“Is communication with intelligent beings of other planets possible?”: Iosif Shklovsky’s launch of Soviet SETI

Abstract

This article uses a combination of biographical and situational factors, close textual analysis, and comparison with contemporaneous publications to illuminate the understudied formative phase of Soviet SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). I examine Iosif Shklovsky’s professional biography and the first Soviet SETI publication, his 1960 article, “Is Communication with Intelligent Beings of Other Planets Possible?” My research situates Shklovsky’s exploration of extraterrestrial intelligence within his broader scientific background and intellectual interests before offering a critical reconstruction of the article’s central arguments. It demonstrates how, through an examination of the evolution of matter in the Universe, Shklovsky framed intelligence and communication within a radio-astronomy-informed cosmology. Communication with other beings via electromagnetic radiation became integral to what SETI and astronomy historian Steven J. Dick later termed the “biological Universe.” I argue that the scientific characteristics Shklovsky articulated effectively naturalized the possibility of extraterrestrial radio communication. Last, I analyze this process of naturalization in the early 1960s Soviet SETI.