Project supported by Yuri Milner will scan the skies for signs of intelligent life. Man’s quest for discovering life on other planets is getting a $100 million boost from a Silicon Valley magnate. Yuri Milner, the Russian billionaire who burst on to the U.S. venture-capital scene with early bets on Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc., is personally funding a bold new effort to scan the skies for signs of intelligent alien life. Milner’s check will go to support a team of researchers, based at the University of California, Berkeley, tasked with collecting more data from outer space in a single day than previous efforts collected over an entire year. To do that, the group plans to rent out two of the world’s largest telescopes, in West Virginia and New South Wales, Australia, over the next 10 years, and use new signal-processing techniques to scan a greater spectrum of their radio frequencies than ever before. “Our search will be 100 times better than any previous search for intelligent life in the universe,” said Geoff Marcy, who chairs Berkeley’s decades-old Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI. The project will survey about a billion stars closest to Earth and listen for any signals from the 100 closest galaxies beyond the Milky Way. The allure of discovering intelligent life among the stars has been central to the plots of hundreds of science-fiction novels and films, from 1977’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” to 1997’s “Contact,” in which Jodie Foster plays a SETI scientist picked to make the first human contact with aliens. Source: http://www.marketwatch.com/