Stephen Hawking launches $100 million search for ET

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"There is no bigger question," Professor Hawking, an advisor to the project, said on Monday. Science has explained the 'light of stars' but not the lights that shine from Earth, he said.

"Somewhere in the cosmos, perhaps, intelligent life may be watching these lights of ours, aware of what they mean. Or do our lights wander a lifeless cosmos – unseen beacons, announcing that here, on one rock, the Universe discovered its existence?

"It's time to commit to finding the answer… we must know."
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The great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously said: “If a lion could speak, we couldn’t understand him.” Even if signals were being transmitted, we may not know how to decode them – just as an old-fashioned radio engineer familiar only with amplitude-modulation might have a hard time decoding modern digital communications.

But the culture gap with aliens need not be unbridgeable.
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wfgodot said:

How so? ET = extraterrestrial = space "alien" -- synonymous. The movie character was in 1982, 33 years ago; ETs have been ETs before and since. (Though the notion of Dr. Hawking wheeling around in search of the little fellow, while throwing large £££ bills at the problem, does have amusement value!)

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