China is relocating more than 9,000 people as it plans to open the world’s largest radio telescope later this year — a move that Beijing hopes will eventually lead to the discovery of extraterrestrial life.

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Work on the 1.2 billion yuan (£127m) FAST (Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope) project began in 2011 and is expected to be completed by September 2016. By that time, 9,100 residents of Guizhou’s Pingtang and Luodian counties are to be “evacuated” from their homes.

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Each of them will receive 12,000 yuan (£1275) in compensation from the government’s eco-migration bureau. 

The telescope is so huge that one of the scientists working on it claimed that if it were to be filled with wine, every single person in the world could fill about five bottles from it.

Chinese astronomer Shi Zhicheng adds:

If intelligent aliens exist, the messages that they produced or left behind, if they are being transmitted through space, can be detected and received by FAST.

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I guess displacing 9,000 people doesn’t seem like a big deal when you remember there’s 1.3 billion people living there. Still it goes to show that the Chinese get the job done no matter what. They’re tired of waiting for Stephen Hawking or anyone else to make the breakthrough so they’re going to do it for themselves.

We also can’t forget the popular theory that the Chinese are really aliens in disguise (I might have just made that up). I mean they do already seem to know an awful lot about aliens don’t they? Could this supposed “telescope” they’re building just be a way of distracting us from the fact that they are indeed aliens life forms? After all what better way to convince the rest of the world that you aren’t aliens than by pretending to look for aliens yourself?

This lady knows what I’m talking about.