(February 19, 2017 at 9:18 am)Anomalocaris Wrote: With our current technology it is possible to generate a controlled laser pulse lasting 10e-18 seconds. It is not far beyond our current technology to give such a pulse an instantaneous power output greater than that of the sun, which is about 10e26 watts.
A watt is a joule per second, and so, talking about a power output less than one second is meaningless, even if the "math" works out. Again, it is physically impossible to detect a 10e-18 burst of anything across interstellar space, or, for that matter, outside of laboratory conditions. The best that fiber optic cables can do is on the order of picoseconds (1 out a million million or 10e-12). Even "short" GRBs last on the order of 2 seconds.