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turchin comments on [Link]: KIC 8462852, aka WTF star, "the most mysterious star in our galaxy", ETI candidate, etc. - Less Wrong
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The SETI attack civ can't touch civs more elder than it - they could prevent the SETI attack civ before it even forms. So it can only attack civs that come after.
But there are probably much easier attacks available for an elder civ. Dyson sphere broadcasting is a rather ludicrous waste of energy - the same energy budget could allow observation and then simulation of all other bio worlds at a lower level of dev. For a small energy budget the elder civ could launch small probes which could then intervene on each planet as necessary, arbitrarily influencing later civ development - accomplishing anything and more than any SETI attack (constrained to pure photons).
If civilization are rare in space, like one in a million light years, observation would be difficult. And if probe speed is 0.5 с, SETI attack will cover 8 times more volume of space during the same time interval. So SETI attack usefulness depends of two unknowns - civilizations density and probe speed. EY by the way said that he believes that StrongAI will be able to expand on almost speed of light so there is no need of SETI attack.
The fact that EY said that strong AI can expand almost at the speed of light does not rule out SETI attacks being useful/efficient to an expansionist AI; perhaps the SETI attack is one of the mechanisms the strong AI uses to expand.
This doesn't help SETI attack, as the energy cost increases with dist squared.
A SETI attack may be faster in terms of latency, but that doesn't matter unless the variance in development time is very low. Realistically the temporal dist is probably spread out over say a billion years or so. The difference between 1c and say 0.1c is just the difference between 100k years and 1,000k year latency and doesn't matter much.
The 1c attack only matters for the tiny fraction of civs that are on the brink of elder status at the time at which the attacking civ achieves said tech level.
I think that you are understating the importance of latency. Earlier, in this post you pointed out some of the difficulties in a civilization 1480 ly away launching an attack on Earth's civilization due to the distances involved. It seems to me that a SETI attack would eliminate these difficulties; the attack could be launched with no knowledge of Earth or Earth's civilization whatsoever, so the attack would not have to wait 1400 years for our radio signals to bring us to the attention of a (hypothetical) advanced civilization. And, a SETI-type attack would not require expensive and time consuming vehicular scouting/probe missions.
I started that with the unrealistic assumption that the attacking civ is close to us in age. In that specific scenario the latency does matter and a photon attack has a potential niche. But that scenario is rare.