A billion dollars to find aliens

Caisey Harlingten, a businessman and Canadian amateur astronomer, plans to build a $ 1 billion Colossus telescope to search for aliens.

Currently, the team of astronomers working for Caisey Harlingten is actively drafting Colossus' design details. It is expected that it will take about 5 years to build this machine before officially putting it into operation.

It is known that Colossus sought alien life through the detection of the thermal energy that the planet's civilization emitted. This will be a giant telescope, 77 meters long, with aperture twice as large as all existing telescopes.

To reduce costs, a $ 1 billion telescope will use thin mirror technology and some large aperture mirrors. The sensitivity of the lens can detect signs of cities or extraterrestrial organisms on planets 60 to 70 light-years away.

Most likely Colossus was built in the San Pedro Martir area of ​​Baja California, Mexico.

Colossus, a telescope looking for aliens worth $ 1 billion.(Photo: Colossus Consortium)

For four decades searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, astronomers often focused on finding signals from other civilizations. However, this method has some limitations. Perhaps aliens don't send their signals out. Perhaps they followed the channels we didn't expect. In addition, care should be taken when transmitting human signals and informing more advanced civilizations about our presence.

Jeff Kuhn, a scientist at the Astronomical Institute at the University of Hawaii, said that this is Colossus's opportunity - the telescope has a passive receiver, allowing scientists to search for extraterrestrials without revealing. our position.

So far, we have obtained very few images of planets far from Earth. They are fuzzy and tend to be overwhelmed by the star's radiation. Therefore, Colossus has a large mirror that makes it easy to observe the space.

Moreover, the largest telescopes we can see in the next 100 years or longer cannot directly capture images of cities or organized structures on these planets. But the heat source there can be 'seen' .

However, this method has limitations."It can be mistaken for a planet that is often covered by clouds. And the signal cannot be detected on a celestial body that somehow is distributed evenly across the planet , " Kuhn said.

Entrepreneur Caisey Harlingten sought a team capable of constructing telescopes two years ago. Among them is David Halliday, founder of Dynamic Structures Inc. in Canada, who participated in the construction of Keck and Suburu telescopes in Hawaii, USA.

Other partners in the project include the Institute of Solar Energy Physics Kiepenheuer (Germany), the National University of Mexico, Tohoku University (Japan), the Astronomy Institute of the University of Hawaii (USA), the University of Lyon (France) and the public - Innovative Optics company.

Overview of the project has just been published in Astronomy astronomy magazine.