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Scientists May Have Discovered the First Planets Outside the Milky Way (washingtonpost.com)
Using data from a NASA X-ray laboratory in space, Xinyu Dai, an astrophysicist and professor at the University of Oklahoma, detected a population of planets beyond the Milky Way galaxy (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). The planets range in size from Earth's moon to the massive Jupiter. From the report: There are few methods to determine the existence of distant planets. They are so far away that no telescope can observe them, Dai told The Washington Post. So Dai and postdoctoral researcher Eduardo Guerras relied on a scientific principle to make the discovery: Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. Einstein's theory suggests light bends when tugged by the force of gravity. In this case, the light is coming from a quasar -- the nucleus of a galaxy with a swirling black hole -- that emits powerful radiation in the distance. Between that quasar and the space-based laboratory is the galaxy of newly discovered planets. The gravitational force of the galaxy bends the light heading toward the Milky Way, illuminating the galaxy in an effect called microlensing. In that way, the galaxy acts as a magnifying glass of sorts, bringing a previously unseen celestial body into X-ray view. In a university news release, Guerras had a less formal way to describe the complicated process: "This is very cool science."
That's - that's ACTUALLY far out, dude.
In order to take advantage of that without some unforeseeable technology, you'd need to do some rather extreme things though.
Not just planning hundreds of thousands of years in advance, but planning across many, many kinds of entropy that we're not used to engineering around - and even then, you'd be very limited with what you could do.
The most hard-sci-fi solution I can think of to get through such a puzzle would be genetically engineering a culture of bacteria-sized critters to live in minimal-metabolism cycles (think water bears) for the long, long period between galaxies, until they sensed a solar body warming them up again. Then, they'd wake up to their their DNA-triggered-payload, and break through a seal to a block of stable metals and, start carving out circuits and shells for nanobots. Those nanobots would work with the organic components to make solar cells, harvest rocks, gather resources.
Eventually, they'd look for home galaxy signals, looking for an extensively protected series of keys and protocols to 3d-print further updates from home, until they can eventually become a hub to print people (or equivalent, given the timeframe) to live on what worlds are discovered, of what habitats can be built.
Anything like a modern machine just wouldn't make it there, and would be useless by the time it was in place, you'd kind of need a generic programmable platform to bootstrap what will actually be useful by that time. You have to have something that makes information from our future mean something in these far-off vistas, a foothold.
Ryan Fenton
I recently started to do a "fun" calculation with energy when it comes to those kind of distances.
First I imagine a radio transmitter or a laser with a frequency and an energy output, for example 50kW and 1MHz.
The output power divided by the frequency times planck's constant gives us the number of photons emitted per unit of time.
Divide this value by the area of a spherical surface and set the radius to the distance we are talking about, like 3.8 billion light years in this case.
Now we have the number of photons that hits a surface area every time unit.
So if you place an antenna with a surface area of one square mile over there it will receive one photon from the KOMO radio station every million years or so.
Increasing to signal strength to 1.21 gigawatts won't really do much to make the signal detectable, neither will directing the signal to a few millidegrees.