China will relocate over 9,000 people residing within the 5-km radius of the world’s largest radio telescope that promises to help humans discover alien life in space.
As many as 9,110 people will be relocated from China’s Guizhou Province ahead of the opening of the Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST), Provincial officials said.
All residents living within 5 km of the listening device will be relocated to other places to “create a sound electromagnetic wave environment”, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.
Each resident will receive 12,000 yuan ($1,800) in compensation from the government’s eco-migration bureau and each involved ethnic minority household with housing difficulties will get 10,000 yuan subsidy from the Provincial ethnic and religious committee.
To be built at a cost of $1.2 billion yuan, FAST will be the world’s largest radio telescope after its completion in September, overtaking the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico which is some 300m in diameter.
Construction of the FAST began in March 2011 to “help us to search for intelligent life outside of the galaxy”, Wu Xiangping, director-general of the Chinese Astronomical Society has earlier said.
