When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.”Wow!” signal printout. The comment on the side inspired the event’s name, as this mysterious signal sparked a debate about life in the universe. . | Credit: Big Ear Radio Observatory and North American Astrophysical Observatory (NAAPO)This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. As humans began to explore outer space in the latter half of the 20th century, radio waves proved a powerful tool. Scientists could send out radio waves to communicate with satellites, rockets and other spacecraft, and use radio telescopes to take in radio waves emitted by objects throughout the universe.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementHowever, sometimes radio telescopes would pick up the artificial radio signals from telecommunications. This interference threatened sensitive astronomy observations, causing inaccurate data and even damaging equipment. While this interference frustrated scientists, it also sparked an idea.During the Cold War, a new field emerged at the intersection of radio astronomy and radio communications. It put forward the idea that astronomers could search for radio communications from possibly existing extraterrestrial civilizations. Astronomy usually dealt with observing the universe’s natural phenomena. But this new field made the detection of technologically, or artificially produced radio waves, the object of a natural science.This field has continued today and is now called the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. SETI encompasses all that scientists do to search for intelligent life beyond Earth. It includes one of the original uses of radio telescopes: to study signals from across the galaxy in hopes of detecting intelligent messages.When the idea behind SETI was first proposed and pursued in the 1960s, only two countries, the U.S. and the USSR, had the technical capability for it. As the only space powers at the time, they were the key actors affected by radio frequency interference.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAs a historian of science, I’ve worked to make sense of what happened throughout the history of Soviet SETI during the space race by analyzing a range of primary sources. SETI captured t …
