12-23-2020, 04:10 AM
There is a possibility that this beam, coming from Proxima the nearest star, could be just the last link in a carefully-designed but sparse network. If each star is only linked to two or three other nearby stars, then the number of links could be minimised but a signal should be able to percolate through the galaxy at a very slow rate. This sort of communication network would work after a fashion, but it would take a long time to send a message to any star that was outside our immediate neighbourhood, and it would take even longer to get a reply back. To send a message to Betelgeuse, or Rigel, or Deneb would require hundreds of steps in the relay system, unless the network is designed quite neatly.