China hunts for ET: World's largest radio telescope for contacting alien life is under construction
A giant building project has been started that will help China communicate with aliens
Scientists around the world are convinced of the existence of alien life.
Now China is building a massive radio telescope to find it.
Once finished, the giant radio dish will be 500 metres in diameter and will be more effective at reading messages from the heavens than anything else on Earth.
It's called the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (or FAST) for short and is expected to be completed next year.
"A radio telescope is like a sensitive ear, listening to tell meaningful radio messages from white noise in the universe," said Nan Rendong, the chief scientist at the FAST project.
"It is like identifying the sound of cicadas in a thunderstorm," he told the Xinhua news agency.
The dish will be suspended slightly above ground and is being built in a remote part of the Chinese countryside to minimise the effect of interrupting Earth-based signals.
Meanwhile, the Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) institute has spent the last 50 years focusing on finding alien life forms.
To do so, they've been honing in on Earth-like exoplanets.
These are planets that are around the same size, composition and temperature of Earth and so could possibly have liquid water and be habitable.
So far, no intelligent life has been in contact. Maybe the Chinese will prove we're not alone in the universe.