Into the Cosmos
But unbeknown to the couple at the time of purchase, the house played a historic role in the establishment of Seti, the organisation that takes its name from the acronym for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. A previous owner, who was a chief engineer at Hewlett-Packard, willed the house to Seti after his death in order to fund its mission.
And, in another twist, Seti convened its very first meeting in 1961, which Yuri is quick to point out is the year of his birth.
According to him, there’s never been a better time to engage in the search for alien life. Nasa’s Kepler spacecraft observatory, launched in 2009, has shown the world that there are many more planets than previously thought.
“It turns out that there are many of them and almost every star-like sun has a planet like Earth, basically. It means that there are dozens of billions of planets like Earth in our galaxy alone. There are a hundred billion galaxies in the visible universe, so you multiply that hundred billion by dozens of billions and you get a very big number of possibilities. A few years ago, we didn’t know that. So now we know,” he says, with a nonchalance that belies the mind-boggling scale of his concept.
The Milners’ Breakthrough Listen project is designed to harness the world’s best telescopes—from California’s Lick Observatory to the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and Australia’s Parkes Observatory—to look for signs of civilisation on one of those many, many billions of planets.
The facilities’ operators, mostly academic institutions, were only too happy to accept the foundation’s much-needed funding in return for usage time, especially since “in the last few years there’s been a dramatic improvement in our understanding of the odds and probabilities of [alien life] existing. So that’s why it’s harder and harder to believe that we’re alone. It’s not impossible but it’s less likely than it was a few years ago.”
One criticism levelled at those searching for alien life stems from what is known as the Fermi paradox: if alien civilisation is so inevitable, then why haven’t we met them yet? Some have countered this with the suggestion that advanced civilisations can often cause their own destruction, a notion not inconceivable given our own relatively recent threats of thermonuclear conflict. With the current political climate charged by global tensions, how do the Milners see themselves?