Martian channels: Imagining interplanetary communication at the dawn of the radio age
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1899 radio pioneer Nikola Tesla claimed to have received a wireless transmission from the planet Mars, which not only confirmed the existence of intelligent life but also invited a response. The public was immediately captivated by the idea that Mars was attempting to communicate with the Earth, and this widespread fascination reflected not only a belief in the existence of extraterrestrial life but also a notion of radio as a transnational medium that could potentially unite the world by making terrestrial borders obsolete. It may seem strange, therefore, that this fascination culminated in Orson Welles’ famous radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds, in which radio was represented not as a medium of interplanetary communication but rather as an emergency broadcast system that warned Americans of an extraterrestrial invasion. Through a closer examination of the history of the idea of interplanetary communication, this article explores how radio was initially conceived as a medium that transgressed social, political and linguistic boundaries and how this utopian promise was later displaced by the idea of radio as a medium that served to construct and reinforce national borders and identities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".