> 4 million times harder I don't think you really understand the problem domain. There are 3 main independent parameters you can tweak to improve maximum trans

> 4 million times harder I don't think you really understand the problem domain. There are 3 main independent parameters you can tweak to improve maximum transmission range: transmit power (100,000x more power has been done commercially), antenna size (we now have a dish antenna over 250x larger), and you can increase the transmission frequency to substantially improve collimation by many orders of magnitude (e.g. use a laser instead of sub-GHz). > your friends on Earth pointing their antennas towards you are blinded by the star that practically touches your spaceship A star puts out a lot of power, but it's spread pretty evenly across a blackbody spectrum. You can certainly overpower it within a very narrow frequency range. Your bandwidth/power ratio might be quite abysmal compared to wifi, but it's workable. > How is SETI supposed to discover aliens who are not purposely beaming waves straight at us I think the idea is that perhaps they would be beaming waves straight at various stars. This is something I can easily imagine humans doing in the near future.