BILLIONAIRES AND ALIENS
BY MAJED G TAIFOUR
Has it become a new hobby of the super-rich to hunt for aliens? And why is the quest to find aliens in space largely funded by billionaires?
Is it nothing but a coincidence that among the scores of astronomers and researchers working tirelessly to uncover these enigmatic creatures are these eccentric billionaires?
Is their relentless hunt for extra-terrestrial life the reason why they ended up partly bankrolling some of the most complex and far-reaching scans of our Universe ever attempted?
To fathom the mystery behind this sudden interest by the world’s richest people on earth in alien life, I had to go back in time to the year 1960, when radio astronomer Frank Drake thought he might have discovered aliens.
At the time, he had pointed a new 26-meter telescope at the star Epsilon Eridani, and within minutes, the instruments went wild. Drake was stunned. Could he have found extraterrestrial life?
As it turns out, he didn’t. The signal wasn’t otherworldly. It was coming from an earthly source, an airplane.
But that first foray into the search for extraterrestrial intelligence sparked a growing effort to scout out intelligent creatures among the stars. And now, with recent discoveries in astronomy, emerging technologies and a flush of new money by the world’s wealthiest, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is in a renaissance.
One of them is charismatic Russian-Israeli billionaire Yuri Milner.
Born and educated in Moscow, Milner worked as a particle physicist at the Lebedev Physical Institute. In 1990, as the Soviet Union collapsed, he left to study business at the University of Pennsylvania, and in 1999 he founded an internet investment fund. The fund was an early backer of Facebook and Twitter.
Milner felt a connection with space. Born in 1961, he was named after Yuri Gagarin, the first cosmonaut. Once he had built up a fortune, he discovered that he can now give back to science. Milner was driven by a personal ambition to make contact with extra-terrestrials in his lifetime. For him, this mission has to be completed within 25 years.
His ambitious goal is to survey one million of the closest stars to Earth and 100 nearby galaxies using two of the world’s most sensitive telescopes in West Virginia and Australia. They cover 10 times more sky than previous surveys and five times more of the radio spectrum. Also, they gather data 100 times faster. The project is adding a major new telescope to its mix, a South African array of 64 dishes each 13.5 meters across.
His $100 million Breakthrough Listen Initiative has identified a mysterious radio signal that seems to come from the nearest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri. This has generated a flood of excitement in the press and among scientists themselves.
Unless the signal repeats itself, scientists will never be convinced that it was a message from aliens. Skeptics will also argue that this is more likely to be either a new form of human-generated radio interference or a rare feature of the complex observing instrumentation itself.
But what if aliens send something more complex than a single loud note? How would scientists scan data for something that seems so weird? With billionaire funds pouring in, researchers are trying to enlist artificial intelligence to do just that.
But what if intelligent aliens are too busy or too shy to send messages to the stars, let alone planet earth? Let’s not forget that there have been many moments in modern astronomy when scientists have seen something unusual in the heavens and screamed aliens.
Well, Milner seems determined to support this endeavor past 2025, when his initial funding runs out. “It’s one of the most existential questions in our universe,” he says. “Just knowing we are not alone is something that can bring us together here on Earth.”
Milner, a technology investor with a background in physics and a well-known name in Silicon Valley, has always been fascinated with life beyond Earth. In 2015, he initiated a $100 million search for techno signatures or transmissions by creatures from other worlds. Four years later, the search for extra-terrestrial Intelligence, which surveyed 1,327 nearby stars for signals from intelligent beings, turned up empty. Milner, whose net worth was estimated today at $4.7 billion, has staged the biggest hunt for alien life ever.
But while the truth might be out there, technological aliens do not seem to be, at least not yet. There are billions of stars in our galaxy alone, and hundreds of billions of galaxies in the visible Universe. Who knows when an intelligent signal will turn out?
In 2010, Stephen Hawking, an English theoretical physicist and cosmologist who died in 2018, had previously warned of the dangers posed by intelligent extraterrestrials, saying that an advanced alien race could potentially wipe out humanity. He said that nomadic aliens may seek to conquer and colonize any civilization they come across.
However, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute or SETI, which is funded largely by individual donors, or the who’s who of tech wealth, continues to scour the skies searching for potential signals from alien civilizations.
When the era of big government was over, a neoliberalism system of minority power arose to grant minority control to a small group of elites, something very much similar to a soft form of authoritarianism in which state apparatuses are put in private hands and assigned to unassailable billionaire technocrats. SETI is one of those apparatuses.
But what I still don’t understand is what do neoliberalists, billionaire technologists, and ultra-rich die-hard believers have to do with aliens?
Well, to begin with, the bizarre cult of billionaire technologists believe deeply that they are the smartest guys in the world, and that planet earth should be run according to their own rules. This kind of mindset trickles down to Silicon Valley’s philanthropy efforts, which are often informed by techno-utopian fantasies about how our world should be.
On the other hand, all billionaires eventually reach a point where their money no longer buys them power or happiness. This is why many of them turn to philanthropy to further cushion their legacy and ego. This is one reason why the next step for the super-rich technocrats is to have their name on what may be the most important single event in human history: the quest to affirm that we are not alone in the universe.
We live today in an era in which people obsess over the views and philosophies of the world’s billionaires. Many even consider them as their messiahs and prophets. After all, this is what got us into the political mess that Donald Trump created in the past four years simply because people believed that he’s smart because he’s rich, or vice versa. Yet, Trump’s disastrous rule of American politics proved that his only talent is his ability to avoid taxation and to manipulate politicians.
I remember watching the unfolding events of the US Congress attack when one of the Make America Great Again supporters waved a large banner that read Masks Off Sheeple, a scornful term likening people to easily led sheep. “The truth barely seemed to be here, let alone out there,” I thought to myself.
Nevertheless, the hunt for alien life is undergoing a renaissance. Astrobiology, a field that engages in the search for signs of habitability and biological life on near and distant planets, is now booming.
China, an emerging scientific superpower, recently finished constructing the largest radio telescope in the world, which will be used to look for other technological civilizations in our galaxy. Meanwhile, billionaires continue to use private capital to fund initiatives to scan the skies for radio signals from afar.
The problem with today’s billionaires is that their numbers are growing faster than the Coronavirus pandemic.
In 1990, statistics reveal that billionaires had amassed $118 billion in wealth. Today, they hoard a treasure trove of more than $3 trillion. Meanwhile, the number of billionaires has grown by nearly 40% over the last five years. As such, billionaires are not only proliferating faster than the coronavirus, but they are concentrating the globe’s money supply like there is no tomorrow.
The globe’s 2,153 billionaires, for example, now have more wealth than half the world’s population, that’s 4.6 billion ordinary Earth dwellers.
Just 22 male billionaires have more money than all women living in Africa. That’s more than half a billion people. At this rate, billionaires will own everything and everybody in a couple of years.
Billionaire oligarchs already dominate global affairs. Every day, billionaires intervene in elections, fund political parties, run for office, dominate another continent or make more merchandise we don’t need.
And when billionaires aren’t telling us how to live, they fly in their private jets to Davos where they pretend to fix the world’s problems.
Only rich people with money and jets can fix things, not us!
However, some things cannot be fixed. Among other things, these include a crumbling world economy, astronomical national debts, politicians who want to tax the rich, and then there is that damn thing called climate change.
Hence billionaires’ obsession with rockets these days and Mars.
A few decades ago, no rich person in their right mind would have ever thought of going to a Red State, let alone a Red Planet. Times have changed!
Today, billionaires are selling their yachts to buy a rocket.
According to billionaire Elon Musk, rich people are now faced with two choices. They can stay on Earth, walk into an inevitable extinction event, and lose their fortunes. Or they can become a spacefaring civilization, and a multi-planetary species.
That’s how hopeful the billionaires are today. They want to get off the planet.
Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, wants not only to go to Mars but everywhere in space in one of his rockets.
Musk, who has already put a Tesla roadster into space, plans to establish a colony on the Red Planet by 2050. Ironically, a sci-fi novel, written in the 1950s, predicted that the red planet would be governed by technocrats and their leader would be called Elon.
Musk revealed that he’s an alien to Cred Founder Kunal Shah who was looking for answers from the businessman on how he keeps up with his immense workload.
Through a tweet, Shah asked Musk how he managed to run more than four organizations that may soon become $500 billion companies at such a relatively young age. Musk responded with a simple three-word tweet, saying “I’m an alien”.
Igor Ashurbeyli, a Russian billionaire and rocket scientist, wants to create his nation in outer space called Asgardia. It will have its government, currency, calendar, and something we miss here on earth, a justice system.
Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, who founded the fashion retailer Zozo, hopes to make it to the moon on one of Musk’s SpaceX rockets.
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t want to go to outer space, at least not yet, but is sending spacecraft to its far reaches. Perhaps aliens will start posting on Facebook.
Robert Bigelow, a maverick Las Vegas billionaire, who is the owner of Budget Suites of America and founder of the Bigelow Consciousness Institute, is so fascinated by extra-terrestrial life and space that he offered a $1 million prize to anyone who could answer whether there is a posthumous world and if existence will continue after death or not.
He founded Bigelow Aerospace in 1999 and purchased a license from NASA the year after to build an expandable space habitat. His company put unmanned Genesis I and II inflatable modules into orbit in 2006 and 2007 and worked with SpaceX in 2016 to expand the soft side called BEAM connected to the International Space Station. Bigelow is convinced that aliens exist and is captivated by paranormal activities.
He even established the Bigelow Consciousness Institute to research the possibility of human consciousness surviving beyond physical death.
In September 2020, scientists came across an astonishing discovery, which suggests that there might be life on Venus, the nearest neighboring planet in our solar system. Despite additional research and telescope observation to confirm the finding, ambitious private space companies are already planning to send life-hunting probes to Venus at their own cost.
New Zealand-based Rocket Lab said it is going to launch a life-detecting satellite, called Photon, to Venus as soon as 2023.
Rocket Lab founder and CEO Peter Beck were already targeting Venus in his quest for extraterrestrial life before scientists’ latest discovery. And when the news reaffirmed his belief, he told the New York Times that “this mission is to go and see if we can find life.” “This discovery of phosphine adds strength to that possibility. So, I think we need to go and have a look there,” he added.
He said the company’s mission will study Venus’ atmosphere about 30 miles above its hot surface, where scientists believe is most likely to sustain life.
Milner is mulling a similar project. He also plans to look deeper into Venus following the surprising discovery.
“Finding life anywhere beyond Earth would be truly momentous,” Milner said on the organization’s website. “And if there’s a non-negligible chance that it’s right next door on Venus, exploring that possibility is an urgent priority for our civilization.”
