Intelligent Aliens - Part 3: The Kardashev Scale
G’day Team,
Moving on from our chat about Fermi’s Paradox, I thought we’d have a chat about what advanced alien civilizations may look like. We’ll be specifically talking about very advanced civilizations, those that have been working on their technology for a lot longer than us. We’ll also have a chat about just how ’advanced’ humans really are, from a cosmic perspective.
Image source
The Kardashev Scale
When we consider whether alien life exists, one of the biggest questions that a lot of people have is ‘just how advanced will it be?’ Will it have faster-than-light travel, time travel, immortal beings or other god-like powers? It’s a question that’s impossible to answer till we ourselves are far more advanced.
It was in the face of a question like this that the Kardashev Scale was first proposed by Nikolai Kardashev, a Russian physicist and astrophysicist. In order to add a frame of reference to the questions regarding ‘how advanced’ an alien civilization may be, he developed an objective scale to measure a civilization's progress, based on its energy consumption.
The original Kardashev Scale had three levels, ranging from civilizations that could harness only the power of their own planet, to those which could harness the power of an entire galaxy. However, over the following decades, this scale has been built upon and now we have a six civilization, and a nifty little formula proposed by Carl Sagan to figure out where we fit in!
The scale is logarithmic, meaning that as civilizations progress up the scale, the energy they control or harness must increase exponentially…
Where K is our space on the Kardashev scale, and
P is our power consumption in watts per year
We’ll plug our own values into this equation a bit later, but for now let’s talk about the scale itself…
Type I – Planetary Civilization
A Type I civilization is one which controls all of the energy on its home planet. As the energy on Earth stems from the sun, this means controlling all the energy the Earth has captured. It may be in the form of natural resources, such as coal and oil, but a real Type I civilization will have control over much more than just this.
A Type I civilization is able to control all of the energy on its planet, including that which influences the weather and movement of tectonic plates. If humans were a full Type I civilization we’d have the weather at our whim, control eruptions of volcanos and stop earthquakes destroying cities.
While we’re clearly not at this stage yet, it’s something that well-known astrophysicist Michio Kaku thinks we’ll reach in the next 100-200 years.
Image Source - Pixabay
Type II – Stellar Civilization
A Type II civilization is one which has advanced enough to harness all of the energy from its host star. This is roughly 100,000,000 times more energy than that of a type I civilization and with it, one hundred million times more awesome technology.
In order to harness the energy of our sun, we’d have technology capable of controlling the orbit of planets and most likely be capable of inter-stellar travel. The reason we’d need this is simple… to harness the energy of our sun we need a way of capturing it, and to build such a device we’d need more metal than can be found in our solar system.
But what would such a structure look like? One popular concept is that of a Dyson Sphere… a super-massive structure that encompasses our entire star and captures all of its energy output. Such a structure is still in the realm of science-fiction at the moment, as no known material would be strong enough to support its mass. But in 1000-10,000 years… who knows?
Type III – Galactic Civilization
The final level of the original Kardashev Scale was the Type III Galactic Civilization… a civilization capable of harnessing the energy of an entire galaxy, including all its starts, black holes and other astrophysical phenomenon. A Galactic Civilization could create stars, harvest supanova and manipulate entire solar systems.
The technology required to become a Galactic Civilization is simply mind-boggling, but the time-scales are surprisingly realistic. The Milky Way is 120,000 Light-Years across, so with super-advanced technology, it may take a Galacic Civilization roughly ten million years to capture all this energy… this may seem a long time, but it’s just a fraction (2.5%) of the amount of time that life has existed on Earth.
Going Beyond
As with all things in the realm of science, the Kardashev Scale has been modified and built upon since its creation… let’s have a look at Type IV, V and VI civilizations.
Type IV – An Universal Civilization
This civilization would harness the energy of their entire galaxy, as well as that of the entire universe. This would require some real crazy technology, such as manipulation of space-time (in order to overcome the expanding universe and reach other galaxies) and possibly even time-travel.
Type V – A Multiverse Civilization
A Type V civilization would have control over not only their own universe but of all parallel universes as well. Given the existence of multiverses is not even a confirmed hypothesis, this is a truly hypothetical civilization type.
Type VI
A type VI Civilization is said to exist outside of space-time, capable of creating and destroying universes and multiverses… so, in essence, a civilization of Gods.
Image Source - Pixabay
Humans on the Kardashev Scale
As we mentioned earlier, the equation to calculate the position of a given civilization on the Kardashev Scale is…
If we plug our World Energy Consumption from 2015 into this scale and do some high-school level maths (or cheat using Wolfram Alpha) then we get a value of…
... with a total World Energy Consumption of 1.9x1013 we’re using just .19% of the energy that a full Type I civilization would be capable of producing. That’s just a tiny fraction, but at the rate we’re increasing our energy use it’s not inconceivable that we’d reach a Type I civilization in just a few hundred years.
In fact, there are many global changes that a lot of futurists and other commentators have mentioned would be the typical growing pains of a civilization about to enter Type I status. Increasing globalization is just one. With the creation of a planetary culture and conformations in fashion, sport, and education occurring globally. Even trade and industry are occurring on a global scale now, with the development of key players such as the European Union being created to counter trade super-powers like China and the USA.
But we’ve challenges to face, and progress to Type I is not certain. We have to overcome climate change, the spread of infectious disease and nuclear proliferation. Some have even commented that progression to a true Type I civilization would require the death of religion, as a historically divisive and anti-progress aspect of human culture.
On a final note… Interestingly enough it’s possible to reverse engineer Carl Sagan’s Kardashev Equation to calculate the amount of energy requires in order to qualify as a certain civilization… the result is.
Feel free to use that if you’re the inquisitive type!
Thanks
Thanks for reading team, and as usual I hope everyone had fun and learned at least one thing. Feel free to leave comments below and give feedback on what I should write on next!
Thanks
-tfc
References
Futurism
Big Think
Wiki
Aperture
Isaac Arthur
Wolfram Alpha
steemstem
Informative blog
Thanks mate!
Very interesting post thank you.
Thankyou