A Jewish billionaire is donating $100 million to answer the question we have been asking since the beginning of the past century - and certainly since ET cycled onto our screens in 1982: is there intelligent alien life out there?

The Breakthrough Listen project, funded by Russian Jew Yuri Milner and launched on Monday by Stephen Hawking, aims to find signs of alien civilisation within 10 years.

Mr Milner, a former physicist who made his fortune as an internet entrepreneur, said that the project would fulfil "our obligation as human beings… to look at the stars and wonder what is there".

He said the academics and researchers working on the project would be given access to two of the world's most powerful radio telescopes, the Green Bank and Parkes observatories in the US and Australia. The project will also build digital processing equipment to handle the vast amount of data supplied by the telescopes. According to Mr Milner, it will then be possible to gather up what is currently a year's worth of data in just one day.

The researchers will search for radio signals from distant planets or machines made by extra-terrestrials. Equally, the signals emitted by the Breakthrough Listen project's equipment could be picked up by alien civilisations.

Launching the project at the Royal Society, Professor Hawking said that there was "no bigger question" in science.

This initiative is the first serious effort to discover potential alien activity for more than two decades, after Congress cut funding for the US Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence in 1992. However, Nasa has subsequently discovered other planets that could potentially sustain life.