StarChip (spacecraft)

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 project Breakthrough Watch aims to to identify and characterize Earth-sized, rocky planets around Alpha Centauri and other stars within 20 light years of Earth.

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 program to search for intelligent extraterrestrial communications in the Universe. With $100 million in funding and thousands of hours of dedicated telescope time on state-of-the-art facilities, it is the most comprehensive search for alien communications to date. The project began in January 2016, and is expected to continue for 10 years.

The project uses radio wave observations from the Green Bank Observatory and the Parkes Observatory, and visible light observations from the Automated Planet Finder. Targets for the project include one million nearby stars and the centers of 100 galaxies. All data generated from the project are available to the public, and SETI@Home is used for some of the data analysis. The first results were published in April 2017, with further updates expected every 6 months.

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