Breakthrough Starshot

Breakthrough Initiatives is a program founded in 2015 and funded by Yuri Milner to search for extraterrestrial intelligence over a span of at least 10 years. The program is divided into multiple projects. Breakthrough Listen will comprise an effort to search over 1,000,000 stars for artificial radio or laser signals. A parallel project called Breakthrough Message is an effort to create a message "representative of humanity and planet Earth". The project Breakthrough Starshot aims to send a swarm of probes to the nearest star at about 20% the speed of light.

The Breakthrough Initiatives were announced to the public on July 20, 2015 at London's Royal Society. Physicist Stephen Hawking, Russian tycoon Yuri Milner, and others created the Initiatives to search for intelligent extraterrestrial life in the Universe and consider a plan for possibly transmitting messages out into space. The announcement included an open letter co-signed by multiple scientists, including Hawking, expressing support for an intensified search for alien radio communications. During the public launch, Hawking said: "In an infinite Universe, there must be other life. There is no bigger question. It is time to commit to finding the answer."

The US$100 million cash infusion is projected to mark up the pace of SETI research over the early 2000s rate, and will nearly double the rate NASA was spending on SETI research annually in approximately 1973–1993.

Breakthrough Listen is a ten-year initiative with $100 million funding begun in July 2015 to actively search for intelligent extraterrestrial communications in the Universe, in a substantially expanded way, using resources that had not previously been extensively used for the purpose. It has been described as the most comprehensive search for alien communications to date.

Announced in July 2015, the project will use thousands of hours every year on two major radiotelescopes, the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia and the Parkes Observatory in Australia. Previously, only about 24 to 36 hours of telescope per year were used in the search for alien life. Furthermore, the Automated Planet Finder of Lick observatory will search for optical signals coming from laser transmissions. For processing of the massive data, the experience of SETI and SETI@home will be used. SETI founder Frank Drake is one of the project's scientists.

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