British physicist Stephen Hawking and Russian tech billionaire Yuri Milner are teaming up to search for extraterrestrial life.

The $100 million project is called Breakthrough Initiatives. The open letter posted on the project's website, which is signed by Milner, says, “There has never been a better moment for a large-scale international effort to find life in the Universe. As a civilization, we owe it to ourselves to commit time, resources, and passion to this quest.”

As reported by PBS, Milner, a man who earned his fortune by savvy early investment in social media, announced the money will, as of now, be divided between the search for alien life and the creating of digital messages to be sent beyond Earth. Breakthrough Initiatives will combine never-before-used computing technology with the world's most powerful telescopes and, in doing so, will hopefully intensify the search for life outside the planet beyond anything that has previously been attempted.

As reported by the Associated Press, Hawking describes the reason behind the new search as a kind of human duty: "We are alive. We are intelligent. We must know."

Further elaborating on the aims of the project, Milner explained to the press at the Royal Society in London, "The scope of our search will be unprecedented: a million nearby stars, the galactic center, the entire plane of the Milky Way and 100 nearby galaxies."

As Hawking sees it, whatever information is received will be welcome data: "If a search of this sophistication finds no proof, that is an interesting result. ... It will not prove that we are alone, but it will narrow the possibilities, and it is likely to produce data that is fascinating in its own right.

"It is time to commit to finding the answer to search for life beyond Earth," said the author of “A Brief History of Time.”