The Chinese government has displaced over 9,000 villagers from the southwestern province of Guizhou. They plan to use the space to build the world’s largest telescope to gather more data from space and search for extraterrestrial life. The citizens living within a three-mile radius of the telescope were moved in order to have an improved environment to detect electromagnetic waves. This costly project comes with a heavy cost of nearly $200 million in plan to creating a telescope that is 164 feet in diameter.

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I think it’s good they’re taking the initiative to go out and look for intelligent life beyond the stars. But China is huge why not just go somewhere uninhabited instead of moving a bunch of people. I don’t see the reasoning in that if they have enough money to look for aliens.

— junior Gaby Vega

The displaced Chinese villagers will each be given $1,800 in compensation. Although this may seem like a foreign concept for most Americans, it is common in China to displace people in order to create large projects, such as dams. Even though, the people are always compensated, they are not always repaid a fair amount leading to backlash.

The Chinese government plans to expand its space program seeing how NASA is not funding as many projects as in previous years. They plan to make their program stronger and even send an astronaut to space. The project of this telescope has been in the works for over 10 years and they have been looking for the perfect location since 1994. The government plans to explore several space phenomenons but also seems to highlight a search for alien life.

“I think it’s essential that us as human beings should obtain as much information about space since it’s something that we clearly don’t understand, and the only way to gain that data is through advancements in technology. Plus, I personally believe that it’d be cool to know that another form of life exists other than the ones on earth,” sophomore Melanie Wu said.

This project is a huge endeavor that takes a great deal but if the plans of completing the telescope in September stay on track, it will be an amazing contribution not just to the Chinese space program but to the global science community. To find more information click here.