference held in April in New York City, Russian billionaire and Breakthrough Prize co-founder Yuri Milner, along with famed physicist Stephen Hawking, announced Breakthrough Starshot, a 20-year voyage to the Alpha Centauri star system. Should the existence of planets in the Alpha Centauri system be confirmed, Starshot could provide us with the best measurements of an exoplanet atmosphere we could ever hope to get this century. Milner will spend $100 million dollars to fund the project. Facebook's founder and CEO, Mark Zuckenberg, is on the project’s board of directors.
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