Quote Originally Posted by Wraith View Post
Yes, I know. I was assuming it was a swarm of solar panels supporting people on a planet or maybe culture orbitals or something, not an actual sphere being built in bits.
Sorry dude.

I was careful to always say "impractical" and not "impossible". If they need to build a dyson sphere to get the energy to send out spaceships, moving population via spaceship is probably impractical. If it weren't, they'd probably just spread out instead of getting all their energy from a single star. They're not going to have large-scale FTL.
Well, this may be a bit like the ancients looking at nuclear weapons and all the cost and energy that goes into producing them (imagine the cost of a single device would by easily equal to the GDP of several medieval European kingdoms, if not way more), and wondering "wouldn't it be cheaper to just send an army to massacre the population?" I mean, yeah, technically, it would... but you're not fully appreciating the context in which these things are actually being built.

On vanity projects, it seems unlikely. The main reason is that for it to be a vanity project that would imply a pretty massive civilizational level of power, and it's hard to believe that they'd be confined to one system with that level of power if travel to other systems weren't extremely throttled somehow. There's a good chance they'd at least send out slowboats by the time they started building stellar scale monuments to themselves. There's a limit to how widespread they can be if this is the first time we've detected them. Not impossible that it's a vanity project, just unlikely IMO.
We don't actually know that they're confined to one system. We've just seen them in one system, it doesn't mean they aren't in others where we haven't seen them. We only saw them here, assuming we saw anything at all, because they were undertaking a vast construction project, they could be in literally 100s or 1000s of star systems where they haven't done this yet (as of 500 BC) and we wouldn't see shit.

In fact, no - even if they have done this a few times we still might not see it. It took some guys taking a close look at data from this one star and then writing a paper about it for us to notice something weird was going on there. We've catalogued millions of stars which might mean 10s or 100s of thousands of stars in the area of space where this hypothetical race might theoretically hold sway. Have we looked at all of them for weird dips in starlight? I'm betting no.

Basically what I keep getting at is that if that actually is bits of a megastructure or some other result of intelligent life we're seeing, then influencing the universe on that scale without colonizing the galaxy first implies some sort of throttle on colonization. An attitude-based throttle (some sort of prime directive type thing, like what you suggested) would work. We should probably expect to be in the same boat as them either way though - that they're that far developed and haven't colonized the galaxy means that there's very likely good reason for that.
Maybe they're doing it right now. The period of time between "single planet civilisation" and "has colonized the galaxy" is probably millions of years, especially if they're doing so via STL.

That said, you may well be right; the seeming lack of intelligent life kicking around the galaxy is puzzling and none of the explanations I have heard sound compelling to me. It seems we're missing an important piece of the puzzle. Perhaps advanced civilisations come to understand the physical universe in ways that simply make spreading out like that irrelevant.