The hunt for extraterrestrial intelligence survived on scraps for the majority of its existence. Short, awkward windows of telescope time were borrowed. Funding came in small amounts before ceasing. In 2011, after UC Berkeley withdrew its support and the Allen Telescope Array in northern California was put on hold for several months, Andrew Siemion estimated that he was one of only two or three people working on SETI worldwide. It’s not a field. It’s a pastime.
Before most people knew what Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, and Airbnb would become, Milner, a Russian-born tech investor, made his fortune by supporting these companies. According to Forbes, his net worth is approximately $3.8 billion. He was born and raised in Moscow, received training as a particle physicist, fled the Soviet Union as it was disintegrating, and eventually made Silicon Valley his home. Notably, he was named after Yuri Gagarin and was born a few days after Frank Drake arranged the first SETI conference in 1961. Depending on how you feel about coincidence, that could be fate or a good story.
In 2015, Milner announced Breakthrough Listen, a $100 million, ten-year commitment to UC Berkeley-based SETI. It was the biggest private grant in the field’s history at the time. The funds were used to purchase significant telescope time on some of the most sensitive instruments in the world, such as the 64-meter Parkes dish in Australia and the 100-meter Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. In contrast to the few dozen hours of observation that SETI researchers had previously managed to gather annually, they were now receiving thousands. Siemion likened the shift to getting out of a wrecked car and sitting in a Formula 1 racer.
The downstream effects have been significant, but the results haven’t included aliens—spoiler alert, as one researcher dryly put it. Astronomers outside of SETI have been searching the public archive of the data that Breakthrough Listen gathers for fast radio bursts and potential dark matter particles. The project’s new scientific infrastructure is currently oversubscribed by other researchers who wish to use its frequency resolution. Sofia Sheikh is among a generation of graduate students who have made careers out of the project after learning about it on Reddit.
A different $200 million grant from the estate of Qualcomm co-founder Franklin Antonio, who had quietly collaborated with the company for twelve years prior to his passing, arrived at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, in 2023. Such a long-term, patient relationship with a single organization is uncommon in philanthropy and points to something more than the whims of a billionaire. Antonio wasn’t interested in making news. He was placing a long-term wager.
It’s important to understand what private funds can and cannot accomplish. NASA briefly operated its own SETI program in the early 1990s before Congress terminated it, mocking it as unnecessary spending. Since then, the agency has largely refrained from participating. Federal grant procedures are slow, prioritize incremental work, and are run by peer review panels that, until recently, viewed technosignature research as something in between punchline and fringe science. There was a genuine “giggle factor.” Journals were hesitant. Proposals for workshops were in limbo.
Private funding doesn’t address any of that structurally, and some astronomers are concerned that it distorts priorities. They believe that chasing alien signals is a high-risk wager in comparison to the slower, more methodical search for microbial biosignatures on nearby exoplanets, and that telescope time consumed by SETI leaves less for other work. These are valid criticisms that are difficult to ignore.
On purely pragmatic grounds, however, it is difficult to dispute what Milner’s money actually accomplished for a field that was on the verge of extinction. Papers are being released. Scientists are undergoing training. The language that had excluded SETI-related proposals from NASA’s funding calls was quietly removed. According to one researcher, the winds are beginning to change. It is unknown if any of this will eventually lead to contact with another civilization. However, the question of whether we are alone is being asked once more, seriously, and with actual tools. Compared to fifteen years ago, that is more.
