So, if they're so superior why don't they get used in any conflicts? In fact, they must be inferior to our conventional weapons because we never use them. Right?
It's unlikely that they're the first. If there are two sapient races, then there are almost certainly many. If the reasons are political or cultural, then you need to assume that all races have political or cultural reasons not to do it. I consider this unlikely, but if it were true there's no reason to assume we'll be any different at that stage. The difference between this and assuming that there is some logistical reason not to do it is negligible right now.
I think the assumption here that I have an issue with is that the cost-benefit analysis of total colonisation vs limited colonisation vs megastructure buidling is uniform across all of time and space. Just because it makes no sense for them to do it now, in this part of the universe doesn't mean it won't make sense for them, us, or someone else, to do it at some other point in time or some other part of the universe.
The assumption is also that regions of space, once colonised will stay colonised more or less indefinately.
This is that massive coincidence again, though. On further reflection of the likelihood of this, I can only pray that this isn't the case. For colonization to be worth doing, and for it to not have happened until now, and for sapient life to be so common that two races could coexist so close in time and space, it won't matter how far off their expansion horizon is from us - we are almost certainly thoroughly fucked. The Great Filter will be ahead of us, and it is going to be angry.
The Great Filter will learn to *fear* us.
This is solved by a version of the anthropic principle. Our conversation here is nothing special. I could be having a similar conversation on some other forum, or with someone else. If you weren't here, I'd probably be doing something equivalent with EyeKhan. Right now, other people besides the two of us are probably having similar conversations. Nothing is special about what we're doing right now, so it's a believable outcome.
I am trying not to be offended here.
The same cannot be said about the idea that they exist, are colonizing the galaxy, but haven't gotten to us yet. That would place both us and them in a privileged position in the history of the galaxy. It's not impossible, but it's extremely unlikely, only more so because the galaxy has been capable of supporting life such as our for billions of years before now.
The situation can only be resolved by assuming there's nothing special about our situation. We aren't privileged. If we had existed at some other time in the the past or next billion years instead, or in some other galaxy, we would still be able to look out and see most stars empty, with a scant handful stars having megastructures built around them. The only way this can be true (if that is a megastructure we're seeing), the only way to maintain our unprivileged status, is if interstellar colonization just isn't a route civilizations go down, for whatever reason. Otherwise, the universe doesn't meet what we should expect as unprivileged observers.
Alternative theories:
* if life on Earth began elsewhere that would potentually add billions more years to the timescale of the evolution of life meaning that it is only around now that intelligent life begins to develop
* Once intelligent life is advanced enough, it stops expressing itself in ways which are detectable to us
It actually doesn't, the point of it is to escape uniformity of motive. If galactic colonization is not merely inconvenient, but has intractable problems of some sort which throttle it, societal motivations don't matter - it's just not going to happen much, or maybe ever depending on the nature of the problems and how parallel universal sapient development is. One possible solution is that building something in your own star system is just so superior to colonizing the galaxy that nobody ever really gets too far from their home systems before just doing that instead.
The problem I have with this is that intersteller colonisation is plausible even with current or near future technologies (although not easy); certainly more plausible than megascale engineering, so it's hard to imagine what would keep civilisations from doing it *across the board*; especially when some races may find it a lot easier than we do - if they're on a world with lower gravity, getting into orbit isn't such a pain in the ass, races longer lived or less suseptable to radiation damage would find space travel a lot easier etc. I mean, space travel is hard but not that hard.
The bottom line is that if that actually is an alien civilization building a megastructure, their existence implies that it is very unlikely that interstellar colonization is something we'll ever actually do, even if we don't understand the reasons yet. If we look closer and find out that they are colonizing systems even while building this thing, that they're expanding outwards in a manner consistent with eventual galactic colonization within the next hundred million years or so, then we'd better hope that galactic colonization actually is a terrible idea and we just managed to spot them before they figured it out themselves and stopped completely. Otherwise that implies that there's a very high probability that oh shit oh shit oh shit fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
Alternatively, a species rate of technological progress is no constant; after a certain point you reach more of a plateau and we'll catch them up before they get near us.