PLATO

Seems a bit cheap that we are spending £50bn on making a train track that will get you somewhere 20 minutes quicker but we have only chucked £50m into the European Space Agency plot in its ET finding mission.
Nevermind, as this is a Conservative Government so i'm sure they will find some benefit they can cut from disabled kids to pay for it but the ESA's Planetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO) is set to go on it's mission to to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilisations, to boldly go where no Telescope Optical Unit has gone before.
Astronomers have so far found over 1,000 planets beyond our Solar System, but none as yet has been shown to be Earth-like in terms of being in a habitable zone with the right size to maintain its atmosphere but PLATO is looking to kick that up a few gears by searching for rocky planets orbiting over a million stars 'Plato will be our first attempt to find nearby habitable planets around Sun-like stars that we can actually examine in sufficient detail to look for life' said Dr Don Pollacco who leads the Plato Science Consortium.
Finally we may find some intelligent life in outer space, now if only we can find some in the Conservative Party.