Posted on 11/09/2017 11:16:11 AM PST by EveningStar
As America has turned away from searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, China has built the world’s largest radio dish for precisely that purpose.
Last January, the Chinese Academy of Sciences invited Liu Cixin, China’s preeminent science-fiction writer, to visit its new state-of-the-art radio dish in the country’s southwest. Almost twice as wide as the dish at America’s Arecibo Observatory, in the Puerto Rican jungle, the new Chinese dish is the largest in the world, if not the universe. Though it is sensitive enough to detect spy satellites even when they’re not broadcasting, its main uses will be scientific, including an unusual one: The dish is Earth’s first flagship observatory custom-built to listen for a message from an extraterrestrial intelligence. If such a sign comes down from the heavens during the next decade, China may well hear it first.
In some ways, it’s no surprise that Liu was invited to see the dish. He has an outsize voice on cosmic affairs in China, and the government’s aerospace agency sometimes asks him to consult on science missions. Liu is the patriarch of the country’s science-fiction scene. Other Chinese writers I met attached the honorific Da, meaning “Big,” to his surname. In years past, the academy’s engineers sent Liu illustrated updates on the dish’s construction, along with notes saying how he’d inspired their work.
But in other ways Liu is a strange choice to visit the dish. He has written a great deal about the risks of first contact. He has warned that the “appearance of this Other” might be imminent, and that it might result in our extinction.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
They can fill humanities first take-out order.
How do they know that we haven’t already made first contact and are keeping it under wraps.
Maybe the Solar System, possibly in the Milky Way, but the biggest in the whole universe? Wow. I am so impressed.
The aliens will be hungry again in about an hour ...
I know a place that makes excellent Crab Rangoon. Give it a couple.
Area 51, anyone?
Yep, not to worry, they will be sending out Chinese characters instead of English ... so the aliens won’t know what they are saying anyway. /s
Expect a mini knock off at Harbor Freight.
First contact with what?
Perhaps they ought to be trying to find freedom
Added to my list of things I will never have to worry about!
LOL. It’ll be rough around the edges and break the first time you use it. It’ll probably garble the Chinese language, too...but I’m not sure how you could actually tell.
“We want General Tso’s Chicken to go.”
Other than aliens thinking the entire planet can’t pronounce “L”s, why would anybody have a problem with this? Good for them
The Aliens will want more ‘contact’ in 20 minutes?
“To Serve Chinese”
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