With the announcement, this October, of Oxford being the new international headquarters for the Breakthrough Listen Project, I thought I would do an post discussing the Breakthrough Initiatives as a whole. For anyone who hasn't heard about them , they are a group of space science programmes funded by Julia and Yuri Milner, and launched in 2015, that aim to explore the universe and seek scientific evidence of extraterrestrial life. If the Milner name sounds familiar, the husband and wife duo also fund the Breakthrough Prize Foundation, a set of three prizes awarded annually that aim to support and reward research in the fundamental physics, maths, and the life sciences.
The Breakthrough Initiatives consist of four 'missions' - Listen, Message, Watch, and Starshot - along with an annual academic conference - Breakthrough Discuss - focused on life in the universe and space exploration. The projects overall investigate big picture questions regarding extraterrestrial life such as are we alone in the universe? Each of the individual projects aim to enhance our knowledge of life out there and accelerate scientific understanding/research in some way. Breakthrough Listen, the main focus of this post, is essentially 'listening' for any artificial signals out in space that could indicate life. Breakthrough Message is an international competition where entrants have to design a message representing life on Earth that could be read by an alien civilisation, with the long term plan of learning about how we might communicate with non-earthly life and no actual plans to send the message. Breakthrough Watch aims to identify Earth size rocky planets around stars such as Alpha Centauri that are within 20 light years of Earth and look for signs of life on them. Finally, Breakthrough Starshot is an engineering programme looking at overcoming the challenges and laying the foundations for a launch to Alpha Centauri (the closets star system to our solar system). These projects, whilst they may seem like something out of StarTrek may potentially help us to answer one of humanity's biggest questions and see if there really is life beyond Earth!
Before I move onto the nitty-gritty of Breakthrough Listen, I wanted to talk a bit about the thinking behind the Breakthrough Initiatives and this all comes to light through Yuri Milner's Eureka Manifesto, available to read here. In the manifesto, Yuri discusses the fact that we know almost nothing about what he dubs 'the Universal Story', essentially how the universe formed, what is out there beyond our planet. He states that, " Our brains are modern, but our understanding is still primitive." and goes on to outline the mission behind the Breakthrough initiatives: To explore and understand our universe. He outlines the manifesto in key steps: 1) Every successful organisation needs a mission, 2) Our mission is to explore and understand the universe, 3) We must embrace this mission to ensure we survive to build a galactic civilisation, 4) It is critical that rapidly developing AI is involved in the mission, and 5) To advance the mission we must spark a new scientific revolution. He goes on to say we must invest resources, celebrate scientists, and educate the world on the universal story in order to achieve the mission. The various breakthrough projects are steps towards doing this. The manifesto, whilst quite long, is a fascinating read so if you have a bit of free time then maybe give it a glance!
So, the Breakthrough Listen project is the largest ever scientific research program aimed at finding evidence of life and civilisation beyond Earth. Having now moved it's headquarters to the Department of Physics at Oxford, new papers are coming out about the search for 'technosignatures'. These technosignatures refer to signals out in space that could not have been created by nature and therefore show evidence of past or presence technology, by hearing these we would be able to infer the presence of an alien civilisation. Any alien civilisation listening out for technosignatures in space would hear many coming from the Earth such as the radiowaves we use in everyday communication. The program will listen for technosignatures from the 100 closest galaxies to the Milky Way over an initial span of 10 years, committing a total of $100,000,000 (£78,660,000). The Listen project combines instruments such as data from some of the world's most advanced telescopes, with AI and data analysis, so that candidate signals can be identified from billions of radio channels across the radio spectrum all at the same time. The telescopes used claim to be able to hear a common aircraft radar from any of the nearest 100 stars. This is an insane sensitivity (50 times more powerful than existing telescopes) and should help to not only see new signals but also mean that new data processing techniques, used to sort the many signals generated, should be applicable across a wide range of industries.
The Listen part of the Breakthrough Initiatives was launched by Yuri Milner in collaboration with Stephen Hawking back in 2015, it is now, and will continue to be led by Principal Investigator Dr. Andrew Siemion as part of Oxford’ Astrophysics Department and has pre existing relationships with UC Berkeley, University of Manchester, the University of Cambridge, the SKA Observatory, the SETI Institute and other global partners. The Oxford physics department have played a key role in developing instruments and software for MeerKAT, a group of 64 telescope dishes in South Africa that have just started sending signals/data to the Listen Project. The signals detected by the 64 antenna are combined giving very high levels of resolutions as well as spatial coverage. The project will also use the data from the Vera Rubin Vera Rubin Observatory in Northern Chile which is expected to start to operate at some point in 2024. The includes a 3200 megapixel camera that was also co-developed by the Ox physics dept.
Looking for technosignatures in the sky is very cool, but what have we actually seen? In the last five years it has been discovered that planets 'living' in the habitable zones of stars (the zone of distance from the star that makes temperatures right for liquid water to exist) are actually very common. In 2016, a potentially habitable planet was discovered in the habitable zone of Proxima Centauri, one of the stars in the Alpha Centauri system. This planet, imaginatively dubbed 'Proxima b', is currently envisioned as the primary target for the Breakthrough Starshot mission. Currently we do not know if it has liquid water on its surface or in its atmosphere or what conditions may be like, but knowing it exists is a promising start.
Most recently, in December 2023 to be exact, a paper was published as part of the Listen project by Carmen Choza and colleagues looking at the technosignature of 97 nearby galaxies. In the study, technosignatures were searched for using the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, USA which has the capacity to detect Kardashev Type II civilisations. In short, this refers to a civilisation that can harness all the energy of not just the planet it lives on but the star of the star system it lives in, with the Kardashev Scale being used to measure the technological advancement of a society based on how much energy it uses (Earth is about a Type 0.7 civilisation. In order for a beacon to be detected from so far away it would need to be sent with a whole lot of power, power that comes from the entire output of a star to be exact, hence we wouldn't be able to detect any measly civilisations like our own that is using less energy than this. The outcome of this study, unfortunately, did not find any extraterrestrial civilisations but it did only look at 97 galaxies, and only Kardashev Type II civilisation, so it's not to say that there is no one out there, just no one we have seen yet.
The Breakthrough Listen Projects continues to do exciting things, with many stars and galaxies out there left to listen to with ver evolving technology. It's definitely one to watch!
All sources are hyperlinked in text
Breakthrough Initiatives Website: https://breakthroughinitiatives.org/
Recent Choza et al Paper: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/acf576
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