Sitting in a white prefab hut, Lindsay Magnus punches a code into a computer beneath bands of red, green and blue representing the Centaurus A galaxy. Beyond the window, seven giant dishes turn in unison, throwing shadows across the gravel. Their target lies millions of light years away in the cosmos.
Magnus and his colleagues are aiming to build the world's biggest telescope. It will cost £1.3bn and consist of thousands of dishes with a total surface area of one square kilometre. It will generate enough raw data to fill 15m 64 GB iPods every day, requiring a supercomputer 1,000 times faster than currently exists. It will peer back to a time before the first stars and galaxies formed and offer our best chance yet of detecting alien intelligence.
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