The Square Kilometer Array will be world’s largest telescope when it’s up and running in 2024.
The SKA it will be a collection of around 3,000 dishes, each 15 meters in diameter, and tens of thousands of smaller receivers, all spread across an entire continent, able to detect electromagnetic radiation at a great distance:
Could it really help us discover aliens?
SKA says its instrument will be able to pick up airport radar on a planet 50 light-years away — if such a thing exists.
The SKA will require the support of a supercomputer capable of 100 petaflops per second. Sure, I could Google up the definition of that word, but I prefer to think it means the computer is going to roll over a lot faster than my dog.
Back in the previous century (1987 to be exact), Melinda Snodgrass put together a collection called “A Very Large Array: New Mexico Science Fiction and Fantasy” published by the University of New Mexico Press. It had an interesting cover too: http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/ciu/5c/5d/78dbc0a398a01c37b9a32210.L.jpg
VLA details: http://www.vla.nrao.edu/