telescopes

So let's say that by examining the petabytes of data that's received from the telescopes, at some point a signal is detected.

And that is the primary driver of cost and program complexity when it comes to orbital space telescopes.

Paraphrasing he Djikstra (misatributed quote) [1] hacking is no more about computer security hacking than astronomy is about telescopes.

Which likely would be just a small fleet of relatively modest sized space telescopes designed for 2 way communications.

They'd take the form of essentially space telescopes with special instrumentation for sending and receiving laser comms.

So wouldn't a good next step be to point a bunch of radio telescopes at this system and start listening?

Cooperation between the various space agencies on missions from telescopes to probes is commonplace.

That makes it more feasible to test innovative designs, it makes it easier to launch a fleet of similar or identical telescopes to increase science throughput, and it makes it feasible to simply replace failed telescopes.

We haven't been able to observe them for the same reasons our telescopes can't see the New Horizons spacecraft out by Pluto, just too small.

First, some telescopes do do portions or all of their observations in queue or staff mode, where you just give them the required objects and weather conditions.

True, but our radio telescopes have also been improving.

Aperture synthesis in MRI scanners (combining several images in to one image the size of all the cameras combined) came from combining the results from telescopes together.

Heck if it was 107.5 light years away it would still be "useless" but might inspire better telescopes.

Telescopes that can do this are still a tiny bit away reality I think.