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g_pepper 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).
How do you figure that? A SETI attack can be launched simply by transmitting a signal. How is that a waste of energy compared with vehicular travel?
A realistic SETI attack would need to transmit a very large quantity of information broadcast over very large distances, where the cost is quadratic with distance.
With a physical attack the 'energy' payload can be very dense and targeted, and it can use adaptive computations to decompress based on local information, harness energy from the local star, do physical manipulations, etc.
There is related analysis showing that sending particles or physical objects at high speeds can beat photons for interstellar communication in terms of energy efficiency.
This is an interesting point. However, while it is true that a physical attack can be precisely targeted, it is also true that it must be precisely targeted. One of the advantages of a SETI type attack is that it can be launched with no specific target in mind at all. The quadratic drop-off in signal strength that you allude to comes with a corresponding cubic increase in coverage space/volume, provided you run the signal continuously.
This is an interesting point. However it would seem to apply to a targeted, point-to-point communication whereas a signal would not need to be precisely targeted.
That isn't a practical advantage - by the time the attack civ is capable of launching a SETI attack they will know where the other stars are located, and they will probably also know which ones are likely habitable. More elder civs may exist in the interstellar medium or elsewhere, but that hardly matters because they are immune anyway.