Residents within 5km radius of Fast project in Guizhou province will be forced to leave their homes and offered £1,275 in compensation 
 
 China is to relocate more than 9,000 people before the unveiling of the world’s largest radio telescope later this year – a move that Beijing hopes will boost the global hunt for extraterrestrial life. 
 
 Work on the 1.2bn yuan (£127m) Fast (Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope) project began in the south-western province of Guizhou in 2011 and is expected to be completed by September. 
 
 
 
 Before then 9,110 residents of Guizhou’s Pingtang and Luodian counties will be “evacuated” from their homes, the Xinhua news agency announced on Tuesday. Each will receive 12,000 yuan (£1,275) in compensation from the government’s eco-migration bureau, Xinhua added. 
 
 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”. 
 
 
 
 Beijing sees its 500 metre-diameter telescope, which will dwarf the 300 metre-diameter Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, as the latest symbol of its growing technological prowess. 
 
 
 
 One of the scientists behind the project recently claimed that if the telescope was filled with wine, each of the world’s 7 billion inhabitants could fill about five bottles from it. 
 
 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Local villagers look at the construction site of the telescope. Photograph: Imaginechina/REX/Shutterstock 
 
 But the telescope is intended as a pioneering scientific endeavour, not a super-sized decanter. According to recent reports in Chinese state media, Fast is made up of 4,450 triangular-shaped panels. Once the telescope is fully functional, those movable panels will be used to reflect radio signals from distant parts of the universe towards a 30-tonne retina capable of gathering them, the China Daily newspaper reported during tests last November. 
 
 China's giant telescope represents its big ambitions for science Read more 
 
 In an interview last year, Nan Rendong, a senior scientist on the project, said: “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.” 
 
 Wu Xiangping, the director-general of the Chinese Astronomical Society, told Xinhua that Fast’s high level of sensitivity would help scientists to “search for intelligent life outside of the galaxy and explore the origins of the universe”. 
 
 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. 
 
 Chinese officials say the telescope’s location in Qiannan, an isolated region deep in Guizhou’s spectacular Karst mountains, is the ideal place to detect possible extraterrestrial messages. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Technicians work at the assembly site telescope. Photograph: Xinhua/REX/Shutterstock 
 
 Li Di, a scientist from the Chinese Academy Of Sciences, said Fast would allow Beijing to “explore deeper into space and look at asteroids and even Mars”. He told China’s state broadcaster CCTV last year: “It will give China an opportunity to conduct frontier research.” 
 
 In an editorial celebrating China’s scientific triumph last July, the South China Morning Post boasted: “If we are ever to make contact with aliens, China may play a key role … our eyes and ears are closing in on the possibility of life on another planet.” 
 
 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. ||||| Virginia bans child marriages: How common are they in the US? 
 
 The world’s largest radio telescope China completed Sunday could answer one of mankind’s oldest questions about the cosmos: is there other life out there? 
 
 China’s Aperture Spherical Telescope, or FAST, could have the ability to detect alien life, as it searches space for strange objects such as neutral hydrogen, faint pulsars, and low frequency gravitational waves, according to China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency. The telescope, which China hopes is operational by September, will be open to the global scientific community in up to three years. 
 
 The magnitude of the $185 million, 500-meter-wide telescope with 4,450 panels attests to the world’s increasing commitment to searching for other life in the galaxy. The discovery that life forms on Earth can survive in the harshest environments, as well as estimates the Milky Way, alone, has thousands of Earth-like planets, has spurred these investments. 
 
 “The telescope is of great significance for humans to explore the universe and extraterrestrial civilizations,” Liu Cixin, a science fiction writer, and winner of the 2015 Hugo science fiction award award for his novel, “The Three Body Problem,” told Xinhua. “I hope scientists can make epoch-making discoveries.” 
 
 The telescope’s size manifests its abilities to explore 1,000 light years into space. It was built into a natural karst depression in southwest China’s Guizhou province, protecting it from electromagnetic disruption, according to Time Magazine. And it’s circumference is one-mile long. 
 
 The telescope is designed to search for disparities in space. It should be able to survey neutral hydrogen in distant galaxies, and detect faint pulsars, improbably dense, small neutron stars that emit radio waves and other electromagnetic radiation. The first extrasolar planets were found around pulsars. The telescope is expected to also be able to better detect low-frequency gravitational waves. 
 
 "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," Nan Rendong, chief scientist of the FAST project with the National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences, told Xinhua. 
 
 China next plans to debug the hardware and test it. Once the telescope is operational, the country's scientists will have exclusive access to it over the next two to three years, according to Xinhua. After that, the telescope will be available to the global scientific community, just as the current world’s largest radio telescope, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, is now. 
 
 The $185 million investment by China, coupled with a $100 million investment by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation last year, is a far cry from how the world previously sponsored searches for alien life, as Pete Spotts reported for The Christian Science Monitor in July 2015 
 
 Until now, the hunt for signals generated by intelligent life elsewhere in the universe has operated on a shoestring and, at least early on, was widely seen as quixotic. But evidence on Earth that simple forms of life can thrive in environments hostile to humans, as well as the discovery of thousands of planets orbiting other stars, has added energy to the effort. The discovery of these extrasolar planets has led to estimates that the Milky Way alone holds billions of Earth-mass planets orbiting within their host star's habitable zone – a distance at which liquid water, essential for organic life, can persist on a planet's surface. 
 
 That year, the Breakthrough Prize Foundation awarded $100 million to the SETI Institute (Search for extraterrestrial intelligence) for a 10-year search using two large radio telescopes to hunt for radio signals, and an optical telescope to search for laser communications. SETI projects previously ran about $2 million a year. 
 
 With all these efforts, the scientific community has little to show or hear from ET. Yet some researchers have said scientists have been looking in the wrong places. 
 
 In a study published in the journal Astrobiology in March, researchers suggested scientists look for signals from extraterrestrial life the same way they would search for us — in Earth’s “transit zone,” where the light of the sun starts to dim as an orbiting planet passes by. 
 
 In another study published in the Astrophysical Journal in May, researchers suggested looking for alien life around planets with dying stars. The idea behind that is as stars heat up before they die, they could warm frozen planets, supporting alien life. 
 
 Others worry about China’s intention for the telescope and the rest of its space program. It has said its space program is for peaceful purposes, but the US State Department has said China’s program could be to “prevent adversaries from using spaced based assets in a crisis,” according to Reuters. 
 
 Nevertheless, the telescope is just one step to discovering if the truth about ET is out there. 
 
 "Our generation, or maybe the next one after that, has a reasonable chance of finding the answer to this question: Are we alone?" Dan Werthimer, a researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, told Mr. Spotts for Monitor in July 2015.
– 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. China started work on FAST—the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope—back in 2011, Xinhua reports. It's scheduled to be completed this September. But first 9,110 residents living within three miles of the project need to be relocated in order to—in the words of one Chinese official—"create a sound electromagnetic wave environment." According to the Guardian, such relocations are a "Communist Party specialty," with millions having been moved in recent decades to make room for infrastructure projects. Relocated residents will receive a little more than $1,800 each for their trouble. Once complete, FAST will be the largest radio telescope in the world—200 meters greater in diameter than the current biggest in Puerto Rico. One scientist on the project explained its size in terms of wine, for some reason, stating that if FAST were filled with wine, all 7 billion people on Earth could each fill five bottles from it. The Chinese government hopes to use the telescope to look for signs of extraterrestrial life and study the origins of the universe. Its size will make a difficult job slightly easier. "A radio telescope is like a sensitive ear, listening to tell meaningful radio messages from white noise in the universe," the Guardian quotes a FAST scientist as saying. "It is like identifying the sound of cicadas in a thunderstorm.” Time reports FAST will cost $180 million. (Maybe we can't find aliens because they don't evolve quickly enough.)