The present work reports on a feasibility study commissioned by the Chinese Academy of Sciences of China to explore various possible mission options to detect gravitational waves in space alternative to that of the eLISA/LISA mission concept. Based on the relative merits assigned to science and technological viability, a few representative mission options descoped from the ALIA mission are considered. A semi-analytic Monte Carlo simulation is carried out to understand the cosmic black hole merger histories and the possible scientific merits of the mission options in probing the light seed black holes and their coevolution with galaxies in early Universe. The study indicates that, by choosing the armlength of the interferometer to be three million kilometers and shifting the sensitivity floor to around one-hundredth Hz, together with a very moderate improvement on the position noise budget, there are certain mission options capable of exploring light seed, intermediate mass black hole binaries at high redshift that are not readily accessible to eLISA/LISA, and yet the technological requirements seem to within reach in the next few decades for China.

A brief status report of an ongoing scientific case study of the Advanced Laser Interferometer Antenna (ALIA) mission is presented. Key technology requirements and primary science objectives of the mission are covered in 0264-9381/11/094012+10$33.00

A way to reconcile Dirac's large numbers hypothesis and Einstein's theory of gravitation was recently suggested by Lau (1985). It is characterized by the conjecture of a time-dependent cosmological term and gravitational term in Einstein's field equations. Motivated by this conjecture and the large numbers hypothesis, we formulate here a scalar-tensor theory in terms of an action principle. The cosmological term is required to be spatially dependent as well as time dependent in general. The theory developed is applied to a cosmological model compatible with the large numbers' hypothesis. The time-dependent form of the cosmological term and the scalar potential are then deduced. A possible explanation of the smallness of the cosmological term is also given and the possible significance of the scalar field is speculated.