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. According a senior Communist party official in Guizhou, Li Yuecheng, residents within 3 miles of the telescope had to be relocated so as to “create a sound electromagnetic wave environment.” These “evacuated” residents will get up to $1,800 in compensation from the country’s provincial reservoir and eco-migration bureau. 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. 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.
– 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.)