With a dish the size of 30
football fields, China's new FAST radio telescope, which measures 500 meters in
diameter, dwarfs Puerto Rico's 300-meter Arecibo Observatory. Having the
world's largest and most powerful new radio telescope, the Five-hundred-meter
Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), "We can receive weaker and more distant
radio messages," said Wu Xiangping, director-general of the Chinese
Astronomical Society.
"It will help us to search for intelligent life outside of the galaxy and explore the origins of the universe," he added underscoring the China's race to be the first nation to discover the existence of an advanced alien civilization.
The dish will have a
perimeter of about 1.6 kilometers, and there are no towns within five
kilometers, giving it ideal surroundings to listen for signals from space.
Scientists have depicted it as a super-sensitive "ear", capable of
spotting very weak messages - if there are any - from "cousins" of
human beings.
The telescope, nicknamed
Tianyan, or the Eye of Heaven, can accurately image twice as much the sky as
the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, which had previously been the world's
largest single-dish radio telescope, with double sensitivity and five to 10
times the surveying speed.
Douglas Vakoch, president of
METI International, an organization promoting messaging outer space in the
search for extraterrestrial intelligence, noted that astronomers worldwide will
be invited to use the facility through a competitive review of observing
proposals.
"By opening FAST to use by the broader international community, China is demonstrating its commitment to fostering astronomy as a global scientific enterprise," he told Xinhua, saying it may lead to "discoveries beyond our wildest imagination."
As for FAST's scientific
missions, Vakoch said it will be used to look for the signatures of complex
organic molecules in interstellar space, which will show how widely the basic
building blocks of life are distributed throughout the cosmos.
"For over a half
century, astronomers have been using radio telescopes to answer the haunting
question, 'Are we alone?' But astronomers face a daunting challenge: the
signals they seek are so weak that an incredibly sensitive telescope is needed
to detect them," he said.
"FAST's innovative design and huge collecting area give it unsurpassed speed and sensitivity, making it vital to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence in the coming decades," said Vakoch. "We can expect China to become a world leader in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence because of its demonstrated commitment in building FAST."
However, FAST will not
initially be outfitted with the signal processing capabilities to search for
aliens, he said. This technology will be added at a later stage, and when that
happens, FAST will be able to scan the heavens for signals that "can't be
created by nature, but only by advanced civilizations," Vakoch said.
Sometimes, radio telescopes
are "confused" by signals from astronomical objects. For example,
astronomers once mistook signals from a pulsar for extraterrestrial signs,
because a pulsar can also give out very stable periodical signals.
"It is highly possible that life on other planets is entirely different from that on Earth, and it might not be carbon-based," says Jin Hairong, deputy curator of Beijing Planetarium.
Liu Cixin, a Chinese science
fiction writer and winner of the Hugo Award for his novel The Three Body
Problem (check out the fascinating video trailer below), points out the current
method assumes that aliens also communicate in radio waves. "But if it's a
truly advanced civilization, it is possible to use other more advanced forms of
communication, such as gravitational waves."
But Mao Shude with the
National Astronomical Observatories of China and professor of astrophysics at
the Jodrell Bank Observatory believes many methods deserve a try: "Who
knows what they are and how they think? "When we study the origin of life,
we risk going down a blind alley if we only have one sample from Earth,"
Mao says. "If we could find more samples in the universe, we could look at
the puzzle more comprehensively and solve it more easily."
Shude gives an example in
astronomy to explain the limitations of a single sample. "When scientists
started to look for planets around Sun-like stars, they thought it must be
difficult as their period might be as long as a year.
However, the first such planet discovered outside our solar system takes only four days to orbit its host star - much faster than astronomers expected. At that time, some people doubted it, showing how the example of our solar system narrowed their thinking.""If we really discover extraterrestrial life, I'd like to know how life spreads in the universe. Is it distributed uniformly in space, or clustered?" Mao wonders.
However, the idea
communicating with aliens comes with concerns.
Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has warned that communicating with aliens could be a threat to Earth: "If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans."
The Three Body Problem by
Liu Cixin depicted the universe as a jungle with every civilization as a hidden
hunter. Those who are exposed will be eliminated.
But Han Song, another
leading Chinese science fiction writer, believes humans naturally want to simply
connect, citing the Internet as proof. "I think aliens might think
similarly. It is a biological instinct to connect with each other. Everyone
wants to prove that they are not alone in the universe. Loneliness is
intolerable to humans," he says.
He also points out that the contact will be driven by curiosity and real requirements. "Humans will ultimately go to space to find resources and expand their living area, so it will be hard to avoid aliens. Contact with them, especially those with more advanced intelligence, may help us leap forward in civilization."Regardless of the theoretical debate, scientists have never wavered in the search. "I think we shall call out. As a matter of fact, we have been yelling for years, and our radios and televisions are broadcasting in space all the time," Mao says, "Aren't you curious what our counterparts would look like?
If they are inferior or
equal to us in terms of civilization, we won't be easily destroyed. If they are
much more intelligent than us, they wouldn't be so narrow-minded as to compete
with us. Some worry they will come to rob us of our natural resources, but they
likely have the power to transform the entire globe already. What's the point
of eliminating a much lower civilization?"
Mao believes the result will
be significant however it turns out. "If we find other life, it will
undoubtedly be the most important scientific discovery in our history; if not,
it shows that life on Earth is unique and we should respect life and cherish
each other.
"No matter the outcome,
we shall never stop searching, and I hope to hear more voices and contributions
from Chinese scientists."
Via DailyGalaxy
Via DailyGalaxy