Worlds Biggest Radio Telescope To Be Built

So it was announced roughly 11 hours ago that the worlds largest radio telescope (International Square Kilometre Array or SKA) will be built in the UK, with massive fields of antennas in Africa and Australia as part of the overall system.

What does this mean? (According to the source anyways)

The SKA will investigate light sources in the sky that radiate at centimetre to metre wavelengths - but it will achieve sensitivities that are far beyond the reach of current telescopes.

This should allow it to see the hydrogen in the first stars and galaxies to form after the Big Bang.

The SKA will also pinpoint precisely the positions of the nearest 100 million galaxies. Scientists hope their structure will reveal new details about "dark energy", the mysterious negative pressure that appears to be pushing the cosmos apart at an ever increasing speed.

But wait! That's not all! It will also:

probe the early Universe, test Einstein's theory of gravity and even search for alien intelligent life.

Now that to me is pretty freaking amazing. To give you an idea of how close the nearest galaxy is (the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy) to us, it would take us traveling at the speed of 38,610 mph (62,136 km/h) [The speed of the Voyager space probe], 749 Million YEARS.

Maybe I'm just geeking out over a simple thing, but to me I thought it was an amazing leap in better understanding the observable Universe.

FYI, if you cannot be bother to read the article cited below, the completion of the SKA will be in 2025. Ten years from now.

For Your Perusal
https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/cosmic/nearest_galaxy_info.html

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-32523768