LONDON — Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking and Russian-born billionaire Yuri Milner on Monday announced an ambitious bid to combine vast computing capacity with the world’s most powerful telescopes to intensify the so far fruitless search for extraterrestrial life.

Hawking, who speaks using a computer-generated voice due to the effects of motor neuron disease, explained the reason for the $100 million project: “We are alive. We are intelligent. We must know.”

Milner, who made a fortune through investments in companies like Facebook, said the power of Silicon Valley technology and innovation would be used.

“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,” Milner told a packed news conference at the Royal Society in London.

Organizers say the “Breakthrough Initiatives” project, also endorsed by other prominent British scientists, is the biggest ever scientific search for alien life. It includes a “listening” program — the effort to analyze vast amounts of radio signals in search of signs of life — and a “messaging” program that will include $1 million in prizes for digital messages that best represent the planet Earth.

The messages will not be sent, however, in part because some scientists — including Hawking — fear messages sent into space could possibly spur aggressive actions by alien races.

It will be supported by the 100-meter Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the 64-meter Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia.

In addition, the Lick Observatory in California will conduct a deeper-than-ever search for optical laser transmissions.

The project will be 50 times more sensitive than earlier searches, and will cover 10 times more of the sky, organizers say.

Milner said the search will be entirely transparent and will rely on open-source software so findings can be shared throughout the world.

“Our approach to data will be open and taking advantage of the problem-solving power of social networks,” he said.

The researchers say the focused computing power and the use of some of the world’s most powerful telescopes will allow them to collect in a day the same amount of data that would have taken a year to collect.