Breakthrough Initiatives

• 1. Introduction

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  Breakthrough Initiatives entered public view on the 20th of July 2015, inside a hall at London's Royal Society. Physicist Stephen Hawking stood before the crowd and said, "In an infinite Universe, there must be other life. There is no bigger question. It is time to commit to finding the answer." What kind of program earns a physicist's public backing before a single instrument has been built for it? And once an organization commits to a search this large, what does it choose to build first?

• 2. A Global Announcement

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  Yuri Milner, a Russian tycoon, created Breakthrough Initiatives to search for intelligent life in the Universe. He also wanted the program to weigh whether humanity should transmit messages of its own into space. He funded the program together with Julia Milner, the same pair behind the Breakthrough Prize. Their commitment ran to at least 10 years, split across several distinct projects rather than one single search.

  An open letter accompanied the announcement, co-signed by multiple scientists including Hawking, in support of an intensified search for alien radio communications. The new funding was projected to increase the pace of SETI research beyond the rate typical of the early 2000s. It would also nearly double what NASA itself had spent annually on SETI research in approximately 1973-1993.

  One of those projects would put that funding to work first, aimed not at messages already sent but at signals that might already be arriving.

• 3. Listening Across The Galaxy

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  Green Bank Observatory and the Parkes Observatory each contribute radio wave observations to Breakthrough Listen, backed by $100 million in funding. Thousands of hours on some of astronomy's most advanced telescopes make it the broadest search yet undertaken for alien communications. The project switched on in January 2016, with plans to continue searching for 10 years. Visible light data comes from the Automated Planet Finder, extending the hunt to laser signals as well as radio waves.

  Its target list spans a million nearby stars, along with the central regions of 100 galaxies. All of the data the project generates is released publicly, and SETI@Home helps analyze some of it. The first results reached publication in April 2017, with the team promising updates every 6 months from then on.

  Breakthrough Listen searches for messages arriving from elsewhere; another arm of the program is asking whether humanity should risk sending one of its own.

• 4. Deciding What To Say

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  A US$1 million prize pool anchors Breakthrough Message's open competition. Entrants are asked to design a digital message the project might one day transmit to an extraterrestrial civilization. That message, the program specifies, should be "representative of humanity and planet Earth."

  Underneath that competition sits a slower question. Breakthrough Message also studies the ethics of sending messages into deep space at all. The program pledges, in its own words, "not to transmit any message until there has been a global debate at high levels of science and politics on the risks and rewards of contacting advanced civilizations."

  While Breakthrough Message weighs whether to speak, a separate project in the program is already building hardware meant to travel rather than transmit.

• 5. Postage-Stamp Spacecraft

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  On the 12th of April 2016, Breakthrough Starshot was announced as a US$100 million program to build a proof-of-concept light sail spacecraft fleet. Its target is Alpha Centauri, reached at roughly 20% the speed of light, or 60,000 kilometers per second, about 215 million kilometers per hour. At that speed the fleet would need about 20 years to arrive, and about 4 more years for Earth to learn of a successful arrival.

  The interstellar route may pass close to Proxima Centauri b, an Earth-sized exoplanet sitting in its star's habitable zone within the Alpha Centauri system. From a distance of 1 Astronomical Unit, about 150 million kilometers or 93 million miles, each spacecraft's four cameras could take a photograph. At high enough quality, that image might resolve the planet's surface features.

  The full fleet would number 1000 craft, each one called a StarChip and sized to a centimeter, weighing only a few grams. Ground-based lasers, some as powerful as 100 gigawatts, would push the fleet toward its target. Each tiny spacecraft would then transmit its data home through a compact, on-board laser communications system.

  Pete Worden leads Breakthrough Starshot. The underlying concept was first laid out in a paper titled "A Roadmap to Interstellar Flight," written by Philip Lubin of UC Santa Barbara. METI president Douglas Vakoch summarized the project's logic this way: "by sending hundreds or thousands of space probes the size of postage stamps, Breakthrough Starshot gets around the hazards of spaceflight that could easily end a mission relying on a single spacecraft. Only one nanocraft needs to make its way to Alpha Centauri and send back a signal for the mission to be successful. When that happens, Starshot will make history."

  In July 2017, scientists announced that Sprites, small precursors to the StarChip design, had been successfully launched and flown.

  Breakthrough Starshot's fleet still needs a destination worth reaching, a question a separate project in the program is built to answer.

• 6. Searching For Biosignatures

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  Breakthrough Watch operates on a multimillion-dollar budget, developing both Earth-based and space-based technology to find Earth-like planets nearby. Its focus falls on Earth-sized, rocky worlds circling Alpha Centauri and other stars within 20 light years of Earth. Rather than simply spotting these planets, the project searches them for oxygen and other "biosignatures," signs that could point to life.

  While Breakthrough Watch looks outward to other star systems, one more Breakthrough project has set its sights on a moon far closer to home.

• 7. Under Enceladus's Ice

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  Breakthrough Enceladus targets Saturn's icy moon of the same name, where a mission concept would search for signs of life in a warm, hidden ocean. In September 2018, NASA signed a collaboration agreement with Breakthrough to jointly develop that mission concept. If it flies, it would be the first privately funded deep space mission ever launched.

  The probe would study the plumes that erupt from Enceladus's ocean, spraying material out through the moon's southern ice crust. That crust is thought to run somewhere between two and five kilometers thick. To measure it precisely, a probe could carry ice-penetrating radar capable of mapping the crust's structure from above.

  That radar, and the mission it would ride on, remained only a concept the year the 2018 agreement was signed. It marks a first step toward a probe that has yet to leave the ground.