British scientist Stephen Hawking attends a press conference in London on July 20, 2015, where he and Russian entrepreneur and co-founder of the Breakthrough Prize, Yuri Milner, annouced the launch of Breakthrough Initiative, a new project to attempt to detect life in the Cosmos. AFP PHOTO / NIKLAS HALLE'NNIKLAS HALLE'N/AFP/Getty ImagesNIKLAS HALLE'N/AFP / Getty Images
It is the essential question of our species, likely posed when humans first became conscious and looked up at the stars: Is anybody else out there?
The interrogation promises to become more insistent with word of a $100-million (U.S.) plan to plumb the depths of outer space in search of sentient beings.
The new campaign is being led by two men. Celebrated cosmologist Stephen Hawking owns an estimable scientific pedigree; the other, Russian-born tech-industry billionaire Yuri Milner, owns a capacious wallet. The pair are mustering unprecedented data-processing resources to look at more sky and probe it more deeply than ever before for signs of other life forms.
It's easy to make fun of the decade-long initiative – to this point the search for aliens has only been successful in sci-fi novels and Hollywood movies – but this is important work. Not just because of the results it may achieve (remember, finding nothing is a kind of discovery), but because it is a serious inquiry into a fundamental question of the cosmos, and of the human condition.
We live in a time of relentless preoccupation with the day-to-day: what to eat for lunch, what to do with the latest cheque from Ottawa, what to make of provincial premiers arguing in Newfoundland. The campaign by Messrs. Hawking and Milner, which also involves all manner of physicists and astronomers, is a reminder there are broader issues to confront.
The announcement comes just a few days after the New Horizons probe beamed the first close-up images of Pluto, the dwarf planet. They represent a towering scientific achievement: successfully flinging a man-made object to the last exit in our solar system and beyond, then having it send photos home.
In an era where public science spending that doesn't have an immediate impact on ready-to-market industrial applications is often questioned, it's helpful to be reminded that the curiosity of influential, brainy people remains undiminished. This drive to discover is what defines our species. It is the sapiens in homo sapiens. As Dr. Hawking said at the project launch in London, "We are alive. We are intelligent. We must know."