Humanity’s best bet at detecting aliens is a giant silver Chinese dish the size of 30 football fields — one that simultaneously showcases Beijing’s abilities to deploy cutting-edge technologies and ignore objectors’ rights as it seeks global prominence.
The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope, or FAST, in the China’s southwest, which was launched in September and cost 1.2 billion yuan (US$174 million) to build, is the world’s largest radio telescope.
Once fully operational, the FAST, nicknamed Tianyan, will be able to peer deeper into space than ever before, examining pulsars, dark matter and gravitational waves — and searching for signs of life.
Authorities also hope it might attract tourist dollars to Guizhou Province, one of China’s poorest regions.
However, it comes at the cost of forcibly displacing about 9,000 villagers who called the site in Pingtang County their home. Many were outraged at being forced to leave the valley surrounded by forested karst hills and hundreds of families are now suing the government.
China built Tianyan as part of efforts to take on international rivals and raise its embarrassingly low tally of Nobel prizes, said Peng Bo (彭勃), director of China’s National Astronomical Observatories, which oversees the telescope.
The 500m wide dish dwarfs its nearest competitor, the US’ Puerto Rico-based Arecibo Observatory, which has a radio telescope only 305m across.
Tianyan’s receivers are more sensitive than any previous radio telescope and its pioneering technology can change the shape of the dish to track celestial objects as the Earth rotates.
It could catalog as many pulsars in a year as had been found in the past 50 years, Peng said.
Tianyan needs a 5km wide “radio silence” buffer zone around it with electronics banned in order to reduce interference with the sky’s much fainter frequencies.
Relocated residents would “enjoy better living standards,” Xinhua news agency said when the dish was completed in July. “Villagers in nearby communities admired their luck, saying they should ‘thank the aliens.’”
However, villagers allege land grabs without compensation, forced demolitions and unlawful detentions, and up to 500 families are suing the county government.
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