I have a half-baked idea that some alien planet's marketing team is probably using pulsars as an advertising stunt. "Relax on Risa" and the like. I don't know how one would go about modulating a pulsar's output, but pulsars are seen everywhere.

Maybe a modified star lifting process could work to change the pulsars pulse rate? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_lifting

Sounds like a trap...

Yeah, who in his right mind would broadcast his position to all the possibly much more advanced, resource-hungry and expansive species out there? ;-)

Perhaps someone with a very strong conviction that they are already the most advanced, resource-hungry, and expansive species out there ;)

The Borg have become lazy indeed.

I would make all my planet's tech based off of sewage.

Borg Drone 8 of 200: "Nothing to Assimilate here...time to go assimilate Risa".

But how do we know our concept of an easily detected signal isn't merely a product of how our technology evolved?

I think it's worth investigating and looking for signals because it does find interesting phenomenon, I'm just very skeptical we'll ever find intelligent life doing so.

> how do we know our concept of an easily detected signal isn't merely a product of how our technology evolved?

Because 150 years of investigation very very very strongly implies that electromagnetism is one of the most powerful of a very short list of fundamental forces.

Even then you have to ask "How long do ETs live?"

Listening for radio signals is way, way cheaper than broadcasting. It might be fair for an advanced civilization to fire up its transmitter for one year every thousand, and transmit a dense "welcome to the universe, here are our civilization's greatest achievements" message to all the listening civilizations. Running a listen-to-the-sky antenna for 500 years is still vastly cheaper and easier than what the advanced civilization has to do to transmit the message, and transmitting constantly is kinda hella wasteful.