[GraceG]

Wasn’t the Dyson Sphere originally envisioned as a means of hiding from malevolent aliens?

You are thinking of a “fortress world”, where you take a planet like earth surround it with a “shell” that looks like the cratered surface of the moon and pump the air from above the shell into the lower levels to leave it a “lifeless airless surface” which has nano solar cells in the “dust” in the above cratered “surface” while you use artifical lighting below in the livable layer to keep all the plants and animals and oceans comfortable.

While building this around a palent like earth you would broadcast “interstellar propaganda” that would make it seem like you have two factions looking to nuke each other and before you “go silent” you detonate a few thousand nukes to irradiate the new “surface” as an added deterrent.

It basically is a expensive version of living underground to avoid the horde looking to colonize your planet preemtively...

We would only consider this if we were really paranoid about an invasion or if we started receiving boradcasts from another race being taken over by another alien armada or got enough lead time to do such a solution....

Who knows, maybe the first thing intelligent species do is hide themselves once they realize how plentiful life actually is inthe universe....

[skinkinthegrass]

Larry Niven...Ringworld

[KC_Lion]

Rudimentary creatures of blood and flesh, you touch my mind, fumbling in ignorance, incapable of understanding. There is a realm of existence so far beyond your own you cannot even imagine it. I am beyond your comprehension. I am Sovereign.

Reaper? A label created by the Protheans to give voice to their destruction. In the end, what they chose to call us is irrelevant. We simply... are.

Organic life is nothing but a genetic mutation, an accident. Your lives are measured in years and decades. You wither and die. We are eternal, the pinnacle of evolution and existence. Before us, you are nothing. Your extinction is inevitable. We are the end of everything.

Confidence born of ignorance. The cycle cannot be broken. The pattern has repeated itself more times than you can fathom. Organic civilizations rise, evolve, advance, and at the apex of their glory they are extinguished. The Protheans were not the first. They did not create the Citadel. They did not forge the mass relays. They mere found them - the legacy of my kind. Your civilization is based on the technology of the mass relays. Our technology. By using it, your civilization develops along the paths we desire.

We impose order on the chaos of organic life. You exist because we allow it, and you will end because we demand it. My kind transcends your very understanding.

We are each a nation - independent, free of all weakness. You cannot grasp the nature of our existence. We have no beginning. We have no end. We are infinite. Millions of years after your civilization has been eradicated and forgotten, we will endure.

We are legion. The time of our return is coming. Our numbers will darken the sky of every world. You cannot escape your doom.