Byurakan Conference

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In 1964, the Byurakan Conference was held at the Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory in Armenia. It was organized by the young Soviet scientist Nikolai Kardashev and gathered many Soviet astronomers to review what we know about searching for life beyond Earth and how we might communicate with intelligent beings using the technology of the time.

Kardashev had been part of a SETI research group in Moscow since 1962. The 1964 Soviet conference was a response to the 1961 Green Bank Conference in the United States, which aimed to find practical and linguistic ways to communicate with a civilization more advanced than ours.

At Byurakan, Kardashev presented his ideas, including a way to classify civilizations. Troitskii suggested that it might be possible to detect signals from other galaxies. Kardashev’s work drew a lot of attention. He argued that within 5–10 years scientists would have mapped the main sources of radiation across the spectrum, since listening devices were reaching their limits. He thought the whole electromagnetic spectrum would be understood and that searches would then focus on the brightest or most massive objects, or on sources making up most of the matter in the universe.

As early as 1971, Kardashev said there was a need for a clear plan to listen and analyze data to search for extraterrestrial civilizations and to address the famous Fermi paradox—the question of why we don’t yet see obvious signs of alien life. He believed that searches like the Ozma project could not detect a Type I civilization, and that SETI should aim for strong radio signals from more advanced Type II or III civilizations.

To test his ideas, Kardashev looked at two radio sources found by Caltech, CTA-21 and CTA-102. Gennadii Sholomitskii studied CTA-102 and found that it varied in brightness. Kardashev saw this variability as a possible sign of artificial emission, though it could also have natural explanations and a short lifetime.