From distance(s) to civilization(s): (Extra) terrestrial intelligence(s) of (post-) Soviet Armenian astronomy

The distance(s) of (post-)Soviet time-space(s)

The grounding of extraterrestrial intelligence in the local, terrestrial existences and intelligences of the (post-)Soviet time-space represents one venue to further expand outer space knowledge toward a more accessible and diversified narrative. Outer space histories and extraterrestrial intelligence narratives of the Cold War (Basalla, 2006; Charbonneau, 2022; Dick, 1996, 2020) have only recently (Shorter & Tallbear, 2021) been challenged through outer space advancements in human geography, anthropology, sociology, and STS (Klinger, 2019; Messeri, 2016; Pass & Harrison, 2016; Vertesi, 2014). This article tells a story of how the Soviet present accessed the past—an ancient distant past—through astronomy, both terrestrially and extraterrestrially, by bringing in the post-positivist and integrative reconceptualization of basic notions in human geography (Simandan, 2016). More than three decades ago, in looking at the relationship between physical and human geography, scholars drew attention to the importance of thinking historically about how space and time are made through science (Massey, 1999). Such accessing of the past, as will be shown, is important for understanding the (post-)Soviet condition of the Armenian astronomical legacy. This article bridges a gap between the study of past and present outer space science in exploring scientists’ collective seeing of distances and distant civilizations. It complements the study of assumptions regarding civilizations and development in present Western-based radio astronomy’s engagement with extraterrestrial intelligence (Denning, 2006, 2011).

In the post-Soviet space contributions to radio astronomy’s engagement with extraterrestrial civilizations, we can access a postcolonial critique of development. Not only was nationality part of the Soviet project of ‘state-sponsored-evolutionism’ (Blinov, 2017; Hirsch, 2005), but science, the idea of civilization, and development played key roles in this project. Additionally, the postcolonial framework in the Soviet Union context is often contested (Beissinger, 2008; Koobak et al., 2021; Tlostanova, 2015). In looking at the Soviet/Armenian intelligentsia—the ‘social stratum of people who earn their living through intellectual labor’ (Antonyan, 2012)—the case study here complements (postcolonial) technoscience (Anderson, 2002; Hecht, 1998) and historiography of the Soviet periphery (see for example, Bekus, 2022; Guth et al., 2019; Rindzevičiūtė, 2008; Tatarchenko, 2016).

The study presented here engages with this scholarly junction by taking a stance close to that of Oskanian (2021), who showed how the imperial condition of Russia was maintained throughout its instantiations as the Russian Empire, the USSR, and the Russian Federation. In the same line of argument, the continuities between different space-time narratives and identities in Armenian science depict how Soviet Armenians were trained to see themselves as a scientific nation. Particularly, Soviet (Armenian) (extra)terrestrial civilizations reflected what historian Oskanian (2021) identified across periods in the (pre-/post-)Soviet space as ‘a strong sense of civilizational mission … intensified by totalizing universalist claims’. The Soviet legitimacy to claim the domain of extraterrestrial civilizations study enabled the tipping point for Armenians to retrieve national identity through scientific legacy (Bayadyan, 2011) across time.

Four categories of distance (spatial, temporal, social, and hypothetical) (Simandan, 2016) inform the (extra)terrestrial geographical imagination of Soviet (Armenian) astronomers. For them, terrestrial physical geography stood outside of time but equally was a witness to terrestrial civilization(s)’ time traversing. This imaginary crossed time between the Soviet and the post-Soviet-eras, drawing continuity in the Armenian identity. In the (post-)Soviet present imaginary, past (extra)terrestrial civilizations were rendered Armenian, while the hypothetical distance of the extra- was reduced to a temporal one. Astronomy’s alchemy of spatial-temporal distances (from unmeasurable to quantifiable and reachable) underpinned the study of extraterrestrial civilizations. In posing the question of contact with extraterrestrial civilizations as radio wave communication, astronomy allowed scientists to further conceptualize the physical-temporal distances as social and hypothetical. Soviet radio astronomers experienced civilizations as spatially distant—extraterrestrial—but the spatial distance was intrinsically linked with time—the time delay that it took for electromagnetic radiation to reach the terrestrial space of the present. By ‘traversing social distance’ (Simandan, 2016), astronomers envisioned contact with extraterrestrial civilizations and conceptualized (extra)terrestrial paths of development. Not least, the unidirectionality of development depicted a ‘debilitating historicism’ in which time was prioritized not only over space (Simandan, 2016) but also over the social and hypothetical aspects of distance.

The ancient Armenian legacy in the Soviet Union and today in light of extraterrestrial civilizations

In 1959, Cocconi and Morrison published an article in Nature, ‘Searching for interstellar communications’, which legitimated the idea that civilizations (terrestrial included) could communicate across interstellar space through radio astronomy. Iosif Shklovsky, an outspoken radio astronomy pioneer working at the Sternberg Institute in Moscow, was the first to develop Cocconi and Morrison’s ideas in the Soviet Union, by publishing an article (Shklovsky, 1960, 1963 in Russian, translated into English and included in a collection of articles), followed by a monograph in 1962 on extraterrestrial civilizations under the new radio astronomy framework (Shklovsky, 1962; Shklovsky & Sagan, 1966; see also Gindilis & Gurvits, 2019). Soon afterwards, his work inspired other scientists to prompt the organizing of a gathering: Shklovsky’s former student and colleague at the Sternberg Astronomical Institute, Nikolai Kardashev, put together an all-union conference on the problem of extraterrestrial civilizations and Shklovsky joined him.

BAO represented a fairly logical choice as the location of the conference. Throughout the Space Age—from the late 1950s until the mid-1970s—BAO stood as one of the most famous observatories in the Soviet Union, as Armenia contributed extensively to both space research and astronomy (Mickaelian & Mikayelyan, 2019, pp. 191–193; Petrosian & Gurzadyan, 1996). The fact that the legitimate study of distant civilizations manifested itself in Armenia as archeoastronomy is at least partially explained by the significance of astronomy and the status of BAO astronomers around the time of the 1964 conference on extraterrestrial civilizations. BAO was a most successful science development story—and the Soviet times represented ‘the Golden Age’—as Elma Parsamian emphasized when interviewed (5 October 2021). From this perspective, being an astronomer offered a lot of advantages—as a highly successful member of the scientific intelligentsia, an Armenian astronomer could travel extensively when invited abroad. As such, being a BAO astronomer allowed one to overcome the distance between the center (Moscow) and the periphery (Armenia) of the Soviet Union—which further translated into the privilege of traveling abroad. The epistemic access to (extra)terrestrial entities was coterminous with international mobility, a form of political and professional capital. Doing astronomy under Viktor Ambartsumian was associated with the highest achievement of Armenian science and culture. The traversing of physical distances came together with removing, if not reversing, the intellectual-scientific distance between Armenian periphery and Soviet center.

The ruling elite of the South Caucasian republic were ethnically Armenian, the population overall one of the most educated in the entire union, and its intelligentsia had substantial power (Suny, 2005). BAO was positioned near the center of this local power—Viktor Ambartsumian led the Republic’s Academy of Sciences and Arts almost during the same period as he led BAO. Overall, at the center of Soviet legacy lies the fact that Armenian astronomers, starting with Viktor Ambartsumian, BAO’s founding director between 1946 and 1988, were relatively both well-known abroad and privileged by the Soviet regime. Among other appointments, Ambartsumian was vice president from 1948-56, and in 1961–63 became president, of the International Astronomical Union, while in 1968 he became president of the International Council of Scientific Unions (see McCutcheon, 1987; Mickaelian, 2008; Trimble et al., 2014, pp. 65–67).

Recalling the events decades later, Shklovsky invoked however a deeper significance associated with BAO:

[W]e wanted to hold it at the Byurakan [Astrophysical] Observatory. Such a rare conference had to take place against the background of the ancient stones of Armenia, witness to bygone civilizations, and within the view of the dazzling beauty of Mount Ararat. (Shklovsky, 1991, p. 254)

In this imagery, the visually perceivable spatial distance to Mount Ararat served as a reference to a distant past in which knowledge represented a defining feature of Armenian ethos. Mount Ararat, located across the border, in Turkey, has been an enduring totem of Armenian (likewise enduring) identity since the Genocide in 1915. Its visual omnipresence is twofold; Armenians can see the mountain from countless locations, due to the local physical geography and the representations of Ararat in culture accompany everyday life (Abrahamian, 2007). The active workings of Armenian symbolism of Ararat later inspired American physicist Freeman Dyson—an early contributor to theories on detecting signs of technological presence in the Universe—to reproduce a similar narrative to Shklovsky. Dyson traveled to Armenia in 1971 to attend the Soviet-American Conference on Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence at BAO. There he noticed Yerevan’s ‘monuments recording the achievements of an ancient civilization’ (Dyson, 1992, p. 426; Figure 2).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Mount Ararat, seen from Yerevan (picture taken by the author, August, 2021).

Just as in the Soviet-era, both a Russian-based and a US scientist subscribed to a narrative grounding Armenians as a cultured nation from time immemorial. The recent Armenian Museum of Moscow (opened in 2015) and the Culture of Nations speaks not only to a significant Armenian diaspora, but also represents Armenians to those (Russian, Armenians, or other Russian language speakers) in Russia—all post-socialist inhabitants of the former center of the Soviet Union. The museum’s official blog depicts a cluster of identity traits manifested specifically in the Soviet period of the 1964 extraterrestrial civilizations conference. It matches the particular image of ancient Armenian civilizational legacy active among the Soviet astronomers’ scientific intelligentsia, which Shklovsky expressed, and Dyson later reproduced:

All over the world, Armenia is associated with ancient history, millennial archaeological and cultural monuments, with a culture that has passed dozens of centuries and has not fallen under the blows of numerous conquerors and enemies. However, few people know that a few decades ago this country was a real center for the study of extraterrestrial civilizations. After all, it was here that the most advanced platform for the study of space appeared—the Byurakan [Astrophysical] Observatory. (Evstratov, 2019)

The blog post hints at the temporal dimension of distance: the thread between (post-)Soviet identity as a present and a long dureé-based identity—how the past was and is signified in the present—the stories that scientists tell and told about the past. Armenians have ‘traditionally put the ancient period of their history at the core of their self-image’ (Herzig & Kurkchiyan, 2005). Studies in Armenian archeoastronomy debuted in the mid-1960s in the context of a relaxation of the Soviet regime. As Armenologist Suny (2005) observed, looking at their own past was at the center of ‘growing cultural self-awareness’ for Armenians during this period. A generalized intellectual and parallel national liberation emerged, peaking in 1965 with pressures for Moscow government to recognize the Genocide. Despite the lack of a record on the scientific intelligentsia’s positioning toward the national dissident movement, there is a general agreement that every Armenian national supported it.

Radio astronomy and its epistemology of distance

At the 1964 All-Union conference, with Mount Ararat as a backdrop, radio astronomy brought extraterrestrial civilizations into a new light—literally. Astronomers have traditionally gained information through light waves situated in the optical part of the electromagnetic spectrum. But light existed and was emitted in all ranges of the spectrum in the Universe. Radio telescopes expanded the human possibilities of seeing the Universe. What became known as classical or optical astronomy—after the appearance of, and to distinguish it from, radio astronomy—had traditionally served as an extension of the human eye. Optical telescopes functioned in principle as a more powerful human eye, perceiving the same light waves as the human eye. With the advent of radio astronomy—attempted in the interwar period but developed into a field from the late 1940s onwards—the range of electromagnetic waves or signals that telescopes captured expanded. Soviet radio astronomy is considered to have started in 1946 with the theoretical work of both V.L. Ginzburg (who came to support CETI later, not least by taking part in the 1971 conference) and no other than I. Shklovsky (Salomonovich, 2004). Invisible entities became ‘visible’ (Sullivan, 2009). With the new astronomical instruments, scientists dealt empirically with unprecedented distances, while the knowledge of distances deeply depended on time delay. The non-optical part of the light, once received and interpreted through the new technology of radio astronomy, could offer information on much more distant objects and places in the Universe than before without being absorbed by the interstellar medium.

Extraterrestrial intelligence rested on radio astronomy’s ability to surpass distances. Radio telescopes captured naturally occurring radio light from stars, galaxies, black holes, and other astronomical objects emitted up to billions of years ago. The development of technologies capable of receiving and interpreting non-visible light (electromagnetic radiation) turned the unseen extraterrestrial intelligence into an object that astronomy could get its telescopes on. The human possibility of receiving and transmitting the quickest traveling entity in the Universe—light—increased with the advent of radio astronomy. Light provided not only the quickest but also the most economical means of communication (Shklovsky & Sagan, 1966, p. 380). This inspired Cornell University physicists Cocconi and Morrison (1959) to theorize which part of the entire electromagnetic spectrum or what kind of light waves civilizations could and would use to send signals over interstellar distances among them and to offer a plausible solution. Their work triggered a widespread interest among (radio) astronomers (Charbonneau, 2021) leading to extraterrestrial intelligence gathering scientists at BAO (Gindilis, 2012, p. 99), as the Soviet Academy of Sciences and its Armenian counterpart put together the conference. Over a hundred publications had been issued since Cocconi and Morrison first launched the idea of interstellar communications with extraterrestrial intelligence as Shklovsky emphasized (in Tovmasyan, 1967, p. 4). In 1964 the topic of extraterrestrial civilizations, though not new to humanity, only recently ‘began to receive legitimate scientific attention’ (Shklovsky, in Tovmasyan, 1967, p. 5).

My reading of these points of Soviet scientists in the context of the conference is that the collapse of astronomical distances was therefore not an isolated monodisciplinary epistemic triumph, but quite the contrary. First, extraterrestrial civilizations were taken on board by a discipline grounded on a well-fought overcoming of criticism (Jarrell, 2005), through the successful joining of disciplines, more precisely radiophysics and astrophysics. As US radio astronomer Verschuur (2007, p. 1), who searched for extraterrestrials at the beginning of the 1970s, has explained: ‘The story of radio astronomy is a tale of the constant quest to express in clearer visual forms the information carried by radio waves’. Second, radio astronomy served as the main element of a series of science and technology advances contributing to the rising interest in extraterrestrial civilizations. According to Shklovsky (in Tovmasyan, 1967, p. 5), at the time of the conference, recent achievements in astrophysics, radio astronomy, cybernetics, molecular biology ‘and the related sciences’ underpinned the pursuit of extraterrestrial civilizations. The success of the conference—the interest rose ‘sharply’ as a result (Shklovsky, 1991, p. 290)—attested to a triumph of radio astronomy in proving the legitimacy of their new object of inquiry.

The adoption of extraterrestrial civilizations by radio astronomy brought with it the aim of even more communication between separate scientific disciplines. According to Shklovsky, the ‘development of special scientific disciplines on nature and society’ made a critical difference in what he called ‘the inception of a new science’ occupying a ‘boundary position between astrophysics, biology, engineering, and even sociology’ (in Tovmasyan, 1967, p. 5). Extraterrestrial intelligence, once an object of radio astronomy, took interdisciplinarity to a new level, including ‘even sociology’. The radio astronomy conference recognized its object of inquiry as transgressing the limits of astronomy and natural sciences. One linguist, Alexey Gladkii, who had been invited to give a talk, argued that one should assume that the content of a message between civilizations would contain the sum of knowledge of the transmitting one. He also argued for the necessity of the development of a corresponding theory of language equal to the studying of the process of learning as part of cosmic linguistics (Gladkii, in Tovmasyan, 1967, pp. 95–96).

The realization of the interdisciplinarity imagined by Shklovsky fell short of reach, however. Except for Gladkii, the other presenters and participants were astronomers, engineers, and more generally trained in physical sciences. There is no hint in the historical records of other disciplines and non-physical scientists engaging in the 1964 event. Moreover, Gladkii’s approach to linguistics came from mathematical training rather than humanities: he worked at the Institute of Mathematics at the Siberian Department of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Novosibirsk. In essence, although Gladkii acknowledged that there might be other mathematics, and more broadly other kinds of terrestrially unconceived knowledge, he stayed within a frame of reference provided by physical scientists. All in all, Shklovsky’s wording ‘even sociology’ captured the conundrum of the conference: Radio astronomy had opened up the possibility of communication with extraterrestrial civilizations, but what exactly one would expect from such an entity, no one knew.

Informed by the still vague but nonetheless underlying interdisciplinarity, the new astronomy of physical entities affirmed and drew attention to the scale of the Universe and the possible encounters between civilizations, and equally created the epistemic conditions for contact in the form of communication. By the time of the conference, the Universe had morphed into a mappable territory; ‘[R]adio astronomers have become highly proficient in the detection and analysis of radio sources in space, up to distances of billions of light-years.’ And the ‘visible’ Universe, with the expansion of the telescopic vision, comprised 100 billion galaxies and 10 to the power of 20 stars (Ambartsumian, in Tovmasyan, 1967, p. vii). As Gindilis (1965, p. 18) wrote a few months later in the Soviet magazine for the popularization of science, Earth and the Universe: ‘life can occur and intelligence can develop’ in this space. The estimation—‘very crude and hypothetical’—as the conference attendants agreed, was that: ‘one civilization should occur each 10^8-17th stars. The mean distances between civilizations are therefore not less than a few hundreds of light years, and possibly even thousands of light years.’ (Ambartsumian, in Tovmasyan, 1967, p. vii). The possibility of sending radio signals into the cosmos and of reaching out to civilizations across the Universe created a domain of interstellar distances. This circumscribed the epistemic domain of extraterrestrial civilizations. In the language of infrastructure (Blok et al., 2016), electromagnetic highways provided the infrastructure for crossing interstellar distances at the quickest speed, the speed of light.

The points discussed at the conference established the prospect of interstellar communications as the most promising means to know of other extraterrestrial civilizations. Such a means transformed contact into a question of distance as understood by radio astronomy and contrasted with the traditionally envisaged means of contact. The possibility of interstellar trips was considered ‘not promising’, ‘unfeasible at the present-day level of technological development’ and ‘without any future’ (Shklovsky, in Tovmasyan, 1967, p. 8). Nonphysical, electromagnetic communications replaced direct physical contact between civilizations as a hegemonic narrative of astronomers’ hope for knowledge of other intelligence in the Universe. A real-time contact turned into a time-delayed communication scenario. Astronomers could only know of the past of an extraterrestrial civilization through their electromagnetic traces. Nonvisible entities displaced the visible physical extraterrestrial that one could encounter through space travel. As an electromagnetic radiation space vanguard, astronomers gave themselves exclusive access to extraterrestrial civilizations and more specifically, to the past of these civilizations.

From distance to distant civilizations: Unidirectionality of development and disparity

One overarching ability—and inherent limitation—of an astronomy expanded into the non-visible ranges of light had significant reverberations upon the object of extraterrestrial civilizations, and this became visible at the 1964 BAO conference. The radio map of the Universe inevitably represented the past of widely aged cosmic entities. The further one reached, the older the information would be. The detailed analysis of radio sources and the kind of surveys of the sky that one should carry out to find extraterrestrial civilizations was accompanied by brainstorming on an interdisciplinary working framework for extraterrestrial civilizations (Gindilis, 2012, p. 99). Astronomers considered how the variety in ages of cosmic objects impacted the possibility of communication with extraterrestrial civilizations. From that emerged the notion of ‘disparity’, arising from the fact that ‘ages of planets may differ by as much as millions of years’ and, due to the long distances, different civilizations might differ by millions of years in their respective development. In this sense ‘there should be an enormous disparity between EC [extraterrestrial civilizations]’), and communication with EC was intrinsically a problem of ‘communication between civilizations on entirely different levels of development’ (Ambartsumian, in Tovmasyan, 1967, p. 3).

The fact that any signs of intelligence would be an artifact of the past had epistemic consequences in defining extraterrestrial civilizations. The way one knew a civilization became a question of distance that was at once temporal, spatial, and intellectual—the three were inseparable. The estimation of the distance-time delay transformed itself into a marker of the extraterrestrial civilizations themselves. For civilizations to have already sent signals that terrestrials could detect, their technology had to be much more powerful than the contemporary human technological capabilities and situated at much longer distances even than earlier thought. American astronomer Frank Drake, who famously had put into practice the ideas of Cocconi and Morrison in 1960, failed to find any civilizations, Shklovsky argued, because he assumed a similar level of development between terrestrials and extraterrestrials (in Tovmasyan, 1967, p. 9). Instead, according to Shklovsky, extraterrestrials were much more developed and spread across a larger space. This renewed multitude of distances and types of civilizations demanded a more thorough consideration from radio astronomers.

The lack of a unanimous or explicit definition of ‘development’ reflected the assumptions of scientists as they further transferred time scales of celestial bodies to extraterrestrial civilizations. Disparity and development, which referred in the first instance to the possibility of transmitting and receiving electromagnetic signals across interstellar space, became larger than themselves. Nikolai Kardashev presented his classification of civilizations according to the amount of energy they could deploy—of their planet, of their solar system, of their galaxy—mirrored the scales with which astronomers dealt regularly. ⁵ His clearcut schema stayed within the shortcomings of the 1964 BAO conference: ‘When the question of interstellar communications is raised, this topic [evolution of intelligent life in the Universe] inevitably acquires exceptional sociological significance’ (Tovmasyan, 1967, p. vii). Viktor Ambartsumian tuned into a narrative of the directionality of development by establishing an epistemic and evolutionary continuum between biology and technology. He considered development and evolution closely related in that biological evolution might lead to other types of civilizations’ ‘careers’ such as ‘cybernetic machines and automata’ (in Tovmasyan, 1967, p. 2). Altogether, ideas around the question of ‘levels of development’ made technological capabilities clear markers that obviated any need of further definition.

The managing of diversely distant cosmic worlds became epistemically valuable for the characterization of civilizations. For Shklovsky, ‘of cardinal significance is the duration of the psychozoic era (the age of intelligent life) on any given planet (we denote this duration by t)’ (Shklovsky, in Tovmasyan, 1967, p. 7). According to Shklovsky, most scientists both inside and outside of the USSR agreed that ‘the age of intelligence is definitely shorter than the cosmogonic time scale’ or that ‘civilizations tended to destroy themselves after a while when reaching the nuclear or the communication stage’ (in Tovmasyan, 1967, p. 5). Not everyone at the conference agreed and some even reacted very harshly—most notably the head of the Radio Astronomy Council of the USSR himself—accusing Shklovsky of destroying civilizations before one started to look for them (Kotelnikov, in Tovmasyan, 1967, p. 14). However, the frame of discussion within which scientists stayed assumed the universal desirability of a unidirectional development. The unidirectionality assumption embraced by everyone was that with time, technology and the presence/activity would increase for a civilization. This was valid not only for extraterrestrial civilizations but ‘unrestrained expansion of human activity throughout the entire near-solar space is an inevitability, culminating in the creation of an artificial biosphere some 10-15 orders of magnitude greater than the natural habitat of man’ (Shklovsky, in Tovmasyan, 1967, p. 7). Instead of explicit definitions, an implicit scientific-technological frame of mind spread across the terrestrial intelligentsia spectrum for talking about advancement, moving forward, and development.

The assumption of the unidirectionality of development shows how scientists transformed the means of contact with extraterrestrial intelligence (radio astronomy) into characteristics projected onto civilizations. Extraterrestrial civilizations had to be able to transmit or detect the kind of electromagnetic signals that the new radio astronomy dealt with. But this further translated into a defining characteristic meaning that the civilizations became inherently astronomical and driven by terrestrially similar scientific and technological paths of development, as seen by the Soviet radio astronomers belonging to a larger scientific intelligentsia. Extraterrestrial civilizations, having reached and passed the communication stage, were astronomical civilizations, and more specifically radio astronomical civilizations. The development of radio astronomy was a reference point the ‘communication stage’, used to extrapolate characteristics from humans onto extraterrestrials and to understand the ‘level(s) of development’ of extraterrestrials.

Terrestrial civilizations and parity: Armenian (archeo)astronomy

A terrestrial disparity manifested as Russian-based institute representatives traversed terrestrial distances to Armenia to accommodate extraterrestrial intelligence. The ‘all-union’ conference gathered participants working at institutes in two republics. Although Armenia’s support for the legitimization of the research on extraterrestrial intelligence at the level of the USSR Academy of Sciences was genuine, the South Caucasian Republic did not contribute per se to this field. The role of the two Armenian presenters at the conference, though engaged, seems rather formal or circumstantial. The director of the observatory, Viktor Ambarstumian, showed a profound but armchair understanding of the issue of extraterrestrial civilizations. The head of radio astronomy at Byurakan and the second in rank in the role of organizers of the conference from Armenia’s side, Hrant Tovmasyan, proposed an empirical project that no one took one inch further towards realization (personal communication, 6 June 2021). The difference between the center-based participants (in Russia) and the periphery-based participants (in Armenia) mirrored cosmic disparity in this major regard.

Working through this terrestrial disparity, the Armenian conference participants conversed with the Russian scholars of distant extraterrestrial civilizations. Armenian physical scientists E. Mirzabekyan, G. Aivazyan, and P. Herouni all asked Kardashev particular questions: the criteria for artificiality, the distances to the sources analyzed, and the time to complete a survey of the sky in search of artificial signals (in Tovmasyan, 1967, p. 28). Overall, the interventions in the discussions from Soviet Armenian scientists were various. Not all of them pointed to an immediate and hopeful pursuit of extraterrestrial intelligence. Mirzabekyan expressed skepticism about the human resources’ capabilities required to come close to a finding of an extraterrestrial civilization, however he did validate communication with extraterrestrial intelligence as ‘clearly a scientific problem’ (Mirzabekyan, in Tovmasyan, 1967, p. 50). By the end of the conference, Mirzabekyan seemed more optimistic:

It seems to me so far that identification of artificial signals is no problem. As regards information, call signals themselves are a mine of information: they give notice of the existence of a transmitting civilization, and also indicate that this civilization is sufficiently advanced to try to establish contact with others. … This information is clearly of enormous scientific and philosophical importance. (Mirzabekyan, in Tovmasyan, 1967, p. 89)

Armenian space scientist Grigor Gurzadyan reacted first to Shklovsky’s estimation of the scarce possibility of finding intelligent civilizations. He was more upbeat about contact with extraterrestrial civilizations than the pioneer of radio astronomy’s extraterrestrial civilizations:

I do not understand why …. I.S. Shklovskii has quoted 10^4th years as the lifetime of a civilization on a particular planet or in the planetary system of a particular primary. Why not take a billion years, which is closer to the age of the primary? Insofar as we are unable to fix the reasons and factors, either natural or artificial, which may set a limit to the lifetime of a plenary civilization, the probability of finding alien civilizations on nearby stars should increase markedly. This may substantially modify the considerations presented in I.S. Shklovskii’s paper. (Gurzadyan, in Tovmasyan, 1967, p. 22)

Notably, physicist Paris Herouni (in Tovmasyan, 1967, p. 90) made final remarks on the technicalities of a search in terms of equipment that could be adapted terrestrially. All of this shows that the object of distant extraterrestrial civilizations that the scientists based at Russian institutes preoccupied themselves with resonated with Armenian scientists.

In spite of the disparity, the active participation of BAO astronomers resulted in a knowledge transfer from the center (Russia) to the periphery (Armenia). Armenian astronomical resonance with a distant civilization manifested itself terrestrially soon after the conference. As alien as the pursuit of extraterrestrial civilizations was from the everyday epistemic radar of BAO astronomers, another distant civilization preoccupied some. The intelligent skills provided by astronomy offered the prerequisites but also the legitimacy to transform the Armenian ancient civilization into one that activated in the domain of astronomy. Two of the Armenian physicists at the 1964 conference contributed to archeoastronomy substantially in the aftermath of the event: physicist and engineer Paris Herouni and astrophysicist Elma Parsamian. Parsamian, who was the first in this sense, recalled:

I had a vacation in the summer and I became very interested generally in history, and archeology and asked a friend to send me on an archaeological expedition. I went not far from Yerevan, 34 kilometers away, where Metsamor is. … I was shown a very interesting rock on which there were marked carved star signs that were repeated four times and this interested me very much as an astronomer. … in the first moment, I understood—I asked this boy to go and bring a compass—and I immediately realized that these rocks were oriented north-south and these signs were oriented east-west. I realized that there is astronomy there. … I started to make a measurement, I started calculating all kinds of mathematical formulas and showed that with a high probability that around thousand years BC what kind of star was observed here. My study has shown that this star coincides with the rising of Sirius. Sirius is the brightest star in the northern hemispheres—the likelihood is high that it was observed … [by] those people who lived at that time on the territory of Armenia, that is, the ancient Armenians. Then in 1968 at the large forum of the Astronomical Union in Prague, I made a big report on this. And then I solved the problem. (personal communication, 2 October 2021)

The epistemic confidence that Parsamian expressed in tackling archeoastronomy mirrors the epistemic confidence of radio astronomers and other natural scientists in the pursuit of communication with extraterrestrial intelligence:

The development of cybernetics, general theory of language, and modern mathematical techniques provide the necessary tools for tackling the general features of information transmission and reception between civilizations and for an objective analysis of coded signals. (Tovmasyan, 1967, p. vii)

The epistemic process of bringing the ancient Armenian distant past onto the radar of Soviet astrophysics at the time, as recalled by Parsamian, resembles in a few ways the legitimizing of extraterrestrial civilizations by radio astronomers. Parsamian’s interest in history and her skills as an astronomer sufficed to propel the study of archeoastronomy to the intersection of humanities and natural sciences. She expressed no doubt about entering the epistemic theater of the distant past of Armenians. Moreover, defining ancient Armenian civilization as an astronomical civilization mirrored the astronomization of extraterrestrial civilizations. Parsamian recalled the resistance she encountered at the beginning, especially from the archeologists and the historians but in the end ‘they took in everything I said’ (personal communication, 2 October 2021). Parsamian’s study about Metsamor attracted international support leading to letters of congratulations such as the letter of the University of Boston Astronomy Department Head addressed to Viktor Ambartsumian (BAO archives).

Today a narrative emphasizing the importance of this mid-1960s archeoastronomy is still present: ‘The important discovery, which enriched our knowledge of ancient astronomy in Armenia, was the complex of platforms for astronomical observations on the Small Hill of Metsamor, which may be called an ancient observatory’, contended Parsamian (2018). Rediscovering the ancient inhabitants of Armenia as a civilization that took part in the formation of ancient astronomy was the result of the exclusive epistemic access of Soviet astronomers to a distant terrestrial civilization relevant to them. In the 1980s, Parsamian and Herouni, independently of one another, further discovered that the ancient stone monument at Karahunj also served as an astronomical facility. Since then, Armenians have described it by comparison to the prehistoric stone formation at Stonehenge in England (Belmonte, 2015, pp. 139–140; González-García, 2015, p. 1453)—long studied for its connection with ancient astronomy—pointing to its similar or older age (Herouni, 1998, 2004; Parsamian, 2018). Herouni in the 1980s even went as far as abandoning natural sciences and dedicating himself to the study of ancient Armenian civilization. Not without importance, this happened after building the first radio optical telescope in the world—ROT-54/2.6 in Orgov, about an hour away from Byurakan. On its premises, in front of the entrance to the main building facility, Herouni placed a reproduction of an ancient solar calendar.

Today, the intersections between humanities, culture, and astronomy extend beyond archeoastronomy in Armenia as continued by the BAO scientists (Mickaelian & Farmanyan, 2021). BAO recently founded the Research Department ‘Historical-Cultural Astronomy’ and in 2017 hosted the Symposium on Astronomical Heritage in the Middle East (Farmanyan et al., 2019). When asked about any connections between the early preoccupations of BAO astronomers with ancient history and astronomy in Armenia, the current director of BAO Areg Mickaelian, who established the new department, replied: ‘I can just imagine that Ambartsumian [the founder and director of BAO from 1946 until 1988] would [have] lik[ed] to have such a department’ (personal communication, 27 September 2021). Broadly, the legacy of Armenia as a center for space research in the Soviet period presents itself to the public in the Space Research Museum in Yerevan today. Mickaelian emphasized (personal communication, 2 July 2021) that Armenia is one of the few countries to have a museum for space research, thereby attesting to the narrative of (Soviet) Armenian pride through outer space science. The Historical-Cultural Astronomy Department and the Yerevan Space Museum as knowledge intelligentsia memory repositories, thereby both draw temporal continuity with a Soviet-era (self)representation.

Yerevan’s Space Research Museum retains distance in more ways from other terrestrial realities. Situated far from Yerevan’s center, which hosts all the other museums, it started in the small town of Gyumri, a three-hour drive from Yerevan. The museum currently occupies the modest floor of a building that hosts another one-floor Museum of Science and Technology. Though separate entities, their connection resides in more than a shared building on the outskirts of Yerevan. Together, the museums replay a connecting narrative between the Space Era legacy and the millennial heritage of Armenian preoccupation with knowledge. In the Museum of Science and Technology, the distance between disciplines, and between historical periods, collapses particularly in the depiction of the image of Karahunj. The museum placed the image of Karahunj alongside pictures of monasteries attesting to the millennial tradition of the Armenian Christian Church, the second oldest after Ethiopia. Once, Armenian monasteries housed knowledge centers for the local civilization (Figure 3). ⁶

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

Karahunj stones along with ancient Armenian monasteries in the Science and Technology Museum, Yerevan (picture taken by the author, July 2021).

The epistemic access to distant terrestrial civilizations shows how the Soviet and the ancient past of Armenia validate(d) one another. Unlike Mount Ararat’s symbolism, where physical distance signals loss, the astronomical legacy reflects a contribution (and thereby gain) to the Armenian condition. Moving between the 1960s and an (ancient) past was valuable in maintaining a continuum to the present day in the national identity of Armenian astronomers:

We had a very homogeneous observatory of Armenian nationality because this is not such an astronomical observatory where you can just work very little, and not wake up and be distracted. This is Armenia—it’s not easy. It’s not that I praise my people. But this is what the people withstood to lose their homeland. (interview, 2 October 2021)

Parsamian equates the hardship of being a (Soviet) astronomer to the hardship endured throughout history by Armenians. The hardship of astronomy is part of a hardship associated more generally with science: ‘It’s hard. … This is the kind of life that is connected by science’ (interview, 2 October 2021). For Parsamian, identifying oneself as part of the astronomical/scientific intelligentsia involves the recognition that astronomy is difficult but also highly important as it provides continuity for the Armenian people (interview, 5 October 2021). The access to a distant terrestrial civilization for Soviet astronomers allowed them to relate their scientific activity and their lives to a larger narrative of Armenian history. As such, they moved toward terrestrial parity between a Soviet and Armenian collective identity understood as an ancient astronomical civilization.

Conclusion: Mobilizing epistemology

The 1964 conference grounded a category of ‘distant civilizations’, which reverberated into the domain of Armenian archeoastronomy, where a national identity was at stake. During the ‘Golden Age of radio astronomy’ from 1960 to 1975 (Verschuur, 2007, p. 22), distant civilizations legitimized themselves both on and off Earth, pointing to an epistemic continuum. As distance transformed itself from an impediment to contact into an inherent characteristic of (thereby distant) civilizations, it projected an epistemic encouragement. That is, scientists at BAO had participated in a precedent set by the 1964 conference to study distant astronomical civilizations. The exponential diversification of time delay which came with the astronomers’ access to the non-visible part of the spectrum translated into a multitude of pasts for civilizations. This apparent disparity did not set scientists back. The working framework and assumptions regarding distant civilizations created parity between terrestrial and extraterrestrial, as well as between present and past. The collapse of astronomical distances, in giving Armenian scientists epistemic access to archeoastronomy, was also accompanied by stories of development to which radio astronomers subscribed. All in all, the Armenian story of extraterrestrial intelligence/intelligentsia depicts how astronomers reconsidered distances and existences both on and off Earth.

That the scientific intelligentsia in Armenia could mobilize such epistemological prerequisites is an example of the lack of a ‘monolithic’ approach of the ruling party of the Soviet Union toward science (Andrews & Siddiqi, 2011, p. 2). BAO’s (archeo)astronomers explored an interdisciplinary territory legitimated by radio astronomy’s foundations for the study of extraterrestrial civilizations, further legitimated by the USSR Academy of Sciences. By claiming that to be Armenian was to belong to a science-oriented and cultured nation, (archeo)astronomers transferred the Soviet Armenian present into a moment in a temporal continuum of ancient origin. Science more generally served as a nationalizing resource in Soviet Armenia. Thereby, the conversion of the physical notion of distance at the center of radio astronomy epistemology into a characteristic of extraterrestrial civilizations was epistemically promising for Armenian astrophysicists concerned with their history.

The findings of this article speak for the Armenian stellar intelligentsia’s contributions to the rising national sense of identity in Soviet Armenia. Making ancient Armenia an astronomical civilization enabled BAO’s intelligentsia to join the generalized ethos of a national dissident movement from a position of privilege. Space science and astronomy were capital at the disposal of the Armenian intelligentsia to counteract Moscow’s All-Soviet policies when these went against national interests at the periphery. By landing distant civilizations terrestrially, Armenians appropriated them as a part of a local history that served as capital for national revival.

The scope of the imaginary binding an Armenian ancient legacy with a scientific preoccupation with the stars extends beyond archeoastronomy, Soviet conferences on extraterrestrials, and BAO’s image. At the time of drafting the first version of this article (July 2022), the international festival of science communication Starmus - with astronomy at the center - is under preparation to take place (in September 2022) in Armenia for the first time. The complex agency of narratives that bind the terrestrial and the extraterrestrial by collapsing time-space distances is more than ever present, calling for historical inquiries into Armenia’s past. By bringing in analytical tools from humanities and social sciences to understudied historical episodes, one can shed light on contextual transdisciplinary stakes as well as on the implications of accompanying assumptions. Ultimately, this article offered a productive venue for inverting the vantage point of the current historiography of radio astronomy’s engagement with extraterrestrial intelligence. It turned the question of the absence of a phenomenon seen from this vantage point—why Armenia did not develop radio astronomy’s extraterrestrial intelligence—into a presence one—what Armenia did make out of radio astronomy’s extraterrestrial intelligence.