China is to relocate more than 9,000 people in the lead-up to the opening of the world’s largest radio telescope later this year — a move that Beijing hopes will boost the global hunt for extraterrestrial life.
Work on the 1.2 billion yuan (US$184 million) Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) project began in the southwestern province of Guizhou in 2011 and is expected to be completed by September.
Before then, 9,110 residents of Guizhou’s Pingtang and Luodian counties are to be “evacuated” from their homes, Xinhua news agency said on Tuesday. Each is to receive 12,000 yuan in compensation from the government’s eco-migration bureau, Xinhua added.
Li Yuecheng, a senior Chinese Communist Party official in Guizhou, said the relocations, from an area within a 5km radius of the project would help “create a sound electromagnetic wave environment.”
Beijing sees its 500m telescope, which will dwarf the 300m Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, as the latest symbol of its growing technological prowess.
One of the scientists behind the project recently said that if the telescope was filled with wine, each of the world’s 7 billion inhabitants could fill about five bottles from it.
However, the telescope is intended as a pioneering scientific endeavor, not a super-sized decanter. According to reports in Chinese state media, FAST is made up of 4,450 triangular-shaped panels. Once the telescope is fully functional, those movable panels will be used to reflect radio signals from distant parts of the universe toward a 30-tonne retina capable of gathering them, the China Daily reported during tests in November last year.
In an interview last year, Nan Rendong (南仁東), a senior scientist on the project, said: “A radio telescope is like a sensitive ear, listening to tell meaningful radio messages from white noise in the universe. It is like identifying the sound of cicadas in a thunderstorm.”
Chinese Astronomical Society director-general Wu Xiangping (武向平) told Xinhua that FAST’s high level of sensitivity would help scientists to “search for intelligent life outside of the galaxy and explore the origins of the universe.”
Last year, Shi Zhicheng (史志成), a Chinese astronomer, told the South China Morning Post that the telescope represented a giant leap in the hunt for alien life.
“If intelligent aliens exist, the messages that they produced or left behind, if they are being transmitted through space, can be detected and received by FAST,” Shi said.
Chinese officials say the telescope’s location in Qiannan, an isolated region deep in Guizhou’s spectacular Karst mountains, is the ideal place to detect possible extraterrestrial messages.
Li Di (李迪), a scientist from the Chinese Academy Of Sciences, said FAST would allow Beijing to “explore deeper into space, and look at asteroids and even Mars.”
“It will give China an opportunity to conduct frontier research,” he told China Central Television last year.
In an editorial celebrating China’s scientific triumph in July last year, the South China Morning Post wrote: “If we are ever to make contact with aliens, China may play a key role — our eyes and ears are closing in on the possibility of life on another planet.”
Massive relocation projects have long been a Chinese Communist Party specialty. Millions of Chinese citizens have been displaced in recent decades to make way for hydroelectric dams and other infrastructure projects, or as part of “poverty alleviation” schemes.
Those forced from their homes often complain of poor compensation.
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