James Kynge

There are modules going up there meeting demand for further advances.

My favorite space fact when it comes to China is that China is actually officially...

trying to find signs of aliens.

China has a huge satellite dish.

It's 500 meters across.

They call it Tianyan or sky's eye or heaven's eye.

And it's there in southwestern China, listening for signs of an extraterrestrial life.

I mean, because it's, I think, the biggest dish in the world, it probably has a higher capability of listening for that kind of life.

And recently, well, in June 2022, there was a report in the Chinese Science and Technology Daily that said that researchers had found multiple suspicious narrowband signals.

So there was a great flurry of excitement.

Maybe the Chinese Tianyan had found some sort of sign of extraterrestrial life.

But in fact, later on, scientists in the US said that this was almost certainly radio interference.

But I just sort of think that

It just shows the level of China's ambition.

You know, this is not something crazy.

They really are listening for extraterrestrial life.

I think that just shows they're leaving no stone unturned.

Well, Alice, you highlighted this topic, and I must say, since you have done so, and I've been looking into it a bit, I really do think that it's indicative of so much in China.

And I think at the middle of it is a bit of a mystery, at least an ostensible mystery to me, because when you look at China, you find what is one of the world's most unequal societies.

And yet this is a country still controlled by the Communist Party of China.