The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is attempting to amp up its mission with more funding, BBC News reported.

The SETI, a research team that has remained privately funded, is asking investment companies for £1 million per year for radio time. The team plans to listen on radio telescopes for data analysis.

The U.K SETI Research Network (UKSRN) does most of its work in the U.S. and the group's coordinator Alan Penny said it would be important research for Britain.

"If we had one part in 200 - half a percent of the money that goes into astronomy at the moment - we could make an amazing difference. We would become comparable with the American effort," the University of St Andrews researcher said.

While these types of missions have not always been fruitful, Penny is anxious to learn for himself.

"I don't know whether [aliens] are out there, but I'm desperate to find out. It's quite possible that we're alone in the universe," he said. "And think about the implications of that: if we're alone in the universe then the whole purpose in the universe is in us. If we're not alone, that's interesting in a very different way."

From 1998-2003, the UKSRN used Jodrell bank's 76m Lovell radio telescope to search 1,000 nearby stars in search of extraterrestrial transmission, but found nothing. California's SETI Institute funded the project.

Jodrell's telescope has undergone numerous improvements and is now one of the best tools for transmission searching available. It will use fiber optics to link with six other telescopes across England in a network known as eMerlin.

"You could do serendipitous searches," Jodrell's Tim O'Brien said. "So if the telescopes were studying quasars, for example, we could piggy-back off that and analyze the data to look for a different type of signal - not the natural astrophysical signal that the quasar astronomer was interested in, but something in the noise that one might imagine could be associated with aliens. This approach would get you SETI research almost for free."