China is constructing what will be the world’s largest radio telescope. The Independent reports:
Assembly of the five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, or FAST, began in July and is expected to be completed in 2016. Once finished, the reflector dish of the telescope will be 500 metres in diameter, replacing Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory, only 300 meters in diameter, as the world’s largest.
The wider the dish, the more effective the telescope becomes at picking up weak messages from outer space. Nan Rendong, the chief scientist of the FAST project, told the Xinhua news agency: “A radio telescope is like a sensitive ear, listening to tell meaningful radio messages from white noise in the universe.” “It is like identifying the sound of cicadas in a thunderstorm.”
I doubt that the big dish will be used exclusively for SETI searching. Many astronomical uses for large radio telescopes as Arecibo has demonstrated. I find it interesting that China is returning to scientific research in all areas as that is something they pretty much abandoned at about the time they discontinued the voyages of their great fleet about 1400. Prior to that they were world leaders in many areas of science and technology. They had furnaces capable of making cast iron at least 1500 years before Europe developed them as just one example.