Communications From Superior Galactic Communities

Communications From Superior Galactic Communities
Prof. R.N. Bracewell
Nature, vol. 186, no. 4726, May 28, 1960, pp 670-671

Here in the 21st Century, this paper still seems fantastic, but it was probably meant seriously when it was written, in 1960.

I found a PDF of this three page, six bibliography item paper, and it is bursting with ideas.

There are lots of good sci fi ideas in it, maybe even precursors to Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon The Deep, or the Monolith in A. C. Clarke’s 2001 if you squint. Throw in Bussard’s 1960 Astronautica Acta paper Galactic Matter and Interstellar Flight and you’ve got Larry Niven’s Known Space.

Bracewell gives a wink and a nod to the Fermi Paradox without naming it directly. He solves it by having Superior Galactic Communities leaving a watcher in orbit around likely star systems near to theirs. The paper has a few sentences devoted to how we would go about recognizing such a watcher, and mentions that signals resembling what a watcher would put out have been noted as early as 1928.

The watcher is darned close to Robert Freitas' self-reproducing interstellar probe. Bracewell’s description should have started a search for extraterrestrial artifacts program, but somehow, did not.

Bracewell takes it almost as a given that most or all stars have planets, citing low stellar angular momentum. I do not remember reading this hypothesis at all. The idea of exoplanets existing at all was pretty fantastical until very recently.