IIRC in the story I read, military force is used.
Yeah, but 22 watts ain’t much. Television stations in the US are limited to 5 MW, about a quarter of a million times more powerful. That’s for a single station, and there are a lot of stations. If alien beings want to find us, and they’re scanning for radio waves, we’re making a hell of a lot of noise. It might not be an intelligible signal, but the only information that they need to get is that we’re broadcasting.
Inverse square law and all that. Out near Voyager its transmitter is far louder (brighter actually) than all of Earth’s put together. It’s also be more obviously coherent and hence stand out better than would Earth’s more muddled collective signal.
If the weapon happened to be arriving from a different direction than where the Voyagers happen to be the math would work out the other way.
Another vote the Earth is screwed, end of story.
Ten years. OK, that’s sufficient time. I was worried about our probes orbiting the big planets, but we can probably de-orbit those. I hope.
Sink a whole lot of money, through publishing and radio, into convincing the fundies that the alien superweapon is The Second Coming. Build a giant transmitter designed to draw the weapon (or to “sing to the Lord”).
Then use their obvious suicidality to provoke a war of elimination. Get rid of most of the fundies, and focus humanity’s collective mind on survival. Then shut down the globe’s power grids for the five weeks, if you know when they are.
And if the aliens were lying, hey, all you really had to go through was a religious purge, not nuking the surface, Mnemosyne.
They won’t do what you want, because they just won’t believe you. Also, they’re not the only, and maybe not even the biggest problem.
Mister President, we must not allow a mineshaft gap!