It
is not a colonization plan from outer space. The Chinese government is
relocating the villagers as it finishes building the world’s biggest
radio telescope, one of whose purposes is to detect signs of
extraterrestrial life.
China to relocate over 9,000 residents to protect world's largest radio telescope https://t.co/hLK8Ak0IKr pic.twitter.com/DtfZuWZIkr— China Xinhua News (@XHNews) February 16, 2016
The
telescope will be 500 meters, or 1,640 feet, in diameter, making it by
far the largest instrument of its kind in the world. It is called FAST,
short for 500-meter aperture spherical telescope, and will cost an
estimated 1.2 billion renminbi, or $184 million, to erect. The
government hopes to complete it by September.
The mass relocation was announced
on Tuesday in a report by Xinhua, the state news agency. The report
said officials were moving 2,029 families, a total of 9,110 people, who
live within about three miles of the telescope in the area of Pingtang
and Luodian Counties in the southwestern province of Guizhou.
Depopulating the area will create “a sound electromagnetic wave
environment” for the telescope, Xinhua said.
Officials plan to give each person the equivalent of $1,800 for housing compensation, the report said. Guizhou is one of China’s poorest provinces.
Forced
relocations for large projects are common across China, and so are
complaints about them and about the amount of compensation offered. The Three Gorges Dam displaced more than one million people along the Yangtze River, for example, and the middle route of the gargantuan South-North Water Diversion Project has resulted in the relocation of 350,000 people to make way for a series of canals.
The Chinese government has announced ambitious plans
for its space program, at a time when the American one’s direction is
uncertain. China aims to put an astronaut on the moon and a space
station in orbit. The FAST project is another important element in the
larger plan.
Some
official Chinese news reports about the project have emphasized the
search for alien life, but the telescope’s main scientific work will be
somewhat less romantic, gathering large amounts of new data on a wide
range of physical phenomena in space including pulsars, galaxies, black
holes and gas clouds.
The telescope is being built in a wide depression among karst
hills. The site is far from any large city, and ideal for picking up
radio transmissions from the sky, the Xinhua report said. Scientists
began looking for a suitable site for the project in 1994.
If
the truth is out there, some Chinese scientists are confident that the
giant telescope will find it. For decades, professional and amateur
scientists have combed the data gathered by the largest currently operational radio telescope in the world, the 53-year-old Arecibo Observatory
in Puerto Rico, hoping to find traces of intelligent life that, like
mankind, may be advertising its existence to the universe through radio
emissions. But they have yet to find any sign.
“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 Di, a chief scientist with the National Astronomical Observatories under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told China Daily last year.
The
new telescope should be able to pick up all kinds of radio signals more
clearly from sources much farther away than can the Arecibo dish, which
is 300 meters (about 1,000 feet) in diameter.
In
November, scientists successfully tested the new telescope’s “retina,”
which weighs 33 tons and is suspended 460 to 525 feet above the
reflector dish, which was half-finished at the time, China Daily
reported.
The
telescope is made up of 4,500 mostly triangular panels that measure
about 36 feet on a side, the report said, which together create an
immense parabolic dish. Scientists will be able to adjust the panels’
positions to alter the shape of the dish and reflect radio signals from
distant parts of the universe to a single focal point for detection and
study.
Mr.
Li told China Daily that engineers were aiming to install all the
panels by June and complete debugging the antenna by September.
“Ultimately,
exploring the unknown is the nature of mankind,” he said, adding that
it was “as visceral as feeding and clothing ourselves.”
“It drives us to a greater future,” he said.
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