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.