Are super civilizations possible? At what point is our civilization?

Are super civilizations possible? At what point is our civilization?

The Kardashov Scale

For me who grew up in the pre-Internet era this was a very interesting topic I used to think about when I was a kid. While reading Carl Sagan imagined what the future life would be like, a future life idealized by the imagination of a ten-year-old boy. And although we have lived a great advance we are still very far from those dreams of my childhood.

After this little personal introduction, let's get to the point.

Two years after his doctorate, Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashov proposed a method for measuring the degree of technological evolution of a civilization.
This happened in 1964. After in 1963 a Quasar was observed what was the first attempt of the Soviet Union for the search of extraterrestrial intelligence.The Quasar CTA-102.

But what is a Quasar?

Image Source Wikipedia

Quasar is the acronym in English for quasi-stellar radio Source. The Quasars arise when massive black holes in the center of a galaxy begin to absorb the surrounding matter. When this occurs the enormous speed of rotation of the formed accretion disk produces an immense amount of energy. That released energy occupies much of the electromagnetic spectrum. And it ranges from radio waves to x-rays, through visible, infrared and ultraviolet light.
In 2008, thanks to the infrared spectrograph Spitzer scientists found dust grains in a Quasar located 8 billion light-years away. The Quasar called PG2112 + 059 located in the center of a galaxy.
It was discovered that these dust grains were made up of peridots, sapphires, and rubies. The latter are not found in galaxies without Quasars suggesting that they might have formed in the winds of Quasar.
As we can see in this photograph that made an artist for the nasa.

Image Source NASA

The Kardashov Scale

Image Source Brianpereis

According to the scale proposed by Kardashov there would be three types of civilization.
This scale is based on the level of energy use in your environment. It is an exponential scale that also denotes the degree of colonization of space.
According to this scale we would have:

-Type 1 civilizations that have mastered the resources of their home planet.
-Type 2 that have managed to dominate the resources of its planetary system.
-Type 3 would be able to dominate the resources of its galaxy.

However, with the passage of time, the scale of Kardashev that only contemplated 3 types of advanced cosmic civilizations, has been modernized to a total of 7. For this, other additional factors such as communication technology are taken into account.

I have to say that these scales are totally hypothetical and are only used as theoretical frame of reference by science fiction writers, future visionaries or SETI scientists in their quest for extraterrestrial life.

Where are we?

In spite of the enormous technological increase that we are living. For those born in the last century has been more than evident in a few years from the huge computers that occupied an entire room to carry in a pocket more computing power than the one that led man to the moon.
It seems that we are still very far from civilization type 1.
Unfortunately for us we are still only able to take advantage of a small fraction of the energy of our planet which places us as a type 0 civilization.
We can be a little more optimistic thanks to one of the best scientific disseminators in history is none other than Carl Sagan. Who determined that intermediate levels could be defined by interpolation and extrapolation using the values ​​given by Kardashov.
Taking the levels of energy consumption and energy resources of Earth and using the mathematical formula of Sagan was deduced that our civilization is in the 0,724 of the scale Kardashov Sagan.

Are super civilizations possible?

Although it is impossible to affirm or deny the existence of super civilizations. Lately a mysterious star has become fashionable in the scientific community KIC 8462852.
Benjamin Montet and Joshua Simon have analyzed the brightness of the creepy star during Kepler's primary mission, that is, about four years.And they have discovered that in addition to the erratic curve of light its brightness has diminished continuously in those four years.
Thus it was confirmed that the first hypotheses that suggested that there were clouds of comets that partially obscured the light of KIC are erroneous.
Raising old theories about Dyson spheres.

Image Source Danielle Futselaar

Dyson spheres are superstructures built by very advanced civilizations to obtain energy around a star. Hypothetically.

Many questions remain unanswered, but a term relegated to science fiction is being contemplated in the scientific field is already good news in itself.

As you have read I have avoided making future projections about when we would be able to reach the different evolutionary degrees according to the Kardashov scale. And I have done this because from my point of view our civilization does not follow a linear evolutionary level.

A very simple example of understanding my point of view is that any of the ancient civilizations, whether the Egyptian Greek or the Roman were able to harness the energy of their surroundings in equal measure that was millennia later in the lower Middle Ages .

And that without contemplating supposed ancient advanced civilizations.

I would like to know your opinion.

Do you share my idea of ​​a non-linear advance? Or do you believe that our civilization will continue to grow to type 1 in a century as Michio Kaku suggests?

I hope you have enjoyed reading as much as I enjoyed writing.

Sources

https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_933.html

https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escala_de_Kardashov

https://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/k-4/dictionary/Quasar.html

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