The summer of 1962 was a grim time for American-Soviet relations. The botched Bay of Pigs invasion of the previous year, in Soviet-backed Cuba, was still a fresh memory, and the Cuban Missile Crisis was just months away. Nonetheless, in June of that year a young astronomer named Carl Sagan decided to reach out to a colleague in the USSR, the astrophysicist Iosif Shklovsky.
Sagan had just written a paper on the possibility of intelligent civilizations beyond Earth and was curious to hear Shklovsky’s reaction. Shklovsky sent back positive feedback, and Sagan would end up overseeing an English translation of Shklovsky’s recent book on the search for life in the cosmos. The book bore extensive annotations by Sagan, and was published in 1966 as “Intelligent Life in the Universe,” with both men listed as authors.
BOOK REVIEW — “Mixed Signals: Alien Communication Across the Iron Curtain,” by Rebecca Charbonneau (Polity, 256 pages).
Coming at the height of the Cold War, such a joint venture was a rare event indeed. At one point, Shklovsky mentioned that it would be nice to meet Sagan in person, but joked that this would be about as likely as an extraterrestrial visiting Earth.
This story, told in the middle of Rebecca Charbonneau’s engaging new book, “Mixed Signals: Alien Communication Across the Iron Curtain,” is one of many episodes that highlight the peculiar interplay between the search for life “out there” and the very real political and military machinations down here on Earth. As the book’s title suggests, there are intriguing comparisons to be drawn between the attempt to speak with (or at least hear from) aliens in the depths of space, and the struggle faced by Americans and Russians trying to speak to one another across a gaping political divide.
There’s no shortage of popular books on the search for aliens — in the last few years alone we’ve had Jaime Green’s “The Possibility of Life” and Sarah Scoles’ “They Are Already Here: UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers,” among others — but Charbonneau, a historian at the American Institute of Physics as well as an affiliate of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and the St. Andrews SETI Post-Detection Hub, has found a fresh angle by looking at the search through the lens of Cold War geopolitics.
In the early days of SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence), there was much debate over whether hunting for alien life ought to be considered a legitimate branch of science. For one thing, there was no actual “data” in the traditional sense, as there was no evidence of anything alive, let alone intelligent, beyond our own planet. (Charbonneau uses the acronym CETI — communication with extraterrestrial intelligence — for the early decades of the search, beginning in the late 1950s, and saves the term SETI for the more recent phase of the quest, from the ’80s onward. For simplicity, this review will just use SETI.)
Meanwhile, some felt there was a more down-to-earth justification for SETI: Whether or not there are any aliens out there, the search itself could be illuminating; in particular, it may tell us more about ourselves — an argument that astronomer Jill Tarter has called the “cosmic mirror” effect.
Charbonneau highlights the peculiar interplay between the search for life “out there” and the very real political and military machinations down here on Earth.
In addition, early proponents of SETI, like Sagan and astronomer Frank Drake, figured the search for extraterrestrials would encourage international cooperation here on Earth. For many, there was a hope that such scientific collaborations would nurture a sense of internationalism and global unity. If humanity was smart enough to figure out how to converse with aliens, perhaps it was not so unrealistic to imagine Americans and Russians speaking to one another?
And yet, scientists have had to work hard to overcome what’s sometimes called the “giggle factor” that seems to surround any talk of alien civilizations. Reading Charbonneau’s book, however, one can’t help wondering if the scientists to some extent brought this dilemma on themselves. Take Shklovsky, for example. Though a respected figure in Soviet astronomy and physics, he also harbored some seemingly far-fetched ideas — arguing, for example, that Mars’s moon Phobos was an artificially made, hollowed out satellite built by extraterrestrials. As Charbonneau puts it: “Shklovsky had a reputation for thinking up ideas and theories that were sometimes groundbreaking, other times, absurd.”
Other oddities pepper the narrative, like CTA-102, a distant radio source eventually understood to be a quasar, spotted by California Institute of Technology astronomers in the early 1960s and later studied by Soviet scientists. In 1965, Soviet astrophysicists reported that the object’s radio emissions appeared to be fluctuating in intensity in a periodic fashion, with Nikolai Kardashev reportedly concluding that the peculiar object might be “the technology of a highly developed extraterrestrial civilization.” (The tantalizing alleged “discovery” drew substantial media attention, and was later immortalized by the Byrds in their song “C.T.A.-102” from their 1967 album “Younger Than Yesterday.”)
Not that the Americans were averse to speculation; Sagan himself once optimistically suggested there are about a million “extant advanced technical civilizations in our Galaxy.”
The ideological differences between the Americans and Soviets went beyond the obvious capitalism-communism divide. For example, writes Charbonneau, the Soviets embraced something called “cosmism” — roughly, the idea that humankind is destined for a kind of utopia in outer space, enabled by technology.
For many early proponents of SETI, there was a hope that such scientific collaborations would nurture a sense of internationalism and global unity.
The book benefits from Charbonneau’s insider knowledge of SETI, and from her investigative work, including combing through letters written by Soviet scientists to their U.S. colleagues, oral histories, and interviews with Russian scientists. At the same time, the book is not overly technical, and moves along at a reasonably brisk pace (albeit with occasional repetition).
Even when writing about the rather familiar history of American efforts to find life beyond Earth, Charbonneau often gives us something new. For example, much has been written about the plaque mounted on each of the twin Pioneer spacecraft and the gold records placed on board the twin Voyager spacecraft in the 1970s, each of them an attempt to craft a message that might be understood by aliens in the unlikely event that the objects ever reached an intelligent being far beyond our solar system. The Pioneer plaque was famously controversial for its depiction of a nude man and woman, but Charbonneau explores in detail why, as uncomfortable as it made some to see a man’s penis and testicles, it is perhaps even more problematic for the woman to have no genitals at all.
As for the Voyager record, there was much hand-wringing over what song might represent the Soviet Union: The U.S. team, led by Sagan, suggested “The Young Peddler,” an old Russian folk tune, but the Soviets insisted on something less capitalistic, eventually settling on the song “Moscow Nights.” In the end, that suggestion arrived too late, and Sagan went with “Tchakrulo,” which Charbonneau describes as a song about rebelling against a tyrannical landlord. She writes: “Clearly the introspection caused by crafting messages to aliens stirred passions and disagreements that stemmed from conflict and inequity on Earth.” (One U.S. contribution was Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.”)
Charbonneau explains how SETI has evolved since the end of the Cold War; today we have fewer papers speculating on the likelihood that aliens would blow themselves up as their technology progresses, and more talk of how advanced AI might spell their demise, along with papers proposing that we hunt for aliens by seeking out the pollution they may have unleashed.
While the reader will learn a great deal about SETI from this book, there’s one aspect of the way the story is framed that is perhaps a tad depressing: Is self-knowledge the main driving force behind the search for ET? We might learn something about ourselves from, say, reading Tolstoy or listening to a great symphonic work — but if that’s all one took from the experience, it might make the reader or listener seem somewhat self-involved. Wouldn’t it be great of SETI not only told us something about ourselves, but also one day told us if we are, or are not, alone in the cosmos?
But as Charbonneau notes, her goal was not to answer that question, but rather to explore the complex history of this quest, highlighting the oft-overlooked ways in which it brought two very different cultures together. Those turbulent early decades of SETI, she concludes, was about more than finding life beyond Earth. “It forged friendships across national gaps, prompted reflection on inequity and politics, and forced its practitioners to confront some of the most vital existential challenges that face our world,” she writes. “It made better people.”