Breakthrough Listen: Findings From Yuri Milner’s $100 Million Space Research Program

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has undergone a major transformation in the last seven years thanks to Breakthrough Listen, the largest-ever scientific research program dedicated to finding evidence of civilizations beyond Earth.

The program’s founder is Yuri Milner, an Israeli technology investor and science philanthropist who has committed $100 million to the search for alien signals that could answer that age-old question: Are we alone in the universe?

Listen is one of the Breakthrough Initiatives, a suite of ambitious space science programs that represent a major aspect of Yuri Milner and his wife Julia’s Giving Pledge commitment. Here’s why Yuri Milner launched Breakthrough Listen with Stephen Hawking and an overview of the program’s findings so far.

The Giving Pledge: Yuri Milner’s Science Philanthropy

Since discovering the work of astronomers like Iosif Shklovsky and Carl Sagan as a child, Yuri Milner has had a lifelong fascination with extraterrestrial intelligence. This interest is part of what led him to pursue an education and career in physics before stepping into business and internet investment. The success of his technology company DST Global, today one of the world’s biggest tech investment funds with connections to Facebook and Twitter, made him a multi-billionaire.

In 2012, Julia and Yuri Milner joined Warren Buffet and Bill and Melinda Gates’ Giving Pledge, a movement of philanthropists who are committed to donating the majority of their fortunes to charitable causes. Driven by their deep interest in the subject, the couple committed to donating at least half of their wealth to scientific and other enterprises during their lifetimes.

Later that same year, the Milners collaborated with Google co-founder Sergey Brin and other Giving Pledge signatories Anne Wojcicki, Priscilla Chan, and Mark Zuckerberg to launch the Breakthrough Prize, a major science award that celebrates the work of leading scientists and mathematicians with individual prizes of up to $3 million.

To date, the Breakthrough Prize and the Breakthrough Junior Challenge, a science video competition for high school students, have contributed $292.25 million in prize money to visionary thinkers and bright young minds.

Stephen Hawking and the Breakthrough Initiatives

In 2013, Stephen Hawking won the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for his discovery of Hawking radiation from black holes. The Prize also recognized his significant contributions to the subject of quantum gravity and quantum aspects of the early universe.

Stephen Hawking had long been an inspirational figure for Yuri Milner, ever since he attended a lecture by the pre-eminent physicist in 1987.

After launching the Breakthrough Prize in 2012, Yuri Milner continued to look for ways in which private funding could make a positive impact on the advancement of science. He asked Stephen Hawking for his advice on which scientific fields could benefit most from private investment. Stephen Hawking suggested SETI, and they decided to collaborate and make the idea a reality.

In July 2015, Yuri Milner, Stephen Hawking, and other industry leaders launched the Breakthrough Initiatives at the Royal Society in London. The first of these SETI-focused space science enterprises was Breakthrough Listen.

Breakthrough Listen’s Scope and Power

With a dedicated fund of $100 million from Julia and Yuri Milner’s Breakthrough Foundation, Listen has brought together researchers from institutions all over the world to revitalize SETI research and advance its scope and capabilities as a rigorous scientific field through extensive surveys and data evaluation.

Radio Surveys

Listen has launched a survey investigating the 1 million closest stars to Earth, the 100 closest galaxies to ours, the center of our galaxy, and the entire galactic plane. The radio surveys can search 10 times more of the sky than previous programs, and at least 5 times more of the radio spectrum, 100 times faster.

It may be difficult to comprehend the level of sensitivity these surveys can achieve, but put simply, if a common aircraft radar was transmitting to Earth from any of the 1,000 stars nearest to us, Listen would hear it.

Optical Laser Transmissions

Listen is also carrying out the deepest and broadest hunt ever attempted for optical laser transmissions. Rather than radio surveys, these are spectroscopic searches that are 1,000 times more efficient at finding laser signals over standard visible light surveys. These could detect a 100-watt laser – in other words, the energy of an ordinary household bulb – from 25 trillion miles away.

Powerful Telescopes

The initiative has collaborative partnerships with major observatories in South America, Europe, and China, and uses 13 of the world’s most powerful telescopes to search for extraterrestrial signals, including:

■ The Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia – the world’s largest steerable radio telescope.

■ Parkes Observatory in Australia – the second-largest telescope in the southern hemisphere.

■ Lick Observatory’s cutting-edge Automated Planet Finder in California.

■ The 64-antenna MeerKAT array in South Africa.

Listen combines these instruments, which are 50 times more sensitive than existing telescopes dedicated to the search for off-world intelligence, with groundbreaking software and data analysis.

What Has Breakthrough Listen Discovered?

By harnessing the power of these telescopes, since 2015, Listen has:

■ Published the most comprehensive and sensitive search for technosignatures ever performed. (Technosignatures are signals from technology that could originate from extraterrestrial intelligence.)

■ Released an unprecedented data survey of the Milky Way’s Galactic Center and Earth Transit Zone.

■ Produced a groundbreaking list of “Exotica” that includes one of almost every kind of observable phenomenon or object in the universe.

In 2017, when the interstellar object ’Oumuamua passed through the solar system, Listen’s telescopes reacted rapidly, scanning for signals. In early 2018, Listen detected a new fast radio burst (FRB), an intense radio signal of an unknown source originating from a distant galaxy. Later that year, machine learning algorithms analyzed Listen data from the Green Bank Telescope and found 72 new pulses from the repeating source FRB 121102.

In 2020, in collaboration with the University of Manchester, Listen reanalyzed data and combined the information with new catalogs, creating the most comprehensive SETI search in history, with over 200 times more stars included than before.

SETI and the Ocean of the Universe

Most recently, in early 2021, another Breakthrough Initiative, Watch, discovered a planet candidate in the Alpha Centauri system. Telescopes can pick up exoplanet candidates – observations that appear to show planets but are yet to be confirmed – pending further observation by multiple telescopes. Later that year, Listen reanalyzed older data to reveal an intriguing candidate signal, BLC1, coming from the same direction.

While BLC1 had features suggestive of an artificial signal, Listen eventually ruled out the possibility of its being a technosignature: after months of rigorous analysis, the team was able to show it had originated from an Earth-based source.

Though disappointing, the discovery marked the maturation of SETI into a field that not only generates hypotheses but can also verify or reject them. This will prove an important distinction as the vast search continues, ensuring that if, or when, the initiative does discover a promising lead, we can know with some certainty whether the signal is truly alien in origin.

Thanks to Yuri Milner’s $100 million investment, this may happen sooner than we think. SETI pioneer Jill Tarter once compared SETI’s progress up until 2015 to dipping a glass of water into the ocean and coming up with no life. As Breakthrough Listen’s Principal Investigator Andrew Siemion sees it, the initiative has turned the glass of water into a “gushing torrent.”

About Yuri Milner

After graduating from university with a degree in theoretical physics in 1985, Yuri Milner went on to conduct research in quantum field theory before moving to the U.S. to study business at Wharton School in Philadelphia. In 1999, he founded Mail.ru Group, a top European internet company, and, after taking Mail.ru Group public in 2010, he launched DST Global to focus on global internet investments.

Today, DST Global is one of the world’s leading tech investors, with a portfolio including internet heavyweights such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, Airbnb, and Alibaba.

Science remains Yuri Milner’s greatest passion and, in 2012, he launched the Breakthrough Prize, the world’s largest scientific award, in collaboration with his wife Julia and fellow billionaire entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg. Funded by the Breakthrough Foundation, the Breakthrough Prize and the Breakthrough Junior Challenge, a global science video competition for teens worldwide, honor important achievements in the fundamental sciences and encourage children to engage in some of the universe’s most profound questions and difficult concepts.

In 2015, together with Stephen Hawking, Yuri Milner launched the Breakthrough Initiatives to advance the search for intelligent alien life. Now, he divides his time between DST Global and these philanthropic projects.

You can read more of Yuri Milner’s ideas about the universe in his short book Eureka Manifesto.

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