The " Eye in the sky ! "

Australia is competing with South Africa to host the " Square Kilometre Array "  ( SKA ) which will be the biggest radio telescope ever proposed - a network of 3,000 fifteen metre antennae dishes spaced from Western Australia to New Zealand.

This $2 billion project is the brain child of sixty seven scientific organizations from twenty countries - and it hopes to achieve two outcomes.    To discover how the universe was formed ?     And whether we share it with other life forms ?

The very size of this array is breath taking.   It will look further than we have even been able to imagine, and it will need a super computer capable of making a million, trillion operations a second to analyse the results - and that is something which at this time doesn't exist.

To the average layman this sounds like science fiction, but then that super-collider recently built on the Switzerland/France border has just delivered a finding that sets Albert Einsteins famous formulae on it's ear.   Einstein predicted that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.   This collider appears to show that even faster speeds are possible - and that introduces the possibility of one day solving the tyranny of space travel.

It is worth noting that when we today travel in jet planes and Bullet trains as our normal means of locomotion, two hundred years ago the fastest that any mortal could achieve was on the back of a galloping horse.   Things like the SKA may open travel doors that go far beyond our imagination.

Australia has a lot going for it in this race with South Africa.   We are an entire continent with a single government, and therefore able to control this project under a uniform set of laws.   In contrast, South Africa is just one country in a continent surrounded by a host of smaller nations, some of which are not so friendly and committed to scientific cooperation.

Climate is another necessary factor - and this precludes siting the SKA in Europe or North America.  The temperate climates of both Australia and South Africa make yearlong operation of the SKA feasible.

A lot of scientific people will be holding their breath - as decision time looms !