You hit on something really fundamental in human nature here with this brilliant thought inspiring story, thanks for posting.
The question currently being asked of us, by nature, on Earth, is whether or not we are here to destroy, or create.
Nature will destroy us first, if it is the latter.
It is currently in process as a hyperobject wiping us out by the millions, with those millions soon to become billions if we can't find a way to become constructive, rather than destructive.
Realistically, the many tens of millions lost in the last century alone has to become billions in the next few tens of years, with nothing changed.
We might say a nuclear war would be just another manifestation of our destructive nature.
It is logical that we have to be naturally destructive if we can't understand how to create, only destroy.
If we don't understand creation is even possible by humans, how can we possibly create?
I think this mindset shows when we speculate destruction must always happen as a result of our existence.
It is natural to think that way if our observations throughout our entire experience in life has been to observe destruction. Why would we think the future will be any different?
It all comes down to energy and where we get it from, it seems to me.
It follows that if we accept our energy from a creative source, then we appreciate creation, whereas if we have to extract our energy by a process of destruction, we appreciate only destruction.
Notice most of all the energy we've used to date, to create nearly all our industry to date, is by destruction.
It involves working on materials and other stored energies on Earth, all of which were created by nature, to extract some of that energy back out, for our purposes.
Our money even is issued for that purpose alone, money as debt, to do the work of extraction, in absence of any other, to supply our bodies at least with the Joules needed to maintain our lives.
But look at what we see in solar energy; Joules pushed to us with no need to do any work per Joule received. Those Joules convert to valuable fuel (hydrogen) which functionally replaces fossil fuels with no pollution, either in their production or consumption.
Also they convert to money, by pow cryptocurrency generation, showing money directly physically interchangeable with valuable fuel.
And all of it is for free.
So money issued as debt can't represent it.
So all that free product received at the rate of now tens of GigaJoules in every developed country per second, accumulating and ramping up from near zero over the last twenty years or so, is as yet, unmonetised, because to monetise it, money has to be isssued for free, because the energy creating the product it represents was issued for free, by the sun, to us.
Whilst this is true, we see people dying by the millions, for lack of money.
So there we have to admit that the mentality of believing destruction is necessary, is a kind of self fulfilling prophecy, which has been enforced for quite a long time, unnecessarily.
To see how not to do this destruction, we just need to recognise what is creation, and what isn't.
It isn't creative to use any source of energy than the sun, because by doing that we are destroying, one way or another.
And we could start doing the latter on a community basis, sourcing an entire global 24/7 hydrogen ecology tomorrow, if we started issuing the free money tomorrow, representing the joules already put to use from solar to date, as yet unmonetised.
Sorry this was a long way to get round to finally commenting on the perceived need to destroy planets like mecury, but hopefully you see why it is important, and what causes the mindset of all things perceived from a reference frame of scarcity.
There is no need to sacrifice anything, after we have found out how to tap into the infinite power of creation, there becomes no such thing as cost, it becomes infinitely scaleable, if we understand how creation works.
This is key to also maybe understanding fusion, we might not be able to do it in a lab, we are far more likely to do it in space by replication of the sun itself, since the fusion process of the sun is the source of all creation, why would it not have the power to also create itself? So if we were that evolved, to understand that, we might not feel so inclined to think of the sun as something that needs to be conqurered (or is even conquerable), therefore we might realise super advanced intelligence would not be putting things around bodies of fusion to try to capture all their energy, they would more likely be creating more, to tap off a little more of their energy as needed.
So rather than looking for where sources of light are extinguished in the sky, we should be looking for where they are being ingnited, and we don't have to look far too see plenty of that, as far as I know, there is lots, so maybe a lot more advanced life out there than we can shake a stick at, if we recognise what we are looking at.
As for the materials needed by any project, we can see how to create food ("Solein" for example), fuel, money, and even creative thought from sunlight, of course all materials are possible, even gold, why not, if we know how to work constructively with the force of creation itself, literally nothing is off limits.
It starts with deriving our own life requirements exclusively with that source.
The alternative is destruction of everything we know, including us, as we can see now.