What does a billion-year old technological species… do?

Any technological species that we successfully detect in a SETI search will likely be older than humanity by several orders-of-magnitude. Therefore, it is necessary to imagine how such a species would interact with the universe around it to determine the kinds of technosignatures that we should be searching for. However, given the difficulty of forecasting humanity’s future, technologically or otherwise, on even decades-long timescales, predicting the specifics of such long-timescale behaviour in an extraterrestrial species is challenging at best and perhaps impossible at worst. In this poster, we attempt a new framing for far-future behavior by zooming out as much as possible: generalizing common actions and uses of life, technology, and economy and thinking about their physical impacts and counterfactuals.