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passive_fist comments on Open thread, Oct. 12 - Oct. 18, 2015 - Less Wrong
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As much as I would like for it to be aliens, I think even a 1% belief that it's aliens is privileging the hypothesis too much. Previous 'weird' cosmological objects have all turned out to have far more plausible natural explanations.
All this said, though, it does seem kind of natural for a civilization to put most of its effort into surviving in its own solar system - where energy is plentiful and communication is rapid - rather than spreading outward into tenuous space where the chances of survival are very low. It's not obvious to me why a civilization should choose to colonize other solar systems. That said, if a civilization chose to do that and was successful in doing that, it would quickly become very populous, but it requires an initial impetus.
But how often does that have to happen? They only looked at about 150,000 stars. There are hundreds of billions in our galaxy alone, and if alien civilization developed even 1% earlier than ours, they'd have had time to colonize the entire Virgo supercluster, so long as they start near the center.
I'd say that at this point we are largely ignorant of the odds of intelligent life existing in a solar system. While at least some basic forms of life ought to be plentiful in the galaxy, the conditions for evolution from simple life to intelligent life (that is, civilization-building life) just aren't understood to the level that would be required for ANY probability estimate to be given. Note that I'm not saying intelligent life is rare; I'm just saying that both scarcity and abundance of intelligent life are consistent with our current state of knowledge.
But that's just the prior probability. I can still say that we have strong evidence that the probability of a given solar system having intelligent life is much, much lower than one in 150,000.
Or at least intelligent life that modifies its home system in a way that is visible from thousands of light years away.
I admit that a Dyson sphere seems like an arbitrary place to stop, but I think my basic argument stands either way. If any intelligent life was that common, some of it would spread.