Nestled in southwest China lies the largest radio dish in the world, and Ross Andersen reveals in the Atlantic the dish's purpose: to serve as "Earth's first flagship observatory custom-built to listen for a message from an extraterrestrial intelligence."
Andersen journeyed into the remote countryside to visit the ultra-sensitive dish, which Liu Cixin, a prominent Chinese science-fiction writer, describes as resembling something out of a book he'd write.
The structure that's as long as "five football fields" and "deep enough to hold two bowls of rice for every human being on the planet" doesn't disappoint: Anderson depicts it as looking like "God had pressed a perfect round fingertip into the planet’s outer crust and left behind a smooth, silver print." And it's "sensitive enough to hear a civilization's fainter radio whispers, the ones that aren't meant to be overheard."
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