In what would make for a decent episode of The X-Files, the Chinese government is forcing more than 9,000 residents from their homes in order to better search for alien life in the cosmos.
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The worlds largest radio telescope is almost complete. China began building FAST (Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope), back in March 2011 to a tune of 1.2 billion yuan ($184,015,248), and is scheduled to be finished this September.
There’s only one small problem though, over nine thousand residents need to be relocated in order for it to operate efficiently. One Chinese official awkwardly described why the evacuation is needed.
Li Yuecheng, a senior 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”.
A scientists behind the project claimed that if the telescope was filled with wine, each of the world's 7 billion inhabitants could fill about five bottles from it. Thanks for that useless, but interesting piece of information there China!
FAST is made up of 4,450 triangular-shaped panels designed to move and reflect radia signals from distant parts of the Universe to a 66,000 pound retina located in the center of the giant array.
Massive telescope's 30-ton 'retina' undergoes final test
Last year Shi Zhicheng, 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.
Officials believe that the telescope's location, isolated deeply in the Karst mountains, is the ideal place to detect possible extra-terrestrial messages. I guess scientific research is conducted with an iron fist in China as this isn't the first time citizens have been forced to move.
Massive relocation projects have long been a Communist party speciality. Millions of Chinese citizens have been displaced in recent decades to make way for hydro-electric dams and other infrastructure projects or as part of “poverty alleviation” schemes. Those forced from their homes often complain of poor compensation.
Well, “poverty alleviation” sounds great if I was complaining about being poor in the first place, but I'm not sure that is the case here.
Each of the involved residents will get 12,000 yuan (1,838 U.S. dollars)subsidy from the provincial reservoir and eco-migration bureau, and each involved ethnic minority household with housing difficulties will get 10,000 yuan subsidy from the provincial ethnic and religious committee.
An initial 1.2 million Chinese citizens were relocated during the creation of the Three Gorges dam and after it's completion, it was found that another 300,000 more had to be relocated due to landslides and water pollution.
"With a larger signal receiving area and more flexibility, FAST will be able to scan two times more sky area than Arecibo, with three to five times higher sensitivity," Li said.
FAST was first proposed in 1993 by Chinese astronomers, as one of several competing concepts for the international Square Kilometer Array project－a project by astronomers worldwide to build the next generation radio observatory.
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