[Space Bites+] 3I/ATLAS Is NOT Normal // JUICE Lost Contact // Mars' Lumpy Interior

And the comms burst would NOT be exposed, would be specifically shielded from, the planet where life is detected! I don't think a probe, benevolent, neutral, or belligerent, would blast and EM signal toward us.

Depends on how focused the beam is, whether the earth (or space based telescope) gets in the way of the signal, and how much leakage from the equipment there is. There will be a certain amount of luck involved

I share Fraser's dismay at the Damoclean defunding-threat sword hanging over some of the best science missions, but I don't agree with you about PBS, NPR & NASA. All three, as well as other even more august institutions, have been deeply corrupted by extreme anti-science and leftist bias, for many years. So, for example, PBS Newshour's “STEM Superstar” science reporter reported that “Greenland's ice sheet melted at a faster rate than scientists had ever observed, with 90 percent of the mass thawing in July," a claim which has remained on their website, uncorrected, for over a decade. I trust you understand that 90% of Greenland's ice mass did not actually melt in a single month. If that had happened, someone would have noticed the 20-feet of global sea-level rise. In fact, at the current rate it would take between 90 and 140 centuries for Greenland to lose that much ice. In fact, a large percentage of what those institutions that you so admire report about climate is just plain wrong (albeit less obviously so than PBS's claim about Greenland). At NASA, whole subdivisions are devoted, largely or wholly, to propagandizing on behalf of the parasitic climate industry. That most notoriously includes the JPL Earth Science Communications Team, and GISS in NYC, but many other subdivisions of NASA are also infected. The rot is very deep at GISS. That was the institution which created the famous "GCM Model II" climate model, nearly forty years ago, which was the basis for their shocking prediction of a “warming of 0.5°C per decade” (or “nearly two degrees F higher in 20 years”) under a "business as usual" emission scenario -- a prediction which turned out to be >200% too high. That's how they convinced Congress to pour so much tax money into funding the climate industry, including the IPCC. But there's no possibility of debugging that problem in GISS's GCM Model II, because they LOST THE SOURCE CODE. More recently, GISS's Dr. Kate Marvel, one of their most prominent climate scientists, tweeted that "climate justice and racial justice are the same thing, and we'll never head off climate catastrophe without dismantling white supremacy." I hope you recognize that that attitude is incompatible with actual science. And, believe it or not, it gets worse. Do you realize that the NAS (the U.S. National Academies of Science, Engineering & Medicine) now officially opposes teaching the Scientific Method to schoolchildren? I'm not kidding, they really do. In chapter 3 of "A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas," they attack "the mistaken impression that there is one distinctive approach common to all science—a single ‘scientific method.’" The Scientific Method is fundamental to science. It is what distinguishes science from other types of study. It is an algorithm or process for investigating the physical world. What hope can there be for schoolchildren to grow up and become excellent scientists if they don't even know what science is? There's no threat of "erasure" for PBS, NPR & NASA, that's just propaganda from the Left. But there are real threats to some very valuable NASA science missions. It is important to depoliticize publicly funded organizations, but it is equally important to make sure that we don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Fortunately, the current administration is taking aim at the leftist bias against good science in at least some public institutions. That's long overdue. Unfortunately, in many cases it seems that they don't want to depoliticize those institutions, they just want to substitute their own (populist) bias. That's not a solution, it's just a different version of the same problem.