Dude you know the article is un-serious the minute you see the words "Kardashev scale."

There are at least two books that I know of that are nothing but solutions to the Fermi Paradox because the absolute dearth of hard information leads to an absolute cornucopia of theory. It's pretty useless stuff from a scientific standpoint because it's nonsense divided by nonsense raised to the power of nonsense squared. From an anthropological standpoint, though, it's an entertaining mirror to hold up to society.

One of the things that's always amused me about SETI is that it's always focused on the it-girl of whatever our technology is. I remember an article arguing that obviously we should be looking at tight-beam red lasers back in like '89; there was another one claiming we should be looking at x-ray lasers like five years later.

One of the other things that's always amused me is how everyone pooh-poohs spherical decay as if the farm report from Tau Ceti is gonna make it here accidentally with any kind of signal to noise ratio we'd be able to detect. But you need to justify your time on the radiotelescope, right? So we make up some shit.

This whole "let's turn inward" thing is going to become more and more common as more people read The Dawn of Everything, kinda how Spin doesn't get written without Gray Goo being on the tip of everyone's brain. Frankly, both Dyson Spheres and the Kardashev Scale came of age in an era where energy seemed unlimited; if you'd told Freeman Dyson back when he was working on Project Orion that the world was gonna studiously fail to develop fusion power for the next 70 years he'd never have believed you.