China completes world's biggest telescope, eyes hunt for alien life

originally posted by: Springer
a reply to: tikbalang

Right? This sounds like a satellite killing scope to my old mind.

I sincerely hope I'm wrong, but, recent history (the last few years at least) might indicate otherwise.

This does look fair but feels foul .

originally posted by: Phage
a reply to: Springer

Right? This sounds like a satellite killing scope to my old mind.

You mean like Arecibo?

Thing is, a satellite would have to be directly over the dish to be killable. Assuming that is, it has much of a transmitter. Sort of iffy.

You could look for dark assets with it by listening for internal clock signals and stray emissions. Could also make a really high resolution radar. But a fixed dish like that is not very agile. You'd have issues with LEO satellites.

Also, if you're just after directed fry, you would only need a big reflector like this if you're trying to very daintily pick out one satellite and leave the one right next to it intact. You could fairly easily just blare away at a small area with a small phased antenna array, it's cruder but a lot cheaper.

Designs such as this are probably what they seem - a high gain radio telescope.

originally posted by: eriktheawful
a reply to: Phage

I wonder why they didn't go with an array?

Like you said: what they built is limited in direction, like Arecibo.

But huge array on the other hand.......hrmmmmm.....

Arrays have their own issues. The primary reason for an array is to increase the apparent aperture size. But what you gain in aperture you lose in terms of overall signal capture, and the creation of a lot of spurious sidelobes. It's also non-trivial to keep an array perfectly coherent, especially across a wide frequency range and it's worse at higher frequencies. So that's sort of a reason you don't see a lot of visible light telescope arrays.

a reply to: Springer

Agreed - anything done covertly on this scale ain't for ET voyeurism, unless of course that is merely a byproduct of the weaponisation of space.

And so your comment there got me thinking about DGPS satellite tech. and the use of this mega-scope as a type of differential base station whose job is to relay exact further information to a weapons platform - hell, if I can come up with that idea, I'm sure war pigs with deep pockets have thought the same.

It also makes me think of Carol Rosins comment about space based weapons and ETs.

originally posted by: Sublimecraft
And so your comment there got me thinking about DGPS satellite tech. and the use of this mega-scope as a type of differential base station whose job is to relay exact further information to a weapons platform

You wouldn't need an antenna like this for that.

a reply to: Bedlam

Oh, don't get me wrong, my example is only that and it would indeed be the very definition of overkill used for such a purpose. No, my thinking is more along the lines of this being merely one piece of a much larger picture.

originally posted by: Naturallywired
It wouldn't surprise me the least if China was the one to discover life outside of earth. They are making more strides in space than anyone else lately. Well compared to the USA and Russia and India.

Indeed. Whenever China wants to succeed at something their population and culture of hard work means they generally succeed at it.

a reply to: CaptainBeno

I'm sure it will not be used to gather "radio signals" telecommunication from the atmosphere or from satellites..

a reply to: Sublimecraft

anything done covertly on this scale ain't for ET voyeurism,

Covert? How so?
It seems to be quite overt.

originally posted by: chrismarco
a reply to: CaptainBeno

I'm sure it will not be used to gather "radio signals" telecommunication from the atmosphere or from satellites..

A dish this size is not really required to do that.

Why did you put radio signals in quotation marks?

a reply to: Phage

I joined just to say.

It's so overt, it's covert.

a reply to: MiloTheMarauder

As good a reason as any, I suppose.

a reply to: Phage

I thought so

originally posted by: superman2012
Moon by 2036!? Why is it taking over 60 years for someone to do what the US did in 8!?!?

Geez, you'd think we would have been having vacations on the moon for the last 20 years!! I want what was promised to me as a child!!! lol

What we here is always old news. They build these things and tell a projection that they wish to achieve, just as the US does and most countries do. It is known that whatever you now the US can do now, that information is around 60 years behind what is actually achievable. So, you should wonder exactly is China up to, along with other super powers like Russia.

a reply to: CaptainBeno

That is awesome! Maybe one day the human race will focus on building instead of destroying.

I wonder if SETI@home is thinking about offering their processing power in exchange for funding? The Chinese dish is going to produce terabytes of raw data if they actually do a search for ET. And Congress is threating to kill their funding and close Arecibo.

Why not work for the Chinese?

a reply to: ntech
SETI doesn't do much analysis of astrophysical data, which is what the telescope is designed to collect.

the report paraphrased Mr Zheng as saying.

Keyword; paraphrased.

Arecibo does the same. So do any number of radio telescopes. They are not looking for ET but if something goes "wow"...

a reply to: Phage

They are not looking for ET but if something goes "wow"...

Not exclusively but one of the goals of FAST will be the search for ET.

For ordinary people, perhaps the most exciting goal of FAST is the search for alien life.
In two or three years, scientists could find amino acids, the foundation block of life. There is a great chance that people will someday find life on other planets or galaxies, said Li Di, an NAO researcher.
"FAST's potential to discover an alien civilization will be 5 to 10 times that of current equipment, as it can see farther and darker planets," said Peng Bo.

Zhu said that though the villagers did not understand the radio telescope, they were excited when scientists explained that they would use it to search for intelligent beings on other planets.
www.china.org.cn...

Of course extraterrestrials use gravity wave modulation to communicate so this was a waste of money if it was truly built to search for extraterrestrial life (however I doubt that is its true purpose, probably for global communications monitoring

originally posted by: zinc12
Of course extraterrestrials use gravity wave modulation to communicate so this was a waste of money if it was truly built to search for extraterrestrial life (however I doubt that is its true purpose, probably for global communications monitoring

It's a radio telescope , it's for radio astronomy but they will also search for ET with it.