Space: Mystery from Way Out

One of those far-out fantasies that have long been a staple of science fiction is now a serious subject for scientific discussion—with the Russians taking it to new extremes. Two unusual radio “stars,” wrote Astronomer Nikolai S. Kardashev in the Astronomical Journal of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, may be “supercivilizations” deep in space, calling attention to themselves by transmitting vast amounts of energy on peculiar, and therefore conspicuous, radio frequencies.

The two radio sources, catalogued as CTA-21 and CTA-102, were first detected by radio astronomers in 1960. Both are pinpoints in the sky, which means that they are either very small or very far away. But the most remarkable thing about them is the radio energy they emit: it is strongest at about 900 megacycles. This frequency, says Kardashev, is the best for longdistance space communication.

Spherical Shell. If the radio transmissions from CTA-21 and CTA-102 are actually attempts to communicate, they must come from supercivilizations with incredibly vast amounts of energy at their disposal. But this does not trouble Kardashev. He points out that the total energy generated on earth is only about 4 billion kw., which is only a tiny fraction of the energy transmitted by the two radio sources.

The earth, he says, has only a crude “Type One” civilization. If its energy output continues to grow at 3% to 4% per year, in a few thousand years it will become a “Type Two” civilization producing 400,000 billion kw. This is just about the amount of energy given off by the sun. It might be generated handily, Kardashev thinks, by a civilization clever enough to rearrange the matter from its planets into a spherical shell around its central star. The outside of such an artifact would give no light, but conceivably it could be made to transmit an enormous amount of radio-frequency energy.

Type Three. Are Type Two civilizations the highest peaks that life can reach? Not at all, says Kardashev. A properly ambitious form of superlife would not be satisfied with a single captive star; it would surely proceed to capture a whole galaxy containing billions of stars. Once it had control of an encapsulated galaxy, it would rank, says Kardashev, as a Type Three civilization and would probably try to communicate with other galaxies.

Many non-Soviet astronomers suspect that life may indeed be common in the universe, and if so, its higher centers may be trying to communicate with man’s young civilization on the earth, but few will accept Kardashev’s theory that CTA-21 and CTA-102 are actually stars hitched to radio transmitters. “Extremely unlikely” says U.S. Radio Astronomer Frank Drake of the National Radio Astronomy observatory in West Virginia. Drake admits that the signals from CTA-21 and CTA-102 are impossible to explain at present, but he does not consider them at all suitable for trans-space communication. For the present, he says, those signs must remain among the mysteries that abound in space.