When you're a billionaire, you can use your money for a number of projects or desires.

You can buy gigantic yachts, fund the lawsuits of former wrestlers against outlets you feel have wronged you, or in this case, fund a mission to look for alien lifeforms on Saturn's moon. Yuri Milner, who is currently worth $3.5 billion according to Forbes, is funding a private mission to explore Enceladus, one of Saturn's 53 named moons and considered by many experts to be a prime candidate for extraterrestrial life in our solar system.

The reason for this is that Enceladus has an ocean directly under its icy surface, with geysers that shoot out water into space with a certain amount of regularity. NASA's Cassini spacecraft did a low fly-by of the moon in 2015 and concluded that hydrothermal activity is almost definitely going on beneath the surface of Enceladus, meaning that it's quite possible that microbial life could exist there.

While the exact cost of the mission hasn't been revealed, Milner previously funded a project to send probes to Alpha Centauri - the closest star system to our own - at a cost of $100 million, so he's clearly good for the money on this mission.

 

Via New Scientist