Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. When you’re attempting to communicate across vast distances of space, you need huge amounts of energy. Just look at a star, even though it’s generating an incomprehensible amount of energy every second, the brightness drops dramatically with distance. Any Ancient extraterrestrial civilization, millions of years older than humanity, would need enormous amounts of energy. By creating a swarm of satellites in a spherical shell, they could harness much of the power of their star.

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