Stephen Hawking and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner think you can set your smartphones to find aliens. The two partners in the new alien discovery project have created an app that allows users to keep a close eye on the data that is being registered by the most advanced telescopes on Earth.
Yuri Milner has recently announced that he is willing to fund Stephen Hawking’s project for the study of extraterrestrial life. He has donated $100 million for this research and is willing to make all the necessary efforts to get the first evidence of alien life in space.
The first step that was made in this direction was the development of an online app, namely, the Berkley Open Infrastructure for Networking Computing, which allows regular users to get access to the space data that telescopes register. Space experts have kindly asked interested app users to lend them a helping hand by analyzing the respective data.
Scientists expect the new highly-accurate telescopes to collect massive amounts of data. Thousands of hours of registered data are expected to be received by space administrations per year, once the telescopes will become functional. Up until now, researchers could only receive 36 hours of space data every year, so experts will most likely need all the help they can get to analyze the new information.
According to Todd Thibodeaux, the president of CompTIA, the more eyes look at the data, the faster and easier it will be for scientists to identify potential traces of extraterrestrial life in space. He has also mentioned the financial benefits that the introduction of the new smartphone app will have on the research, as scientists will no longer have to rely on expensive programs to identify space signals.
The app will not disturb users in any way as developers have programmed it to function only when the user is connected to a Wi-Fi network. In addition, the app first scans the device to verify the battery status of the gadget. If the smartphone is not fully charged, the app won’t start, so the battery would not get consumed.
Developers have further revealed that the app will first be available for Android-based smartphones. Apple users will have to wait for several more months until the BIONC app will be available on their iPhones, too, scientists have concluded.
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