Andrew Siemion

  • Investor Yuri Milner joins with Berkeley in $100 million search for extraterrestrial intelligence

    July 21, 2015

    On Monday July 20th, the Breakthrough Prize Foundation and it's founder, famed internet investor Yuri Milner, announced a contract with UC Berkeley that will provide a massive boost of funding towards the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The foundation has pledged $100 million dollars over the next 10 years to UC Berkeley and other additional institutions as part of the Breakthrough Listen project, a project aimed at creating and building new instruments to better analyze information collected by two telescopes that have been contracted through the project: the 100-meter Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the 64-meter Parkes Telescope…

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  • Intelligent civilizations rarer than one in a million

    February 8, 2013

    "Scientists at UC Berkeley have now used the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia to look for intelligent radio signals from planets around 86 of these stars. While discovering no telltale signs of life, the researchers calculate that fewer than one in a million stars in the Milky Way Galaxy have planetary civilizations advanced enough to transmit beacons we could detect. “We didn’t find ET, but  we were able to use this statistical sample to, for the first time, put rather explicit limits on the presence of intelligent civilizations transmitting in the radio band where we searched,” said Andrew Siemion,…

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