04-20-2015, 02:22 AM
I suspect that advanced civilizations don't engage in mega-engineering because they have much more efficient ways to do whatever it is that they want to do. They have a small footprint because most of them live as pure software and use physical actuators only in case of need (ref. Egan's Diaspora and many other works). They don't build starships because they prefer to travel as radiation beams (like in Egan's Schild's Ladder and Incandescence, and many other works).
Perhaps the phase-transition between pre-tech and supertech is very fast and usually happens in only a few centuries (we are in the phase-transition now). In the 60s we thought that we would have starships and megascale enginenering works in a few centuries, but perhaps we will have much more efficient ways of doing things and nobody will bother with starships and artificial planets. That would explain the Fermi paradox.
Perhaps the phase-transition between pre-tech and supertech is very fast and usually happens in only a few centuries (we are in the phase-transition now). In the 60s we thought that we would have starships and megascale enginenering works in a few centuries, but perhaps we will have much more efficient ways of doing things and nobody will bother with starships and artificial planets. That would explain the Fermi paradox.