Chinese state media has announced that the country will soon commence its search for alien life. It hopes to achieve such a feat by using FAST (Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope), which started operating in January after years of testing.
FAST wrapped up construction in 2016, bringing with it China's goal of finding intelligent extraterrestrial life and not just evidence of past life on other planets.
China's plans were announced via STDaily, indicating that the hunt for intelligent life outside of Earth will start in September. FAST is currently the largest telescope of its kind in the world, designed to help scientists configure signals, reduce false positives, and detect the existence of life that may have originated beyond our solar system.
The enormous telescope can be found in the Guizhou province of China and has so far detected 99 pulsars, according to China Central Television. These signals are believed to point toward intelligent alien life, although it's possible that they come from human activities as well.
FAST is currently undergoing upgrades according to officials and that a new observation plan is being put together before the official launch of the mission in September. The report also states that the search for ET will not interfere with the normal scientific observations made by FAST, as asserted by Chief Scientist Zhang Tongjie.
FAST marks one of the pilot state-sanctioned projects ever to focus extensively on research on the extraterrestrial. But Tongjie has said that while there may be no signals from intelligent life, there exist "interesting narrowband candidate ET signals."Radio signals are emitted from pulsars or fast radio bursts. In case any alien life is trying to reach out to Earth, FAST will improve the chances of receiving the signals and processing those signals.
FAST Chief Engineer Jiang Peng in a statement to China Central Television said that the team behind the mission has plans to improve the giant telescope over the course of three years, including a 50-percent boost to its effective observation time. With this technology, China has become a major contender in the search for intelligent life beyond Earth.
China is currently recovering from the coronavirus crisis, which has caused the deaths of many and destroyed the livelihood of workers. The first case was recorded in Wuhan, the initial epicenter of the virus, but is now no longer reporting new cases. The United States currently has the largest recorded COVID-19 cases.
