9 ms·

China Built the World’s Largest Telescope, Then Came the Tourists

139 points by chriskanan 8y ago

adventured 8y ago
They spent about 150% the cost of the telescope in moving 9,000 people from the area around the telescope. Then they plan a city nearby for hundreds of thousands of people. That can't be a decision of scientists involved in FAST. Only a bureaucrat would do something that stupid.
- Barrin92 8y ago
  wasn't that pretty much how the Manhattan project came to be?
- omeid2 8y ago
  You have to consider that most probably, the advantage of the location had savings of over 150% or possibly made the project possible in that kind of time frame to begin with.
- natmaka 8y ago
  If I understand correctly they displaced people who where very near the telescope, and then created a city 10 miles away from it and behind mountains which interrupt at least some wave propagation(?). The article states that the town lies "just a few miles from the displaced villagers’ demolished houses" and also "There are a great many mountains between the telescope and the town" (the mountains may reside in those few miles).
  - A2017U1 8y ago
    There's a ban on mobiles and laptops within 5km of the telescope. I have no idea how far away the towns are but that seems impossible to enforce with tourists. I guess it just doesn't operate during certain hours because of interference.
    - rasz 8y ago
      >There's a ban on mobiles and laptops within 5km of the telescope. as can be seen on the picture of a lady snapping photos with her cellphone right on the telescope ring.
    - natmaka 8y ago
      Maybe by forbidding all and any service in this area, including implanting/enabling GSM antennas. The local government is powerful enough. Most remaining RFI would be smartphones emissions, but as they will be nearly useless in this area most people may accept to switch them in airplane mode (and will be able to use the camera). See also http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1086/588679 http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1086/588679 ("CONCLUDING REMARKS" section).
  - pp19dd 8y ago
    The topography seems to agree with that, clearly visible on satellite view / 3D mode: https://www.google.com/maps/place/25°39'11.0"N+106°51'24.0"E https://www.google.com/maps/place/25°39'11.0"N+106°51'24.0"E
bmc7505 8y ago
Better make sure they don't broadcast anything towards the sun...
- xevb3k 8y ago
  And here I was thinking I’d try to get in first with a Three Body Problem reference, but you beat me to it. It’s interesting though, China does appear to have a much stronger commitment to radio astronomy than the US (at least that’s how the article characterizes it). I wonder why that is? The article didn’t really discuss why radio astronomy is so attractive...
  - sandworm101 8y ago
    Why? How about the direct military applications? Resolving the signal from a distant black hole, the true light against a haze of static, is exactly how you detect the low-level radar reflection of a stealthy aircraft, or the sound of a submarine against the background of pistol shrimp. Teasing out information from a tiny radio signal, even using radio to image objects, that definitely has a military use.
    - xevb3k 8y ago
      Yes, but none of those problems requiring building a really really big radio telescope. Sure there are some common data analysis techniques, but they are common to a lot of applications.
      - jazzyjackson 8y ago
        Maybe having the largest telescope will attract more top talent to the field :)
    - A2017U1 8y ago
      Alternative theory: Perhaps not everyone in the world is obsessed with military might and it is simply just a commitment to scientific advancement? Their plan to put a radio telescope on the far side of the moon would be a huge win for science.
maxxxxx 8y ago
There was a time when you went to the US to see the most advanced or biggest things. Now China seems to be determined to play that role.
- briandear 8y ago
  We can call it “most advanced” when it actually works. The US and Europe also don’t have inferiority complexes where they feel like they have to build the tallest or biggest anymore. Look at skyscraper competitions — generally 2nd tier countries trying to outdo each other for bragging rights but for no real other reason. It’s like the Soviet Olympic team — they had to win to make the political statement trunpeting a triumph of communism. The US did the same thing once upon a time, but then we grew up (and not necessarily for the better.. it’s a lot of fun to be “first, bigger, best.”) 1990s Korea, modern China, 1950s USA, the Soviet Union — those places and eras were representative of a national need to foster patriotism to create unity against real or perceived competitors on the world stage as well as remind the proles of the power and achievements of their benevolent state.
  - omeid2 8y ago
    > The US and Europe also don’t have inferiority complexes where they feel like they have to build the tallest or biggest anymore. Wasn't the whole space-race and moon landing a, excuse the language, rocket-waving contest? As you point out, it is easy to not have "inferiority complexes" or "grow up" as you put it, when you have once established credibility. Don't dismiss achievements just because it is by others.
    - cperciva 8y ago
      I think you mean rocket waving, although the idea of weaving rockets does sound interesting... More substantively, my understanding is that while the space race turned into a PR exercise, it started out as a serious military exercise in demonstrating ICBM capabilities; "we can put a man on the moon" is more politically acceptable than "we can put a big bomb in Moscow" but it is understood just the same.
xevb3k 8y ago
“At other telescopes, astronomers are developing machine-learning algorithms that could identify, extract, and compensate for dirty data“ Whenever I see “machine-learning” in the context of scientific development I just mentally replace it with “magic”. Employing machine learning, at the data acquisition stage, is a really bad idea. It can easily introduce biases...
- EZ-E 8y ago
  It's probably closer to statistics than to machine-learning at this stage. People just love to say they are doing machine learning, it's "sexy"
  - xevb3k 8y ago
    It just says “developing”. I would imagine this is code for “writing papers about”. I’m sure those papers use whatever technique is currently hot and will produce a decent publication. I doubt they use simple statistical approaches, because that’s likely not novel or publishable. This is all fine. However, the problem is suggesting that this is a somehow reasonable/tenable solution to solving the noise issues... Maybe the noise can be removed by other methods, maybe the noise doesn’t matter, but magic doesn’t solve the noise issues.
    - martinpw 8y ago
      > Maybe the noise can be removed by other methods, maybe the noise doesn’t matter, but magic doesn’t solve the noise issues. The noise definitely matters. When you are observing with a telescope you are almost by definition working at the limit of the signal to noise ratio of the instrument, otherwise you would be asked to use a less powerful instrument (since the observing time on these larger instruments is so precious). I worked on a project analyzing data from an X-ray telescope back in my research days. We spent 3 full years building an incredibly detailed model of the instrument noise, just so we could subtract it out and have confidence in our remaining signal. That was longer than the time we spent doing the actual science on the corrected data.
  - deleted 8y ago
zcbenz 8y ago
It is interesting that the tourism income from FAST telescope, has far exceeded its construction costs. From https://www.guancha.cn/society/2017_08_25_424435.shtml https://www.guancha.cn/society/2017_08_25_424435.shtml : > 据悉，平塘县依靠旅游观光，上半年的营收达46亿人民币，较去年同期增加了40％。 > It is reported that relying on tourism, the revenue of Pingtang town in the first half of the year has reached 4.6 billion yuan, an increase of 40% over the same period last year. From http://www.wenxuecity.com/news/2017/10/03/socialnews-144514.html http://www.wenxuecity.com/news/2017/10/03/socialnews-144514.... : > 7天80万人贵州看“大锅” 五星酒店最贵一夜4888 > In 7 days, 800,000 people went to Guizhou to see the "big pot". Most expensive room in five-star hotel has reached 4888 yuan.
- majos 8y ago
  Obligatory "can we trust official Chinese statistics?". Gaming local numbers after a lavishly-funded project seems to have been popular for a while [1]. [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-economy-fraud/china-to-publish-unified-gdp-data-in-fraud-crackdown-statistics-bureau-idUSKBN1CZ0H6?il=0 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-economy-fraud/china...
  - IIAOPSW 8y ago
    8 is a lucky number in Chinese. So I'm not surprised if the 5 star room costs exactly 4,888. I wouldn't be surprised if the visitor number was rounded to 800k, but I doubt the number is made from whole cloth.
    - natmaka 8y ago
      4 (the first figure in this "4888 yuans" price) is an unlucky number in China. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_numerology#Four https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_numerology#Four
      - fipple 8y ago
        Yes but you can’t change the pricing of something by 25% to make it auspicious.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jpatokal 8y ago
Building an "Astronomy Town" in the middle of nowhere and expecting it to attract tourists permanently has echoes of Japan's bubble era written all over it. Random point of comparison: https://soranews24.com/2018/04/24/eerie-dystopian-view-emerges-as-japan-dismantles-one-of-its-departed-bubble-era-amusement-parks/ https://soranews24.com/2018/04/24/eerie-dystopian-view-emerg... Japan's domestic tourism boom was done in by the triple combo of recession (30 years and counting), depopulation and Japanese finding it cheaper and more interesting to travel overseas. Sooner or later these will hit China too.
- mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
  Yep. Live in a destination relic of Miyazaki. Used to get a ton of tourists, now people just go abroad.
  - jpatokal 8y ago
    Have any Chinese tourists found Miyazaki yet? Or are they just piling into Kyoto?
  - therealdrag0 8y ago
    Why is it cheaper to go abroad?
    - rootedbox 8y ago
      Volume of people traveling to a given place lowers the cost.. This also exists in the U.S. It's cheaper for me from SF to fly to Lima, Peru than to Knoxville, Tn.
batbomb 8y ago
This isn’t the only stupid telescope. Just outside Shanghai city limits is the Tian Ma radio telescope. It’s 65m. I went there, I don’t think it’s used at all, and it was completed in 2012
- SiempreViernes 8y ago
  A depressingly common pattern is that you can get funding for building things but not for running and maintaining things. In the case of the Tian Ma they seem to still have money for work on it, I found a 2017 proceeding[1] about adding a new system optimised for pulsar searches. I'm guessing they simply aren't getting very exciting results, which is normal for a non-american dish, you don't hear about Effelsberg every day either. [1]: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8105313/ https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8105313/
  - batbomb 8y ago
    You can see Shanghai from it the location (on a clear day). I don’t think they operate it much because of the noise issue. Apparently they also even more rarely point it.
- Kagerjay 8y ago
  Sounds like every olympic stadium after it's been used once
acoye 8y ago
At Arecibo radio telescope they do not allow something like a single microwave oven in a large radius. So for something that is intended to be even more sensible … yeah
Eric_WVGG 8y ago
remember Contact, where they made two? They should have built a fake biggest telescope and put the real one behind that other mountain over yonder
nayuki 8y ago
For a radio telescope in the USA, the Wendover Productions channel made a good video about banning radio sources - "Why Wifi is Illegal in Green Bank, West Virginia": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjCZ6k7EzjE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjCZ6k7EzjE
Taylor_OD 8y ago
Holy shit. That picture is incredible. The scale of that thing...
idoescompooters 8y ago
I don't know. I'm pretty skeptical about its technical capabilities myself. At the moment they only have a very small sliver of bandwidth they are capable of receiving. I'm unsure on how exactly they plan to receive all of these different bands at once when they are eventually added. Also, their chosen technique of removing RFI after taking in the data (noise) from space is questionable.

139 points by chriskanan 8y ago

They spent about 150% the cost of the telescope in moving 9,000 people from the area around the telescope. Then they plan a city nearby for hundreds of thousands of people. That can't be a decision of scientists involved in FAST. Only a bureaucrat would do something that stupid.

Barrin92 8y ago
wasn't that pretty much how the Manhattan project came to be?
omeid2 8y ago
You have to consider that most probably, the advantage of the location had savings of over 150% or possibly made the project possible in that kind of time frame to begin with.
natmaka 8y ago
If I understand correctly they displaced people who where very near the telescope, and then created a city 10 miles away from it and behind mountains which interrupt at least some wave propagation(?). The article states that the town lies "just a few miles from the displaced villagers’ demolished houses" and also "There are a great many mountains between the telescope and the town" (the mountains may reside in those few miles).
- A2017U1 8y ago
  There's a ban on mobiles and laptops within 5km of the telescope. I have no idea how far away the towns are but that seems impossible to enforce with tourists. I guess it just doesn't operate during certain hours because of interference.
  - rasz 8y ago
    >There's a ban on mobiles and laptops within 5km of the telescope. as can be seen on the picture of a lady snapping photos with her cellphone right on the telescope ring.
  - natmaka 8y ago
    Maybe by forbidding all and any service in this area, including implanting/enabling GSM antennas. The local government is powerful enough. Most remaining RFI would be smartphones emissions, but as they will be nearly useless in this area most people may accept to switch them in airplane mode (and will be able to use the camera). See also http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1086/588679 http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1086/588679 ("CONCLUDING REMARKS" section).
- pp19dd 8y ago
  The topography seems to agree with that, clearly visible on satellite view / 3D mode: https://www.google.com/maps/place/25°39'11.0"N+106°51'24.0"E https://www.google.com/maps/place/25°39'11.0"N+106°51'24.0"E

bmc7505 8y ago

Better make sure they don't broadcast anything towards the sun...

xevb3k 8y ago
And here I was thinking I’d try to get in first with a Three Body Problem reference, but you beat me to it. It’s interesting though, China does appear to have a much stronger commitment to radio astronomy than the US (at least that’s how the article characterizes it). I wonder why that is? The article didn’t really discuss why radio astronomy is so attractive...
- sandworm101 8y ago
  Why? How about the direct military applications? Resolving the signal from a distant black hole, the true light against a haze of static, is exactly how you detect the low-level radar reflection of a stealthy aircraft, or the sound of a submarine against the background of pistol shrimp. Teasing out information from a tiny radio signal, even using radio to image objects, that definitely has a military use.
  - xevb3k 8y ago
    Yes, but none of those problems requiring building a really really big radio telescope. Sure there are some common data analysis techniques, but they are common to a lot of applications.
    - jazzyjackson 8y ago
      Maybe having the largest telescope will attract more top talent to the field :)
  - A2017U1 8y ago
    Alternative theory: Perhaps not everyone in the world is obsessed with military might and it is simply just a commitment to scientific advancement? Their plan to put a radio telescope on the far side of the moon would be a huge win for science.

maxxxxx 8y ago

There was a time when you went to the US to see the most advanced or biggest things. Now China seems to be determined to play that role.

briandear 8y ago
We can call it “most advanced” when it actually works. The US and Europe also don’t have inferiority complexes where they feel like they have to build the tallest or biggest anymore. Look at skyscraper competitions — generally 2nd tier countries trying to outdo each other for bragging rights but for no real other reason. It’s like the Soviet Olympic team — they had to win to make the political statement trunpeting a triumph of communism. The US did the same thing once upon a time, but then we grew up (and not necessarily for the better.. it’s a lot of fun to be “first, bigger, best.”) 1990s Korea, modern China, 1950s USA, the Soviet Union — those places and eras were representative of a national need to foster patriotism to create unity against real or perceived competitors on the world stage as well as remind the proles of the power and achievements of their benevolent state.
- omeid2 8y ago
  > The US and Europe also don’t have inferiority complexes where they feel like they have to build the tallest or biggest anymore. Wasn't the whole space-race and moon landing a, excuse the language, rocket-waving contest? As you point out, it is easy to not have "inferiority complexes" or "grow up" as you put it, when you have once established credibility. Don't dismiss achievements just because it is by others.
  - cperciva 8y ago
    I think you mean rocket waving, although the idea of weaving rockets does sound interesting... More substantively, my understanding is that while the space race turned into a PR exercise, it started out as a serious military exercise in demonstrating ICBM capabilities; "we can put a man on the moon" is more politically acceptable than "we can put a big bomb in Moscow" but it is understood just the same.

xevb3k 8y ago

“At other telescopes, astronomers are developing machine-learning algorithms that could identify, extract, and compensate for dirty data“ Whenever I see “machine-learning” in the context of scientific development I just mentally replace it with “magic”. Employing machine learning, at the data acquisition stage, is a really bad idea. It can easily introduce biases...

EZ-E 8y ago
It's probably closer to statistics than to machine-learning at this stage. People just love to say they are doing machine learning, it's "sexy"
- xevb3k 8y ago
  It just says “developing”. I would imagine this is code for “writing papers about”. I’m sure those papers use whatever technique is currently hot and will produce a decent publication. I doubt they use simple statistical approaches, because that’s likely not novel or publishable. This is all fine. However, the problem is suggesting that this is a somehow reasonable/tenable solution to solving the noise issues... Maybe the noise can be removed by other methods, maybe the noise doesn’t matter, but magic doesn’t solve the noise issues.
  - martinpw 8y ago
    > Maybe the noise can be removed by other methods, maybe the noise doesn’t matter, but magic doesn’t solve the noise issues. The noise definitely matters. When you are observing with a telescope you are almost by definition working at the limit of the signal to noise ratio of the instrument, otherwise you would be asked to use a less powerful instrument (since the observing time on these larger instruments is so precious). I worked on a project analyzing data from an X-ray telescope back in my research days. We spent 3 full years building an incredibly detailed model of the instrument noise, just so we could subtract it out and have confidence in our remaining signal. That was longer than the time we spent doing the actual science on the corrected data.
- deleted 8y ago

zcbenz 8y ago

It is interesting that the tourism income from FAST telescope, has far exceeded its construction costs. From https://www.guancha.cn/society/2017_08_25_424435.shtml https://www.guancha.cn/society/2017_08_25_424435.shtml : > 据悉，平塘县依靠旅游观光，上半年的营收达46亿人民币，较去年同期增加了40％。 > It is reported that relying on tourism, the revenue of Pingtang town in the first half of the year has reached 4.6 billion yuan, an increase of 40% over the same period last year. From http://www.wenxuecity.com/news/2017/10/03/socialnews-144514.html http://www.wenxuecity.com/news/2017/10/03/socialnews-144514.... : > 7天80万人贵州看“大锅” 五星酒店最贵一夜4888 > In 7 days, 800,000 people went to Guizhou to see the "big pot". Most expensive room in five-star hotel has reached 4888 yuan.

majos 8y ago
Obligatory "can we trust official Chinese statistics?". Gaming local numbers after a lavishly-funded project seems to have been popular for a while [1]. [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-economy-fraud/china-to-publish-unified-gdp-data-in-fraud-crackdown-statistics-bureau-idUSKBN1CZ0H6?il=0 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-economy-fraud/china...
- IIAOPSW 8y ago
  8 is a lucky number in Chinese. So I'm not surprised if the 5 star room costs exactly 4,888. I wouldn't be surprised if the visitor number was rounded to 800k, but I doubt the number is made from whole cloth.
  - natmaka 8y ago
    4 (the first figure in this "4888 yuans" price) is an unlucky number in China. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_numerology#Four https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_numerology#Four
    - fipple 8y ago
      Yes but you can’t change the pricing of something by 25% to make it auspicious.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

jpatokal 8y ago

Building an "Astronomy Town" in the middle of nowhere and expecting it to attract tourists permanently has echoes of Japan's bubble era written all over it. Random point of comparison: https://soranews24.com/2018/04/24/eerie-dystopian-view-emerges-as-japan-dismantles-one-of-its-departed-bubble-era-amusement-parks/ https://soranews24.com/2018/04/24/eerie-dystopian-view-emerg... Japan's domestic tourism boom was done in by the triple combo of recession (30 years and counting), depopulation and Japanese finding it cheaper and more interesting to travel overseas. Sooner or later these will hit China too.

mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
Yep. Live in a destination relic of Miyazaki. Used to get a ton of tourists, now people just go abroad.
- jpatokal 8y ago
  Have any Chinese tourists found Miyazaki yet? Or are they just piling into Kyoto?
- therealdrag0 8y ago
  Why is it cheaper to go abroad?
  - rootedbox 8y ago
    Volume of people traveling to a given place lowers the cost.. This also exists in the U.S. It's cheaper for me from SF to fly to Lima, Peru than to Knoxville, Tn.

batbomb 8y ago

This isn’t the only stupid telescope. Just outside Shanghai city limits is the Tian Ma radio telescope. It’s 65m. I went there, I don’t think it’s used at all, and it was completed in 2012

SiempreViernes 8y ago
A depressingly common pattern is that you can get funding for building things but not for running and maintaining things. In the case of the Tian Ma they seem to still have money for work on it, I found a 2017 proceeding[1] about adding a new system optimised for pulsar searches. I'm guessing they simply aren't getting very exciting results, which is normal for a non-american dish, you don't hear about Effelsberg every day either. [1]: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8105313/ https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8105313/
- batbomb 8y ago
  You can see Shanghai from it the location (on a clear day). I don’t think they operate it much because of the noise issue. Apparently they also even more rarely point it.
Kagerjay 8y ago
Sounds like every olympic stadium after it's been used once

acoye 8y ago

At Arecibo radio telescope they do not allow something like a single microwave oven in a large radius. So for something that is intended to be even more sensible … yeah

Eric_WVGG 8y ago

remember Contact, where they made two? They should have built a fake biggest telescope and put the real one behind that other mountain over yonder

nayuki 8y ago

For a radio telescope in the USA, the Wendover Productions channel made a good video about banning radio sources - "Why Wifi is Illegal in Green Bank, West Virginia": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjCZ6k7EzjE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjCZ6k7EzjE

Taylor_OD 8y ago

Holy shit. That picture is incredible. The scale of that thing...

idoescompooters 8y ago

I don't know. I'm pretty skeptical about its technical capabilities myself. At the moment they only have a very small sliver of bandwidth they are capable of receiving. I'm unsure on how exactly they plan to receive all of these different bands at once when they are eventually added. Also, their chosen technique of removing RFI after taking in the data (noise) from space is questionable.