China
is leading, this time in the hunt for alien life.
Their
FAST (five-hundred-metre aperture spherical radio telescope) went operational
on Sunday September 25th 2016 as reported in “China’s
alien-hunting telescope, the world’s largest, is now operational”,
published September 25, 2016 By Trevor Mogg, DigitalTrends.
Constructed
at a cost of US$185 million, it's a part of China's grand Space ambitions which
include:
1.
Getting an astronaut to the moon
2.
Construction of an orbiting space
station by 2018
China
already has a Quantum satellite called Micius that's testing out the idea of
Quantum entanglement being used to make Satellite signals unhackable as noted
in my blog
article entitled “China
Micius QESSS satellite heralds Quantum Communications, encrypted Fiber
Waveguides and Li-Fi”.
So
what can we learn from FAST?
China’s FAST Radio
Telescope – Humans on the menu with a side dish of Greens
FAST
is located in China’s south-western province of Guizhou, about 1,000 miles
(1,610 km) south-west of Beijing. The telescope comprises 4,500 panels, each
measuring about 11 meters (36 feet) in length.
At
500m, it’s the biggest single dish telescope in the world, dwarfing the
Areceibo Radio Telescope located in the municipality of Arecibo, Puerto Rico.
Construction on FAST began back in 2011 as noted in the article “China starts up world’s largest single-dish radio telescope”, published Sunday 25 September 2016, AFP, The UK Guardian.
FAST's
construction displaced some 2,000 families or around 9,000 people within a
three (3) mile radius of the Radio Telescope. The region was chosen as it has
relatively low radio noise and this would not interfere with the operation of
the sensitive radio telescope ability to hear very weak signals being
transmitted by intelligent aliens.
Still, one has to wonder if we're going about this all wrong; advanced aliens may not use radio as pointed out in the argument related to the Fermi Paradox
If
they do, they'd think us a bit archaic and strange to still use such a
primitive communication tool to give away our location so easily announcing
humans are on the menu. Especially give the fact that FAST looks like a really
large dinner bowl, with a side of greens.
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