It's a really fun book, in a world before the Internet, it would be an incredible thing to have, every chapter tells about a different (scientific, historical, theoretical) aspect of communication with aliens (SETI) and societal expectations that SETI was/is entangled with.
Having seen a whole bunch of Youtube videoessays about space I am confident in saying that there is a bunch of them covering the exact topics mentioned in the book and the book presented some of those topics with a bit more finesse than your average videoessay, the second chapter, for example, overlaps with the substance of this beautiful video, there's also a is chapter on the books of Däniken (a guy who's books laid the groundwork for the show Ancient Aliens in 2010), already this book in late 1970s the author debunks of several of Däniken's claims (about alien involvement in the paleolite megaprojects due to the falsifiable inability of humans to do them with the technology of the period).
Generally speaking, the book is an exciting and enjoyable popular science read that certainly stands at the level of the best videos on YouTube on the subject of interactions of humans and space (a thousand times better than Wendigoon, I would say at the level of the modern Trey the Explainer/LEMMiNO). Moreover, especially in the last chapter and in the postscript of the book containing a questionnaire filled by Soviet experts in the field, an incredible optimism about the field of space travel is seen, there is mention of the DEDALUS project (a model of an interstellar rocket from the 1970s, powered by nuclear explosions) and the estimates of that program, according to which if everything went as according to plans in 2015 we would have received signals from a space probe sent to Alpha Centauri, ehhh wasted potential (we did not send anything half as fun to the moon, let alone into the wider space in the last 50 years, Webb telescope is really cool techwise but it's way to close to us).
Source of this beautiful render
My favourite page from this book was this incredible timeline of events, presented in a book as unrealistic but with a "probably" and a few sentences about how young the field of cosmonautics is, and how much the world changed in the 30 years it did exist (exclamation marks kept from the original)
Also thrilling, stemming from the age of the book are such tidbits as the rough estimates about which we have irrefutable data nowadays (such as the number of planets near closest stars), or the cutting edge astronomical theories for the time that became public knowledge by today, seen for example in the paragraph about the black holes (in 1970s black holes were still on the border between respected theory and confirmed scientific knowledge and the naming convention of "black holes" wasn't big in the Eastern Bloc), the author calls them colapsars (and lists them next to quasars and pulsars).
The above is my review which I wrote at the end of June last year in my diary, I mostly added some flare and some links for it to fit the format of a book blog better, I bought this book at a nearby open market for the price of a packet of candy because of the funny name of the author, the enjoyable experience of reading this book annuled my acquired prejudice to reading as a whole (I had a young-adult book reading phase as a teenager but I came across the series “Vampirates” from the miserable dull experience of reading it the whole reading for pleasure as such been torn away from me), I very much appreciate this little book about aliens.
No one has ever scanned it, maybe one day I will, it is a book in Polish, a popular science author who died in 2008 and wrote in the People's Republic of Poland I found out by looking for the year of the first edition that the author did a book about something that care quite a lot and is a theme in the two other books I have read, the one about Nietzsche and the especially the one about Posadas, founding fathers of cosmonautics, people who were the beakons of unimaginable optimism about the future but in a different way than the futurists of this millennium were/are, those Moore's Law futurists or even those AI futurists capitulated to powerlessness in their ability to direct the transformative processes that are happening for revolutionary means (perhaps there is a similar conclusion here to what Fisher had), the era before sending humans into space was as much an era of unlimited optimism about what is possible as today but that unlimited optimism stemmed from the belief about what the human mind and cooperation are able to achieve first and foremost.
