Via: Source

In what appears to be one of the more obscure (i.e. awesome) investments in an already stellar investment and entrepreneurial career, Yuri Millman, an early investor in, or co-founder of companies like Uber, Air Bnb, Facebook, Twitter, and a number of other billion-dollar-valued tech companies, will be turning his attentions to the skies above.

Indeed, Mr. Millman was a scientist before he was an investor and tech entrepreneur, and it now appears as if he will finally be getting the chance to meld his passion for science with his incredibly successful business career.

His new, $100 million project is entitled Breakthrough Initiatives, and was announced just today at the Royal Society in London. The project has a number of other prominent names attached to it, including Stephen Hawking himself. The program will coordinate two of the most powerful telescopes man has ever produced, the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, and the Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia.

The program will survey the closest 100 million stars to our own sun, and will also extend beyond the reaches of the Milky Way, looking for conditions that are suitable for life. To help aggregate and analyze the massive amount of information these telescopes will help to collect, the program will tap the innovative SETI@home program, a computer program distributed by Berkeley in California, which will allow some 9 million people to use their home computing power to help push the project forward.

Indeed; an absolute ton of cash, and some of the best minds of a generation are all coalescing now in the name of one of the most important questions to ever face our species; Are we alone?