that highly visible construction projects are an inevitable outcome of intelligence. It could be that it's the engineering of the small, rather than the large, that is inevitable. This follows from the laws of inertia (smaller machines are faster, and require less energy to function) as well as the speed of light (small computers have faster internal communication). It may be—and this is, of course, speculation—that advanced societies are building small technology and have little incentive or need to rearrange the stars in their neighborhoods, for instance. They may prefer to build nanobots instead. It should also be kept in mind that, as Arthur C. Clarke said, truly advanced engineering would look like magic to us—or be unrecognizable altogether. By the way, we've only just begun to search for things like Dyson spheres, so we can't really rule them out.Joseph Voros in "Macro-Perspectives Beyond the World System" (2007) points out that some researchers have attempted to search for energy signatures that could be traced to Dyson-like structures (shells, swarms, or spheres). So far, none have been found. See for example, Tilgner & Heinrichsen, "A Program to Search for Dyson Spheres with the Infrared Space Observatory", Acta Astronautica Vol. 42 (May–June, 1998), pp. 607–612; and Timofeev et al. "A search of the IRAS database for evidence of Dyson Spheres", Acta Astronautica Vol. 46, (June 2000), pp. 655–659. See also References Further reading External links The Great Filter – Are We Almost Past It? (1998), Robin Hanson Why Alien Life Would be our Doom - The Great Filter (2018), Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell Extraterrestrial life Open problems Fermi paradox 1996 introductions 1996 in science