This was my original point: you can’t hide a Dyson Swarm. It goes the other way too. You can’t really hide from a K2 civilization either.
We’re getting into Fermi Paradox territory here. The beauty of a lot of arguments here is that you don’t need to prove or even assume that civilizations will, on average, “hide” because it just takes one to be detected. So the arguments is actually “do ALL civilizations hide?”
This is a much harder argument to make.
> There could have been aliens nearby a million years ago that are now extinct or elsewhere
In Fermi Paradox terms, this questioned is framed as “is there a Great Filter ahead of us?” This question predictably has a lot of discussion. It’s hard to predict what that might be because even apocalyptic scenarios other than extreme bad luck (eg a nearby star going supernova) are unlikely to completely wipe us out at this point, even nuclear Armageddon.
This was my original point: you can’t hide a Dyson Swarm. It goes the other way too. You can’t really hide from a K2 civilization either.
We’re getting into Fermi Paradox territory here. The beauty of a lot of arguments here is that you don’t need to prove or even assume that civilizations will, on average, “hide” because it just takes one to be detected. So the arguments is actually “do ALL civilizations hide?”
This is a much harder argument to make.
> There could have been aliens nearby a million years ago that are now extinct or elsewhere
In Fermi Paradox terms, this questioned is framed as “is there a Great Filter ahead of us?” This question predictably has a lot of discussion. It’s hard to predict what that might be because even apocalyptic scenarios other than extreme bad luck (eg a nearby star going supernova) are unlikely to completely wipe us out at this point, even nuclear Armageddon.