The Radio Universe, the Cold War, and Universal Communication

With the advent of the Space Age, investigating whether there is extraterrestrial life somewhere in the universe that humans could contact has become a scientifically legitimate question. This methodical endeavor, mostly known as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), is attributable to the development of astronomy beyond the visible light band in the second half of the 20th century. Visible light observations limited SETI to a highly theoretical realm.

Radio telescopes allowed astronomy to expand its view into other wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation for the first time. Radio waves offered unprecedented information on the universe, so new that most classically trained astronomers doubted the relevance. From the 1950s, terms such as “radio galaxy” or “radio star” described corresponding objects visible in radio but not in optical wavelengths. Finding themselves in this new radio universe, scientists reconsidered the scenario of contact with intelligent life. If the new astronomy could decipher radio waves, then it would also be able to recognize those possibly existing of artificial origin. Humans entered the Space Age in 1957, using their ability to use artificial radio waves in space to track spacecraft. Thus, other beings ought to be doing the same, perhaps at a larger distance—sending communications over interstellar distances to communicate with compatible entities—intelligent enough technology and or biology. This idea became widely shared by scientists, even beyond radio astronomers.

In the Soviet Union, scientists managed to convince the country’s Academy of Sciences to support a conference on “Extraterrestrial Civilizations and Communication with Them” at the Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory, situated in one of the smallest of the country’s 15 republics, Armenia. The Academy of Sciences’ representatives agreed to form a new section within its Radio Astronomy Council, exclusively dedicated to contacting other intelligent beings in the Universe. Byurakan’s founding director, Viktor Ambartsumian, was a prolific astronomer and a diplomatic force. Although the Byurakan conference represented a major milestone, no Soviet initiative was taken to extend it internationally. Generally, at the time, international cooperation faced the geopolitical tensions of the Cold War, and the conference coincided with a change of power in the country when Nikita Khrushchev was removed from power by the less progressive political leadership. 

The initiative for international cooperation over radio communication with extraterrestrials emerged from an independent initiative. In June 1965, Czechoslovakian engineer Rudolf Pešek asked the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) to help him organize an international symposium on what he called “Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligences” or CETI. The IAA enabled space scientists across the geopolitical divide to cooperate as individuals, independent of their governments. Pešek coordinated international radar observations within the nation’s Academy of Sciences. He proposed holding the symposium in Prague to bring the East and West of the Iron Curtain together, given Czechoslovakia’s unique political and geographical position.

Pešek was ready to face many obstacles—refusal from a good amount of people and organizations (such as the International Astronomical Union) to support the symposium, difficulty in securing funding, and the delay of letters to and from Soviet scientists due to political control—to enable the event. While reaching out to a large pool of correspondents, Pešek created a network of informed individuals about CETI. At the beginning of the summer of 1968, after overcoming even a sudden change of hearts of the local Academy of Sciences, which strongly recommended not to hold the symposium in Prague, Pešek finally had met all the conditions, including the minutia of logistics to politics. Tragically, in August of that year, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia, with the help of its allies in the region, putting an end to the general liberalization in the country.

Pešek did not give up hope of bringing the two geopolitical spheres together in a CETI meeting. Still, forces in Czechoslovakia and the IAA could not counterbalance the new restrictions. He had, however, placed in the minds of scientists both in the West and East the mere possibility of such a gathering. This seed of imagination inspired CETI astronomers to seek alternative routes for international cooperation when the Prague plans came to a halt. Upon a verbal yet informal agreement between two young rising CETI stars in the USSR and the US during the International Astronomical Union, the “First Soviet-American CETI Conference” came into being. The meeting was held in Byurakan, Armenia, cumulating all previous efforts. Over fifty participants—apart from mostly Soviet and American, four scientists, each from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the UK, and Canada—spent almost a week establishing a common ground over radio astronomy’s question of extraterrestrial civilizations. The subject had grown in range and interest to the extent that several other disciplines accompanied the technical radio astronomical themes, from cosmology, biology, neurology, and linguistics to history and social sciences. Scientists had to deal with the evolution of intelligence and of technological societies on Earth as a prerequisite for theorizing the laws of development of cosmic civilizations.

One of the members of the Special Section on Extraterrestrial Civilizations of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, established in 1964, reported on the conference to the larger public in an article published in the magazine Earth and the Universe [Zemlya i Vselennaya] in March 1972. The article reviewed most of the key ideas advanced by the main conference participants. In this sense, in “the Evolution of Intelligence and Technological Societies on Earth,” the discussion commenced with the points of archaeologist Kent Flannery on the formation of ancient civilizations. “He [Flannery] noted that the process of the genesis of civilizations can be considered typical, as many civilizations appeared at the same time, in different places and independently from one another.” Regarding the regularities in the appearance of advanced technology, “Soviet historian [in fact ethnologist, science fiction writer, and editor of a science fiction magazine called Knowledge is Power] considered this as inevitable stage of the development of civilizations.” As the article further noted, Eduard Markarian of the Institute for Philosophy and Law of the Armenian Academy of Science (indeed a lawyer and philosopher), considered that “the essence of civilizations consists in the ability of living beings to produce means and mechanisms for the adaptation to the medium and the sustenance of their collective life. Such mechanisms serve the material-technological system, consciousness, language, ethics, law, and social institutions.” Other ideas, such as “Regularities in the development of cosmic civilizations,” pertained to the observation of Iosif Shklovsky, the most important Soviet CETI proponent, that CETI deals with the paradox inherent in its premise. That is, the object of study for CETI is a hypothetical one. Another radio astronomer, Boris Panovkin, explored the possibility of civilizations from different planets understanding each other’s messages - a topic discussed in plentiful detail at the event. Panovkin emphasized that only when the receiver had in mind the image of the object the sender was transmitting could one talk about communication, and that mathematics was by no means universal. The article also clarified that CETI dealt more specifically not with extraterrestrial civilizations, but with the possibilities and means of contact and communication with them.

Regardless of the difficulties pointed out in extraterrestrial communication, the conference was a terrestrial success. Even if Pešek, the conference’s delegate from Czechoslovakia, played a mostly passive role and commented briefly during the sessions, it is difficult to imagine the Byurakan 1971 gathering without his work in the IAA. As a symbolic testament, all attendees received a CETI badge. On a more profound note, the conference subsequently allowed the IAA to establish a CETI Permanent Committee in 1972 under the chairmanship of Pešek. The question of radio contact with other civilizations in the universe was not only a legitimate scientific question, but it also had a stable scientific and diplomatic representation—as an officially recognized forum for Soviet and Western parts to cooperate on the subject. The resolutions from the 1964 Byurakan event had finally been realized, skillfully defying Cold War tensions. Access to the radio universe had enabled, for the first time, a legitimate collective scientific imagination over the possibility of Universal communication.

Gabriela Radulescu is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Museum.