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Big, bigger, biggest – China pursues this strategy relentlessly. One example that’s made the news recently is that it’s building the world’s largest radio telescope. Measuring 500 meters in diameter, this Aperture Spherical Telescope (or FAST) is being built in a natural basin in the Guizhou province. Reports say it involves displacing over 9000 people but that’s small change for a country that displaced millions for the Summer Olympics.
Some argue that science is a more worthy endeavor than sports. For example one gushing commentator writes that, “The people who have been told to move to make room for the world’s biggest reflector may not see it this way, but the new 500-metre telescope is not just a tool for tuning in to the distant universe: it is a felicitous examplar of the grand vision.” This grand vision is making China a “science powerhouse” – by encouraging indigenous talent to become internationally competitive and by importing lots of the international talent too.
To illustrate, the country’s flagship newspaper the People’s Daily published an article last week, “Why did we miss the gravitational waves?” Simultaneously state media unveiled three separate Chinese projects to investigate gravitational waves. This of course is after a US-led team made history by detecting gravitational waves for the first time ever, actually observing them make ripples in the fabric of space-time. But China’s serious about being the one to put out the next big discovery. And it’s decided that displacing thousands of citizens is a small price to pay for that ambition.
But how about Stephen Hawking’s warning? He feels that any advanced aliens out there may only approach “new” planets like Earth to conquer and colonize them! He bases this on all the rich empirical, historical, Earth evidence about how badly the encounters between advanced and primitive technologies have gone for the less advanced. Thousands being pushed aside to make way for a telescope in Guizhou is just the latest example. Why should those more powerful than us treat us any differently than how we treat those less powerful than us?
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