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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.
Not only is the Chinese facility twice as large, but the Arecibo telescope's funding is going away. and the NSF is desperately looking for someone to take it over. The NSF's funding has been flat for quite a while, but their expenses are going up and they need to trim programs.
This is all nicely metaphorical of China's rise as the world's major superpower, and the decline of the US. China is pouring huge funding into science and technology, and the US is cutting programs and shutting down major facilities.
"Alien-hunting telescope"? Really, guys?
A large-scale pure-science project. A tool that will advance modern astrophysical and astronomical research. A landmark technical achievement.
But it came from funny-looking furriners (not just funny-talking, like them ones from Yurp). So we must be sure to cast the headline in the most derisive terms possible. It's not a research tool that shoestring SETI projects will be able to snag a bit of time on--no, it's an "alien-hunting telescope".
I mean, my God--snippets of Aricebo's time have been used for alien-hunting (and alien-spamming) for decades. It was used to send publicity stunt messages to M13 in 1974, and to some nearer stars in 2009. SETI@home users have been crunching Aricebo data looking for little green men since 1999. And yet, oddly enough, no one ever seems to refer to Aricebo as an "alien-hunting telescope". Why is that?
~Idarubicin