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"the FRBs were as blinding as flash grenades in a dark forest"

Just that much should be terrifying for anyone who's read The Three-Body Problem and its sequels.

Yeah, Dark Forest features some disturbing paranoids :(

oh it was indeed! i have to thank the writer for such a lovely reference :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_(novel)

I've read Contact and I don't think it had anything similar to this. In Contact the message was coming from a planet system a mere 50 light years away and was no way that powerful.

If it's 3 billion communication-years away, in order to see Earth they'd have seen it 3 billion years ago at the time of viewing. Therefore, for this signal to be targeted at Earth, they'd be targeting an Earth SIX billion years ago (we didn't even exist yet).

You haven't read Contact (or have forgotten some of the plot).

He explicitly circumvents this in the book.

Read it a few weeks ago. Pretty great, though the ending is a bit inconsistent and a bit 80s.

Perhaps, in a way, The Sparrow.