Of all the odd things China could be up to now, with their moribund economy and demographic meltdown, it seems they are devoting time and resources to looking for aliens. No, not the kind that is coming across our southern border; the “new life and new civilizations,” Star Trek kind of aliens.
For several years, China has rapidly ramped up its program to detect alien technology elsewhere in the universe even as the United States’ own Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute, or SETI, continues its decades-long search of the cosmos.
Neither has proven fruitful yet — indeed, we have never found clear evidence of extraterrestrial life of any kind anywhere in the universe. But to speed up any such discovery, China’s Far Neighbour Project, an initiative run out of Beijing Normal University, is setting its sights not only on first contact, but also what to do if and when they…
