The Russian billionaire-funded, Stephen Hawking-backed Breakthrough Initiatives project, whose goal is to find extraterrestrial life, has been pretty rapidly enlisting the world’s most powerful telescopes to listen to the sky for signs of intelligent aliens. But the project just managed to finalize something a bit more exciting an agreement with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile to use its optical instruments to look for signs of aliens in Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to Earth.
Breakthrough, and its benefactor Yuri Milner, are obsessed with Alpha Centauri. The Starshot project is already looking to develop low-cost, ultra-fast spacecraft that could make it to the star system in about 20 years and look for potentially habitable worlds and extraterrestrials. There are strong reasons to believe life could survive and make a home for itself in Alpha Centauri — just 4.37 light-years away.
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