Extraterrestrial death sentence: Stephen Hawking, Yuri Milner’s search for alien life was once fatal

FOR his claim in 1584 that there could be life on other planets, Dominican priest Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake as a heretic.

Illustration from book "War of the Worlds" by H.G. Wells. hg war/of/the/worlds

DOMINICAN priest Giordano Bruno argued in 1584 that as all planetary worlds likely had a ­nature no different from Earth, all could have “animals and inhabitants”.

After a seven-year trial, the Catholic Church ordered Bruno be gagged, stripped and strung upside down in central Rome, to burn at the stake as a heretic on February 17, 1600.

Four hundred years after Bruno published his fatal hypotheses, NASA scientists in 1984 won funding to search for extraterrestrial ­intelligence (SETI) by tracing artificially generated radio signals from up to 1000 light-years away.

Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner and British scientist Stephen Hawking announce the launch of Breakthrough Initiative, a new project to attempt to detect life in the Cosmos. Picture: AFP

Now Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, with support from British physicist Stephen Hawking, has added $US100 million ($135 million) over the next decade to ­expand the SETI ­attempts to find evidence of life beyond Earth.

In ancient religions the cosmos was home to a pantheon of gods, challenged in about 50BC by Latin poet Titus Lucretius Carus, a devotee of Epicurean theory that everything resulted from the chance jostling of matter, being atoms.

In his epic On The Nature Of The Universe, Lucretius suggested that if “the purposeless congregation and coalescence of atoms” created all living things, then “in other regions there must be other earths and various tribes of men and breeds of beasts”.

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German-born Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa speculated that aliens could exist on the moon and the sun in On Learned Ignorance, published in 1440. With glass grinding perfected in central Europe by 1608, mathematician Galileo Galilei adapted the technique in 1609 to magnify the heavens eightfold, eventually multiplying his view to 33-fold. Galileo’s telescopic observations provided the tool to search the heavens for other life forms.

US astronomer Percival Lowell circa 1905.

Milan’s Giovanni Schiaparelli gave hope to extraterrestrial theorists in 1877 when he observed linear structures on Mars as he watched the planet’s “Great Opposition” through a .2m telescope. Schiaparelli described a scrawl of lines as “canali”, meaning “channels”.

The Italian term “canali” was mistranslated into English as “canals”, denoting “man-made” structures and inflaming the ­imagination of Percival Lowell.

Lowell studied mathematics at Harvard University before turning his attention to astronomy, building the Lowell Observatory at Flagstaff, Arizona, to observe Mars in 1894.

He decided Martian canals were real and mapped hundreds, hypothesising the straight lines were artificial canals created by ­intelligent Martians to carry water from polar caps to equatorial ­regions.

Lowell lectured across America and wrote three books, Mars (1895), Mars And Its Canals (1906), and Mars As The Abode Of Life (1908). Lowell’s theories ­inspired English author H.G. Wells’ novel The War Of The Worlds (1899), about an invasion of Earth by deadly aliens from Mars.

Edgar Rice Burroughs published A Princess Of Mars in 1911, the first of his 11 science fiction novels to use Schiaparelli’s names for Martian regions and giving Martians green skin.

An illustration from “War Of The Worlds” by HG Wells.

On Halloween in 1938, Orson Welles and The Mercury Theatre On The Air terrified thousands of Americans into believing they were under attack by hostile Martians with a radio version of The War Of The Worlds presented as “live” news bulletins.

Engineer Nikola Tesla suggested in 1896 that his wireless electrical transmission system could be used to contact beings on Mars and in 1899 thought he had detected a signal from the planet.

The SETI Institute’s Green Bank 140ft telescope in West Virginia in 1996.

In the early 1900s radio pioneers Guglielmo Marconi, Lord Kelvin and David Peck Todd proposed that radio could be used for Martian contact, with the Italian electrical engineer Marconi stating he had picked up potential Martian signals.

When Mars veered close to Earth on August 21-23, 1924, the US promoted a National Radio ­Silence Day for 36 hours. All radios were quiet for five minutes on the hour, every hour, with a radio ­receiver raised 3km above the US Naval Observatory. US Army chief cryptographer William Friedman was assigned to translate any ­potential Martian messages.

Atomic bomb physicist Enrico Fermi posed the question “Where are they?” in the 1950s, suggesting that if technologically advanced civilisations were common in the universe, then they should be detectable.

In 1959 physicists Philip Morrison and Giuseppe Cocconi suggested searching the microwave spectrum for signals from outer space.

Cornell University astronomer Frank Drake performed the first modern SETI experiment in 1960.

Project Ozma, named after the Queen of Oz in L. Frank Baum’s fantasy books, used a 26m diameter radio telescope to examine the stars Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, but found nothing of interest.

Believers’ long and patient wait

NASA funded a SETI study with Hewlett-Packard Corporation and others in 1971 which proposed Project Cyclops, a $10 billion radio telescope array with 1500 dishes.

It was not built, but later adapted in SETI work, which is yet to identify the “wow” signal among 10 billion signals held in its computer data base.

Still, former US president Jimmy Carter, World War II general Douglas MacArthur and former FBI head J. Edgar Hoover all believe in extraterrestrial life that has already landed in unidentified flying objects.

Originally published as Extraterrestrial death sentence: Stephen Hawking, Yuri Milner’s search for alien life was once fatal