Are We Missing Alien Lighthouses? (universetoday.com)

This is an interesting article about how a spacefaring alien civilization might communicate across light years to its colonies on distant stars. SETI has looked for space “lighthouses” that can signal distant stars, but it has searched for laser light signals that last only a femtosecond and can outshine a star for brief periods. This because that is basically a technology we have figured out theoretically. Researchers Dániel Apai, Chia-Lung Lin, and Kevin Wagner, suggest that we should instead start looking for long-duration pulsing interstellar beacons in the micro- to milli-second range, as this method would be much less complex and less costly. Aliens could use this method to keep data transfer at a reasonable pace across the light years. However, the bottleneck for that type of transmission technology is light interference from the local star, which would outshine the pulsing beacons. So the civilization would probably put such a beacon in some sort of interstellar orbit - or at least very far on the outskirts of a star's system itself. That way it wouldn’t need to compete with the light coming from the star itself. SETI’s current astronomical surveys are effectively blind to that exact type of laser communications relay, but perhaps the awareness of this possibility will now encourage investigation? This article is well worth the relatively short read.

But here's the part though that really caught my attention:

“Interstellar communication, such as what an advanced civilization would use in between different stellar colonies, is heavily affected by both resources and time. In the paper, the authors handle this by making a simple assumption: an alien civilization that is trying to send interstellar messages wants to keep its costs down. To be honest, there’s some debate about that idea in the SETI community, with some arguing that “cost” is a relative term based on our own understanding of the world, and might be a completely foreign concept to an alien civilization.”

This actually made me laugh. Sorry to say I’m not surprised in the least some SETI folks would not understand the basic concept of scare resources. I’ve dealt with very brilliant scientific minds who painfully don’t know what they don’t know about economics. I’m curious to discover what economic model they imagine aliens might have that would make “cost” relative? ALL models of economics teach that nothing is achieved without a cost. NOTHING. Not just in the human world but in every aspect of the natural world. This comment by some in SETI is the equivalent of someone saying the laws of physics would not apply to aliens because they're based on our own understanding of the world. Even if aliens could make massive Star Trek-like matter replicators, there would still be an opportunity cost in tradeoffs of what to replicate and in the time it takes to make it. There would still be a limit on resource inputs for the replicators, even if we are talking about atoms from a nearby star.