Abstract
The modern era of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) was inaugurated some 35 years ago, with the seminal paper by Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison in 1959 (Cocconi and Morrison. Nature 184:844, 1959) and the Project Ozma search by Frank Drake in 1960. But even many SETI enthusiasts do not realize that this era of interstellar communication, as it was originally called, was preceded by a colorful era of interplanetary radio communication, involving radio pioneers including Nikola Tesla and Guglielmo Marconi. This era was filled with parallels, contrasts, and lessons for those interested in the survival of SETI in its current incarnation.
First published in The Planetary Report (January–February, 1995).
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Dick, S.J. (2020). Back to the Future: SETI before the Space Age. In: Space, Time, and Aliens. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41614-0_6
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