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China Finishes Building Its Alien-Hunting Telescope

Work has finished on the world's largest radio telescope, which will hunt for extraterrestrial life and explore space, reports Chinese news agency Xinhua. The world's most populated nation fitted the final of 4,450 panels into the centre of the 500m-wide Aperture Spherical Telescope, or FAST, over the weekend. The telescope, which cost $180 million -- and took five years to build -- will be switched on from September. Zheng Xiaonian, deputy head of the National Astronomical Observation under the Chinese Academy Sciences said:The project has the potential to search for more strange objects to better understand the origin of the universe and boost the global hunt for extraterrestrial life.Gizmodo adds:FAST is almost twice as large as the next biggest radio telescope, which is in Puerto Rico. It will be used for early-stage research by Chinese scientists for a couple years, and then be used more widely. FAST is capable of detecting gravitational waves, pulsars and, eventually, amino acids on other planets.

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  1. Re:Nefarious reasons by NotInHere · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So it's a fabrication that "traditional Chinese medicine" uses a lot of weird shit to make impossible claims?

    Its a global issue. In the USA, you have people who think the earth was created six thousand years ago, and evolution is wrong. Would you want them to make contact?

    Is it completely untrue that many Chinese still eat animals people in the West might consider pets?

    Yes, just as many westerners still eat animals that people in India might consider to be sacred cows. Also, we poison animals that people in India think to be holy as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

    Its just a cultural thing.

    In fact, all the science fiction movies/books have some US agency dissecting the aliens. Its not the chinese who dissect (or eat) them, its the some branch of the US Government.

    Living in a western country, I would obviously prefer that the USA made first contact rather than china, but that still doesn't mean that china will do a horrible job at it, or would first eat the aliens or something.