It's the World's Biggest Radio Dish, and It's Looking for ETs

Nestled in southwest China lies the largest radio dish in the world, and Ross Andersen reveals in the Atlantic the dish's purpose: to serve as "Earth's first flagship observatory custom-built to listen for a message from an extraterrestrial intelligence." 

Andersen journeyed into the remote countryside to visit the ultra-sensitive dish, which Liu Cixin, a prominent Chinese science-fiction writer, describes as resembling something out of a book he'd write. 

The structure that's as long as "five football fields" and "deep enough to hold two bowls of rice for every human being on the planet" doesn't disappoint: Anderson depicts it as looking like "God had pressed a perfect round fingertip into the planet’s outer crust and left behind a smooth, silver print." And it's "sensitive enough to hear a civilization's fainter radio whispers, the ones that aren't meant to be overheard."

Read the full story on Newser.com

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