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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.
No civilization should ever announce its presence to the cosmos, he says. Any other civilization that learns of its existence will perceive it as a threat to expand—as all civilizations do, eliminating their competitors until they encounter one with superior technology and are themselves eliminated. This grim cosmic outlook is called "dark-forest theory," because it conceives of every civilization in the universe as a hunter hiding in a moonless woodland, listening for the first rustlings of a rival.
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (seti) is often derided as a kind of religious mysticism, even within the scientific community. Nearly a quarter century ago, the United States Congress defunded America's seti program with a budget amendment proposed by Senator Richard Bryan of Nevada, who said he hoped it would "be the end of Martian-hunting season at the taxpayer's expense." That's one reason it is China, and not the United States, that has built the first world-class radio observatory with seti as a core scientific goal.
In 2015, the Russian billionaire Yuri Milner poured $100 million of his own cash into a new seti program led by scientists at UC Berkeley. The team performs more seti observations in a single day than took place during entire years just a decade ago. In 2016, Milner sank another $100 million into an interstellar-probe mission. A beam from a giant laser array, to be built in the Chilean high desert, will wallop dozens of wafer-thin probes more than four light-years to the Alpha Centauri system, to get a closer look at its planets. Milner told me the probes' cameras might be able to make out individual continents. The Alpha Centauri team modeled the radiation that such a beam would send out into space, and noticed striking similarities to the mysterious "fast radio bursts" that Earth's astronomers keep detecting, which suggests the possibility that they are caused by similar giant beams, powering similar probes elsewhere in the cosmos.
Andrew Siemion, the leader of Milner's seti team, is actively looking into this possibility. He visited the Chinese dish while it was still under construction, to lay the groundwork for joint observations and to help welcome the Chinese team into a growing network of radio observatories that will cooperate on seti research, including new facilities in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. When I joined Siemion for overnight seti observations at a radio observatory in West Virginia last fall, he gushed about the Chinese dish. He said it was the world's most sensitive telescope in the part of the radio spectrum that is "classically considered to be the most probable place for an extraterrestrial transmitter."
The week before, Liu and I had visited a stargazing site of a much older vintage. In 1442, after the Ming dynasty moved China's capital to Beijing, the emperor broke ground on a new observatory near the Forbidden City. More than 40 feet high, the elegant, castlelike structure came to house China's most precious astronomical instruments.
No civilization on Earth has a longer continuous tradition of astronomy than China, whose earliest emperors drew their political legitimacy from the sky, in the form of a "mandate of heaven." More than 3,500 years ago, China's court astronomers pressed pictograms of cosmic events into tortoiseshells and ox bones. One of these "oracle bones" bears the earliest known record of a solar eclipse. It was likely interpreted as an omen of catastrophe, perhaps an ensuing invasion.
Liu and I sat at a black-marble table in the old observatory's stone courtyard. Centuries-old pines towered overhead, blocking the hazy sunlight that poured down through Beijing's yellow, polluted sky. Through a round, red portal at the courtyard's edge, a staircase led up to a turretlike observation platform, where a line of ancient astronomical devices stood, including a giant celestial globe supported by slithering bronze dragons. The starry globe was stolen in 1900, after an eight-country alliance stormed Beijing to put down the Boxer Rebellion. Troops from Germany and France flooded into the courtyard where Liu and I were sitting, and made off with 10 of the observatory's prized instruments.
The instruments were eventually returned, but the sting of the incident lingered. Chinese schoolchildren are still taught to think of this general period as the "century of humiliation," the nadir of China's long fall from its Ming-dynasty peak. Back when the ancient observatory was built, China could rightly regard itself as the lone survivor of the great Bronze Age civilizations, a class that included the Babylonians, the Mycenaeans, and even the ancient Egyptians. Western poets came to regard the latter's ruins as Ozymandian proof that nothing lasted. But China had lasted. Its emperors presided over the planet's largest complex social organization. They commanded tribute payments from China's neighbors, whose rulers sent envoys to Beijing to perform a baroque face-to-the-ground bowing ceremony for the emperors' pleasure.
Only recently has China regained its geopolitical might, after opening to the world during Deng Xiaoping's 1980s reign. Deng evinced a near-religious reverence for science and technology, a sentiment that is undimmed in Chinese culture today. The country is on pace to outspend the United States on R&D this decade, but the quality of its research varies a great deal. According to one study, even at China's most prestigious academic institutions, a third of scientific papers are faked or plagiarized. Knowing how poorly the country's journals are regarded, Chinese universities are reportedly offering bonuses of up to six figures to researchers who publish in Western journals.
China has learned the hard way that spectacular scientific achievements confer prestige upon nations. The "Celestial Kingdom" looked on from the sidelines as Russia flung the first satellite and human being into space, and then again when American astronauts spiked the Stars and Stripes into the lunar crust.
China has largely focused on the applied sciences. It built the world's fastest supercomputer, spent heavily on medical research, and planted a "great green wall" of forests in its northwest as a last-ditch effort to halt the Gobi Desert's spread. Now China is bringing its immense resources to bear on the fundamental sciences. The country plans to build an atom smasher that will conjure thousands of "god particles" out of the ether, in the same time it took cern's Large Hadron Collider to strain out a handful. It is also eyeing Mars. In the technopoetic idiom of the 21st century, nothing would symbolize China's rise like a high-definition shot of a Chinese astronaut setting foot on the red planet. Nothing except, perhaps, first contact.
Siemion told me he's especially excited to survey dense star fields at the center of the galaxy. "It's a very interesting place for an advanced civilization to situate itself," he said. The sheer number of stars and the presence of a supermassive black hole make for ideal conditions "if you want to slingshot a bunch of probes around the galaxy." Siemion's receiver will train its sensitive algorithms on billions of wavelengths, across billions of stars, looking for a beacon.
If civilizations are indeed silent hunters, we might be wise to hone in on this "leakage" radiation. Many of the night sky's stars might be surrounded by faint halos of leakage, each a fading artifact of a civilization's first blush with radio technology, before it recognized the risk and turned off its detectable transmitters. Previous observatories could search only a handful of stars for this radiation. China's dish has the sensitivity to search tens of thousands.
Liu told me that first contact would lead to a human conflict, if not a world war. This is a popular trope in science fiction. In last year's Oscar-nominated film Arrival, the sudden appearance of an extraterrestrial intelligence inspiresandthe formation of apocalyptic cultsanxious to gain an edge in the race to understand the alien's messages. There is also real-world evidence for Liu's pessimism: When Orson Welles's "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast simulating an alien invasion was replayed in Ecuador in 1949, a riot broke out, resulting in the deaths of six people. "We have fallen into conflicts over things that are much easier to solve," Liu told me.nearly triggers a war between world powers
