Yuri Milner Founded two Companies in Silicon Valley
The Breakthrough Listen project is a 100 million-dollar research effort led by Yuri Milner and funded by Silicon Valley billionaire and entrepreneur Elon Musk. The project attempts to detect evidence of life on Earth and beyond the solar system. This article will go through the history of Yuri Milner’s work in computer science and science fiction and some of his early investments in space exploration that laid the foundation for what became Breakthrough Listen.
Yuri Milner, born in Moscow in 1971, became interested in sending humans into space at a young age. He was inspired by his grandfather, a cosmonaut and an engineering professor at the Moscow Aviation Institute, who had taken him to see the launch of hundreds of rockets that would send satellites into orbit. At 9, Milner’s interest in space travel crystallized when he watched Yuri Gagarin become the first man to orbit Earth. In high school, he was inspired by Stephen Hawking’s book A Brief History of Time. He also found himself inspired to take up math after learning about Richard Feynman’s theory that quantum mechanics could allow people to communicate faster than light using lasers.
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Breakthrough Initiative
In 2009, Milner founded two companies in Silicon Valley, Breakthrough Starshot and D-Wave Systems. Breakthrough Starshot was intended to develop a starship that could travel to the nearest star system and at the speed of light using a beam of light. The goal was to send people to Alpha Centauri within 20 years and beyond 100 years at the latest. Blushing Robotics, founded by Milner in 2011, was an offshoot of Breakthrough Starshot that aimed to make humanity run with artificial intelligence robots by sending them off into space.
Learn more about Milner: https://givingpledge.org/pledger?pledgerId=246
The Breakthrough Listen project is a 100 million-dollar research effort led by Yuri Milner and funded by Silicon Valley billionaire and entrepreneur Elon Musk. The project attempts to detect evidence of life on Earth and beyond the solar system. This article will go through the history of Yuri Milner’s work in computer science and…