Bracewell probe
Sonda Bracewell
- Date
- 1960 · confidence high
- Place
- Stanford, California, United States
- Credited to
- Ronald N. Bracewell
- Field
- Movement
What it is
Proposal by Ronald N. Bracewell for an autonomous space probe that would travel to other star systems and wait there to communicate with extraterrestrial civilizations, avoiding the long delays of direct interstellar radio communication.
What it led to
- Conceptual alternative to radio telescopes in the search for extraterrestrial life (SETI)
- Influence on science fiction and the debate over self-replicating probes
- Later discussion of von Neumann probes