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Devac  ·  1656 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What If We Really Are Alone in the Universe?

It's a good estimate of the lowermost power consumption, and you've done all the legwork. Kudos! Might be a base for fun Fermi problems or a reference point to some other interstellar communication discussions.

    but if there's no calculus involved, is it even math at all?? :/

Does it even need calculus? Beam dispersion would probably be some Gaussian bundle, dissipation is most likely adequately described as a sum of elements in form of whatnot_optical_coefficient * distance, error correction is a bunch of algebra, and involving any fancy astrophysics is just going to make us look desperate.

Also, it's been a while since I had to use actual numbers to solve a problem. :P