Messaging with Cost Optimized Interstellar Beacons

Understand

This paper considers galactic scale Beacons from the point of view of expense to a builder on Earth.

• For fixed power density in the far field, what is the cost-optimum interstellar Beacon system? Experience shows an optimum tradeoff, depending on transmission frequency and on antenna size and power.
• This emerges by minimizing the cost of producing a desired effective isotropic radiated power, which in turn determines the maximum range of detectability of a transmitted signal.
• We derive general relations for cost-optimal aperture and power.