
SETI had its roots in Cold War politics as much as in human curiosity
https://www.supercluster.com/editorial/t...ct-on-seti
EXCERPTS: That’s the thesis of a new book called Mixed Signals: Alien Communication Across the Iron Curtain, from science historian Rebecca Charbonneau.
[...] “It’s hard for me to imagine that SETI would look the way that it does without the Cold War,” says Charbonneau, who works at the American Institute of Physics. “Things like the ‘L’ factor in the Drake Equation, things like the Kardashev scale, they were just so of that particular moment that it’s hard to imagine that they would have existed in their exact form without the influence of the Cold War.”
[...] One of the commonalities between the East and West during the Cold War was the militarisation of certain civilian activities. As much as scientists might like to pretend otherwise, astronomy and the military have always been bedfellows, and it hasn’t always been the military using astronomical technology for its own ends; sometimes astronomy has been able to take advantage of what the military has had to offer too.
[...] The Cold War was waged not through direct conflict, but through both a series of proxy wars and through competing for prestige...
Over in the United States, radio astronomy took longer to catch on – somewhat ironic, given that it was an American, Karl Jansky, who kickstarted it all. Many astronomers in the United States were sceptical of the value of radio astronomy – they didn’t think there was anything interesting to be seen in the radio sky.
[...] The success of the Lovell Telescope in tracking Sputnik 1 convinced US spies that some form of radio monitoring technology was essential, and as this technology was pretty similar to the technology required by radio astronomy, the two developed synchronously. It was that technology that in 1960 allowed Frank Drake and his students, Margaret Hurley and Ellen Gunderman, to conduct the first ever radio SETI search, called Project Ozma.
They didn’t discover any alien signals, of course, but their search triggered a chain reaction that spread around the globe to the Soviet Union and gave birth to the SETI that we know today.
[...] “In some ways, SETI in the Soviet Union exists because of Iosif Shklovskii,” says Charbonneau. “He’s the one who supported his students like Nikolai Kardashev to be able to do their work. ... and it does seem he largely got his interest because of the activity in the United States.”
[...] Soon, Shklovskii became pen-pals of sorts with Carl Sagan ... Sagan and Shklovskii’s contact across the Iron Curtain was part of a growing connection between SETI astronomers on both sides, all of whom tried to resist the efforts of national spy agencies to use the scientists for intelligence gathering.
[...] The contact between Soviet and American SETI scientists was multi-layered. At face value it was a sharing of ideas. At a deeper level it showed that people of the East and West could work together as human beings. ... “They were very aware of the parallels between what they were trying to do, which was to make contact with ‘the other’, while very similarly trying to talk to each other – and they loved it,” says Charbonneau...
[...] There’s one other way that the Cold War seems to have had influence on SETI, in that the only two nations that did SETI systematically were the opposing Cold War powers, namely the United States and the Soviet Union. Charbonneau has been wracking her brain for answer. “In my book I’ve tried to figure out why it was really just the United States and the Soviet Union, and really nobody else. That’s weird, right?” (MORE - missing details)
https://www.supercluster.com/editorial/t...ct-on-seti
EXCERPTS: That’s the thesis of a new book called Mixed Signals: Alien Communication Across the Iron Curtain, from science historian Rebecca Charbonneau.
[...] “It’s hard for me to imagine that SETI would look the way that it does without the Cold War,” says Charbonneau, who works at the American Institute of Physics. “Things like the ‘L’ factor in the Drake Equation, things like the Kardashev scale, they were just so of that particular moment that it’s hard to imagine that they would have existed in their exact form without the influence of the Cold War.”
[...] One of the commonalities between the East and West during the Cold War was the militarisation of certain civilian activities. As much as scientists might like to pretend otherwise, astronomy and the military have always been bedfellows, and it hasn’t always been the military using astronomical technology for its own ends; sometimes astronomy has been able to take advantage of what the military has had to offer too.
[...] The Cold War was waged not through direct conflict, but through both a series of proxy wars and through competing for prestige...
Over in the United States, radio astronomy took longer to catch on – somewhat ironic, given that it was an American, Karl Jansky, who kickstarted it all. Many astronomers in the United States were sceptical of the value of radio astronomy – they didn’t think there was anything interesting to be seen in the radio sky.
[...] The success of the Lovell Telescope in tracking Sputnik 1 convinced US spies that some form of radio monitoring technology was essential, and as this technology was pretty similar to the technology required by radio astronomy, the two developed synchronously. It was that technology that in 1960 allowed Frank Drake and his students, Margaret Hurley and Ellen Gunderman, to conduct the first ever radio SETI search, called Project Ozma.
They didn’t discover any alien signals, of course, but their search triggered a chain reaction that spread around the globe to the Soviet Union and gave birth to the SETI that we know today.
[...] “In some ways, SETI in the Soviet Union exists because of Iosif Shklovskii,” says Charbonneau. “He’s the one who supported his students like Nikolai Kardashev to be able to do their work. ... and it does seem he largely got his interest because of the activity in the United States.”
[...] Soon, Shklovskii became pen-pals of sorts with Carl Sagan ... Sagan and Shklovskii’s contact across the Iron Curtain was part of a growing connection between SETI astronomers on both sides, all of whom tried to resist the efforts of national spy agencies to use the scientists for intelligence gathering.
[...] The contact between Soviet and American SETI scientists was multi-layered. At face value it was a sharing of ideas. At a deeper level it showed that people of the East and West could work together as human beings. ... “They were very aware of the parallels between what they were trying to do, which was to make contact with ‘the other’, while very similarly trying to talk to each other – and they loved it,” says Charbonneau...
[...] There’s one other way that the Cold War seems to have had influence on SETI, in that the only two nations that did SETI systematically were the opposing Cold War powers, namely the United States and the Soviet Union. Charbonneau has been wracking her brain for answer. “In my book I’ve tried to figure out why it was really just the United States and the Soviet Union, and really nobody else. That’s weird, right?” (MORE - missing details)