{"id":73749,"date":"2017-11-13T08:42:30","date_gmt":"2017-11-13T16:42:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2017\/11\/what-happens-if-china-makes-first-contact"},"modified":"2017-11-13T08:42:30","modified_gmt":"2017-11-13T16:42:30","slug":"what-happens-if-china-makes-first-contact","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2017\/11\/what-happens-if-china-makes-first-contact","title":{"rendered":"What Happens If China Makes First Contact?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/what-happens-if-china-makes-first-contact.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>As America has turned away from searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, China has built the world\u2019s largest radio dish for precisely that purpose.<\/p>\n<p>Last January, the Chinese Academy of Sciences invited Liu Cixin, China\u2019s preeminent science-fiction writer, to visit its new state-of-the-art radio dish in the country\u2019s southwest. Almost twice as wide as the dish at America\u2019s 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\u2019re not broadcasting, its main uses will be scientific, including an unusual one: The dish is Earth\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/magazine\/archive\/2017\/12\/what-happens-if-china-makes-first-contact\/544131\/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axioschina&stream=top-stories\">https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/magazine\/archive\/2017\/12\/what-ha...op-stories<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As America has turned away from searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, China has built the world\u2019s largest radio dish for precisely that purpose. Last January, the Chinese Academy of Sciences invited Liu Cixin, China\u2019s preeminent science-fiction writer, to visit its new state-of-the-art radio dish in the country\u2019s southwest. Almost twice as wide as the dish at [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":431,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1527,2028],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73749","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alien-life","category-satellites"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73749","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/431"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73749"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73749\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}