SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -- With millions of dollars in funding pledged by two of the men behind softw are giant Microsoft, the search for intelligent life on other planets got a big boost Tuesday as officials unveiled plans for a massive new telesc ope to scan the skies.
The Allen Telescope Array -- named for Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen, who put up $11.5 million for the project -- will b e "the world's most powerful instrument designed to seek out signals from civilizations elsewhere in our galaxy," the SETI (Search for Extraterres trial Intelligence) Institute said.
Joining Allen in funding the project was a former Microsoft chief.
"The probability of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe is fairly high, there is great uncertainty and some controversy in the calculation, " Nathan Myhrvold said in a statement.
"One thing however, is beyond dispute. That is, if we don't continue supp orting projects like the Allen Telescope Array, our chances of discovery will remain at zero."
Plans for the telescope mark a turning point for the SETI Institute (www.seti.org), the Silicon Valley-based nonprofit body that is the world's largest private organiza tion devoted to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
The institute's Project Phoenix, which spends more than $4 million a year to buy time on large radio telescopes, is widely held to be the inspirat ion for the 1997 film "Contact" starring Jodie Foster.
But institute researchers have never before had their own installation de voted exclusively to hunting down signals from alien worlds.
"We're overjoyed, and we're ready to move ahead," the institute's directo r of research Jill Tarter said. "Paul and Nathan have understood from the beginning how exciting and groundbreaking this telescope could be. They have contributed time and ideas to our work, and now they are quite liter ally giving us the means to make it happen."
The telescope, which will be jointly administered by the University of Ca lifornia-Berkeley, will be situated about 290 miles (464 km) north of San Francisco at the university's Hat Creek Observatory -- a remote site th at is "radio quiet" with little static or man-made interference.
Astronomers hope the new telescope will be an important new tool in the h unt for alien life, which has been going on for more than four decades.
While researchers have carefully screened records of extraterrestrial rad io emissions, they have yet to come up with a signal displaying a pattern that could clearly indicate it was produced by intelligent life.
The Allen project will differ significantly from radio telescopes current ly in use.
Unlike mammoth dishes such as the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, the Allen Array will be constructed from between 500 to 1,000 small, mas s-produced dishes resembling those used for home satellite television rec eption.
"They are going to be single, backyard style dishes, arrayed together in a field," said Greg Klerkx, the SETI Institute's director of development. "It will be a lot of small dishes, but their signals will be electronica lly linked to form one picture of the stars."
Klerkx said project astronomers were starting to develop a list of "targe t" stars for observation -- focusing on those suns which most resemble ou r own solar system and are closest to us as the best possible chance for discovering nearby intelligent life.
The new telescope will incorporate miniaturized electronics as well as la rge amounts of affordable computer processing, which will enable it to lo ok at up to a dozen candidate star systems simultaneously, scientists say.
It should also prove useful for traditional research in radio astronomy, enabling scientists to look more closely at interstellar chemistry, the s tructure of galactic magnetic fields and the physics of rotating neutron stars.
SETI Institute officials hope to have a large-scale prototype of the new telescope ready by 2003 and to push the project quickly toward completion , with the full telescope scheduled to become operational in 2005.