In July 2015, a wealthy Russian Yuri Milner, donated $100 million to support a 10-year Project, named “Breakthrough Initiatives”. This Project aims to seek out intelligent life outside the earth by sending messages to deep space and receiving replies from there.

    As it happens, Milner has the support of eminent scientists including Stephen Hawking. This gift from Milner is a great boost to SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence), an activity already going on for several decades. The well-known astronomer, author and science communicator, Carl Sagan (1934–96) was a pioneering champion of SETI.

    Sagan, by the way, was the creator of the legendary messages, namely the Plaque and the Golden Record, carried respectively in the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft launched in the early 1970s. The design of these messages was based on the notion that any intelligent extraterrestrial being that happens to....