Stephen Hawking announces 'biggest ever' probe into alien life

LONDON — World renowned scientist Stephen Hawking and entrepreneur Yuri Milner announced Monday an unprecedented $100 million project to determine if intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe.

The Breakthough Initiatives division at the Royal Society — the U.K's national academy of science — said it would be "the most powerful, comprehensive and intensive" such search ever conducted.

The 10-year project will access to the powerful Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia, to survey the million stars closest to Earth, and will cover 10 times more sky than previous projects, the investigators said.

"Somewhere in the cosmos, perhaps, intelligent life may be watching these lights of ours, aware of what they mean," Hawking said, according to the BBC.

"Or do our lights wander a lifeless cosmos — unseen beacons, announcing that here, on one rock, the Universe discovered its existence. Either way, there is no bigger question. It's time to commit to finding the answer — to search for life beyond Earth," he said.

"We are alive. We are intelligent. We must know."

Breakthrough Initiatives said all data from the project will be available to other scientists, who will be able to add to it and develop their own applications to analyze the material.