Breakthrough Initiatives

[2][3] The project Breakthrough Starshot, co-founded with Mark Zuckerberg,[4] aims to send a swarm of probes to the nearest star at about 20% the speed of light.

The project Breakthrough Watch aims to identify and characterize Earth-sized, rocky planets around Alpha Centauri and other stars within 20 light years of Earth.

[5] Breakthrough plans to send a mission to Saturn's moon Enceladus,[6] in search for life in its warm ocean, and in 2018 signed a partnership agreement with NASA for the project.

Russian tycoon Yuri Milner created the Initiatives to search for intelligent extraterrestrial life in the Universe and consider a plan for possibly transmitting messages out into space.

[8][10][12] With $100 million in funding and thousands of hours of dedicated telescope time on state-of-the-art facilities, it is the most comprehensive search for alien communications to date.

The program pledges "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".

[26][27] METI president Douglas Vakoch summarized the significance of the project, saying that "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.

[29] Breakthrough Watch is a multimillion-dollar astronomical program to develop Earth- and space-based technologies that can find Earth-like planets in our cosmic neighborhood – and try to establish whether they host life.

[30] The project aims to identify and characterize Earth-sized, rocky planets around Alpha Centauri and other stars within 20 light years of Earth, in search of oxygen and other "biosignatures.