Mixed Signals: Alien Communication Across the Iron Curtain

The eye-opening debut chronicle from Charbonneau, a historian at the American Institute of Physics, charts scientific efforts to communicate with aliens during the 1960s and ’70s. She surveys the advances that enabled the search, explaining how the 1951 discovery that neutral hydrogen emits radiation at a frequency detectable light years away prompted radio astronomers to propose looking for alien signals at that frequency. The main focus, however, is how the Cold War shaped the endeavor. Charbonneau argues that strained communication between the U.S. and the Soviet Union meant that their ostensible attempts to send missives to the stars were in actuality often aimed at their terrestrial neighbors (“ ‘PEACE, LENIN, USSR’—the first such message to be sent to another world—was... a message for Earth”). Elsewhere, Charbonneau explains that funding for the search was driven by political and military leaders’ belief that technologies developed for extraterrestrial communication could also be used to listen in on geopolitical rivals. The illuminating history reveals how jingoistic chest-thumping masqueraded as scientific inquiry during the Cold War, and the strongest sections discuss how planetary concerns shape how humans conceive of potential interplanetary communication, as when Charbonneau notes that astronomers “have historically used language and metaphors rooted in frontier myths and colonialism to frame their conceptions of ‘first contact.’ ” The result is a vigorous blend of scientific and political history. Photos. (Jan.)