I believe if life is common than there must of been at least one group of aliens that at least attempted to colonize it self everywhere in space?
Unless humans are a extreme anomaly and that most other aliens don’t really care about space exploration, and just focus on their home planet.
this word. yeah, a satellite is a real thing. get me a satellite that gathers energy and sends it back. get me one of those whose efficiency makes it worth the fuel & resources to create it. justify millions upon millions more of those. find me a purpose for infinite energy gathering & infinite energy use. And then explain how fusion power planetside isn't suitable/or is less efficient
The power doesnt necessarily have to be sent anywhere, people would probably live on these satellites, manufacturing would happen there, agriculture too, and a population of trillions that signifigantly dims a star could start with a few space homesteaders that becomes an entire culture with growth only limited by the total mass in their solar system.
what kinda shmuck would homestead a satellite. what kinda shmuck-ciety would dedicate the resources to allow said shmuckery
I didn't mean we could start in the near future, just that they don't contradict our current understanding of physics the way, say, FTL travel would. Even if sending the energy back proves to be impossible to do efficiently enough to be worth it, you could probably just use the it there. As far as resources go, the solar system is filled with them. We don't really need Mercury anyway. The purpose doesn't need to be anything beyond meeting the needs of an expanding population. For a space faring civilization, anything planetside is inefficient because gravity. But yeah, it's possible that the answer to the question is that buried in the nitty gritty details of how it would actually be built, there lie challenges that render it completely either impossible or pointlessly inefficient. But that would be curious itself, since it doesn't look like that from here.