China has just finished building the world’s largest radio telescope, which it will use to explore space and hunt for extraterrestrial life. About 300 builders, experts, science fiction enthusiasts and reporters have watched the installation of the telescope.

The Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope, or FAST, is the size of 30 soccer fields and has been hewn out of a mountain in the south-western province of Guizhou. It is almost twice as large as the next biggest radio telescope, which is in Puerto Rico. It will be used for early-stage research by Chinese scientists for a couple years, and then be used more widely. FAST is capable of detecting neutral hydrogen activity in distant galaxies, gravitational waves, pulsars and, eventually, amino acids, which could point towards alien life on other planets and in other galaxies.

China has its eye on tracking alien activity since 1994 and has planned to design a device for searching the extraterrestrial life. After jumping over regulatory and permission hurdles, the massive telescope (FAST) took five years to complete and cost a total of $180 million.

Scientists will now start debugging and trials of the telescope, Zheng Xiaonian, deputy head of the National Astronomical Observation under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which built the telescope said. “The project has the potential to search for more strange objects to better understand the origin of the universe and boost the global hunt for extraterrestrial life.”

“FAST’s potential to discover an alien civilisation will be five to ten times that of current equipment, as it can see farther and darker planets,” Peng Bo, director of the NAO Radio Astronomy Technology Laboratory says.

In order to make room for FAST, the Chinese government displaced 9,000 people who lived in the area by paying them only about $1,800.

The telescope is expected to begin operations in September.