A dyson swarm does not require any new technology to develop, only the constant churning out of satellites. They do not need to be technologically superior to us.

In any case, we would still be ants compared to them.

I dunno, a self-replicating swarm would by definition be technological superior to us, for the next few decades at least.

You don't need a "self-replicating swarm" to build more satellites.

You just need to pump out lot of satellites.

There's nothing special about self-replicating "swarm", either.

Automated self replication is pretty special. We don't have anything like that yet. All of our tech requires human intervention when it breaks down.

kiba above doesn't seem to know exponential growth. Self-replication leads to exponential growth. Creating more satellites here locally only gives you linear growth.

An aggressively expansionist species will always be "in need of housing". They will behave like locusts. It's not a given that most species would be like that, but if they come to us, the odds are pretty good they are aggressively expansionist. If they weren't, why would they bother to go to the trouble of space travel in the first place?

Any civilization that can travel between the stars will be able to build space habs more cheaply. There's no good reason to sit in the bottom of a gravity well when you can build something better yourself.

Unless maybe you are losing a war, being chased relentlessly across the stars and need to make a bomb shelter under a thousand miles of rock. You could offer the natives all sorts of technology, or all the precious metals you find in exchange for a few cubic kilometers deep under ground. Whatever deals you make with them don't matter anyway. They'll all be glassed in a few years when your pursuers figure out where you're hiding and begin bombardment.

Or maybe they need warriors, since their race has already collectively modified itself to delete wasteful things like aggressiveness and anger. Queue the intelligent aggressive naked apes. And throw them at your problems!

Or imagine making peace with the aliens, what will they think of our nearly endless collections of movies, video games and stories wherein we're slaughtering, mutilating and murdering or visitors from the sky? I wonder how _that_ is going to look once they understand what they're seeing.

> Or maybe they need warriors, since their race has already collectively modified itself to delete wasteful things like aggressiveness and anger.

Highly doubtful. Any trait that's collectively exhibited was adaptive and such a spefies would value it to some extent, so they wouldn't breed it out entirely. If some new sub-species found a better way and outcompeted those with this trait, then they are already better adapted by definition, and so wouldn't need this trait.

I think you have to assume some kind deep-rooted psychological idiosyncracies for any expansionist species. A rational species probably wouldn't do much - it's all pointless anyways.

> If they weren't [aggressively expansionist], why would they bother to go to the trouble of space travel in the first place?

To study us. Intelligent life, and maybe even complex animal life, may be incredibly rare in the universe even if life is common. It may even be so rare that even an aggressively expansionist species might choose not to colonize our system because of the value that might be associated with a natural experiment such as ourselves.

IF expansionists chose to spare us, they'd just have to come back later. A species with a requirement of endless growth will never have enough living space or resources. That's not the only kind of species imaginable but we have an example of this kind: mankind at the moment.

So assuming expansionism, the question is, can such a species survive long enough to be a threat to us? If their societt is unstable, they may well destroy themselves before getting very far. Stability seems out of the question here - that would imply they are able to maintain a steady-state society within limits, but still have the need or impulse to hunt for new resources and living space.

So maybe we're not likely to meet such a species as it is likely to be self-destructive. One configuration is worrying, though: An expansionist species sufficiently advanced to reliably spread across space without end, but still bound to eventually exhaust any resources they find. (Inevitable for all species given entropy?)

This species will either die out or monopolize all resources it can find. (And then die out.)If it really requires constant growth, it can do nothing else.

what if creating or displacing planets to habitable zones are possible for an intergalactic species. instead of occupying they might farm new planets.

They would do whatever was most efficient, probably.

Depends what the resource is. Maybe there's something rare here that we don't understand yet.