Posted on 11/09/2017 11:16:11 AM PST by EveningStar
As America has turned away from searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, China has built the world’s largest radio dish for precisely that purpose.
Last January, the Chinese Academy of Sciences invited Liu Cixin, China’s preeminent science-fiction writer, to visit its new state-of-the-art radio dish in the country’s southwest. Almost twice as wide as the dish at America’s Arecibo Observatory, in the Puerto Rican jungle, the new Chinese dish is the largest in the world, if not the universe. Though it is sensitive enough to detect spy satellites even when they’re not broadcasting, its main uses will be scientific, including an unusual one: The dish is Earth’s first flagship observatory custom-built to listen for a message from an extraterrestrial intelligence. If such a sign comes down from the heavens during the next decade, China may well hear it first.
In some ways, it’s no surprise that Liu was invited to see the dish. He has an outsize voice on cosmic affairs in China, and the government’s aerospace agency sometimes asks him to consult on science missions. Liu is the patriarch of the country’s science-fiction scene. Other Chinese writers I met attached the honorific Da, meaning “Big,” to his surname. In years past, the academy’s engineers sent Liu illustrated updates on the dish’s construction, along with notes saying how he’d inspired their work.
But in other ways Liu is a strange choice to visit the dish. He has written a great deal about the risks of first contact. He has warned that the “appearance of this Other” might be imminent, and that it might result in our extinction.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
Take me to your reader.
Those aliens are so advanced they can receive the Chinese transmissions in their fillings. So, no, they don’t need a big dish.
They built a wall and got Matt Damon to invent gunpowder for them.
Or something like that.
Da liu’s vision is that the Aliens, hearing our emissions from many light years distant, decide to act first before we can threaten them so they send a ‘seed’. The seed expands on reaching the solar system and Earth is enfolded in a 2-dimensional bubble from which there is no escape.
Liu poses the answer to Fermi’s paradox in his Dark Forest theory and book by the same title: If there are aliens, where are they? Liu: Hiding.
“They” are already here.
Probably from us -- maybe we have the upper hand, LOL.
I look forward to seeing the movie. I haven't yet read all of the Atlantic article.
Not a big fan of Chinese culture, but the average Chinese citizen probably doesn’t live that differently from you and me.
Of course in the big picture, there is a ton of differences.
Actually they do live very differently than you or me
“Dark Forest” is the second book in the trilogy - “The Three Body Problem” and “Death’s End” are the other two.
There is no movie.
Say you live in a Dark Forest, and there are many predators in it. Which one will eat you? Where are they? You need to be very careful, spending as much time as possible hiding lest you be eaten. To survive, you must hide, and when possible kill all Others you can find, before they kill you.
The Universe is the same.
Only hubris would lead some to imagine, out of the trillions of planets in the universe, that we have the upper hand - we who cannot even walk on our moon ...
I don't know if there will be an English language version.
As for my comment about Earthlings having the upper hand, your sarcasm detector isn't working too well. But when it comes to hubris the human race invented it and continues to exhibit all of its foolish symptoms.
“China may well hear it first.”
Extraterrestrial: One order of Kung Po chicken please.
5.56mm
Notice the tittle: The Three-Body Problem: I (2017) ... hope the “I” stands for part one of three. however, the last update was a year ago; filming ended in 2015; cost US$31 million. Might be DOA.
There will be subtitles if it is ever actually produced and released.
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