The Far-Seeing Cyclops: How SETI Promised to Save the World

In 1971, Barney Oliver and John Billingham led a NASA-funded research study aimed at designing an instrument for conducting the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). The proposed instrument, a colossal array of 2,500 radio telescopes, was called Project Cyclops. The instrument was never built, but not for lack of trying. Oliver and Billingham worked to further an argument, common among SETI researchers, that a successful detection would mean more than we are not alone in the universe--it would prove that our nuclear age, the period at which our technology could occasion our annihilation, was survivable. Humanity could yet be redeemed by the mere presence of the far-off alien. All this talk of redemption and apocalypse certainly smacks of religion, and this talk will attempt to unpack the leveraging of this rhetoric and make a case for why something like Project Cyclops belongs in the domain of religious studies.