Humanity has not yet reached a Level 1 Civilization on the Kardashev Scale. Also, since this scale only measures technology, is there a system that measures how species evolve spiritually, morally, and ethically? Will humanity survive long enough to make it? If humanity goes extinct, will we take the Earth with us?
Or will some other species emerge from those already here? Or will another space-faring species come to our planet and take over? Many species in space want to control the Earth because of all our minerals.
But maybe this is just Groundhog Day, and this cycle’s been happening repeatedly.
Star Trek modeled what an advanced civilization could be. But humans seem so hell-bent on killing one another that it seems unlikely that we’ll make it that far.
I like to believe we will make it. Call me a hopeless romantic, but as a child of the 1960s and a student of Gene Roddenberry, I think Roddenberry was an insider with information our secret government already has. He was permitted to prepare us by showing what exists.
I assume that with these scales measuring the advancement of civilizations, for a species to survive, it must also advance spiritually, morally, and ethically. I’ve been looking for a scale that measures and outlines our technical progress and how we learn to treat one another and move away from war to authentic peace (not peace maintained by authoritarian regimes and force).
The current affairs of our world stress me out ultimately. I’ve invested so much in life and have been watching this show for so long, and it’s like watching a movie that never ends. I want to live long enough to see this one resolve and have a happy ending.
Kardashev Scale: How Can We Measure Technological Advancement Of A Civilization?
The Kardashev scale is a way of measuring a civilization’s technological advancement based on the amount of energy that the civilization is able to harness. The original scale has three levels, with level one being the ability to harness all the energy on the planet, level two being the ability to harness the energy of the star, and level three being the ability to harness the energy of the entire galaxy. There have been modifications to the scale that extend it to higher levels, but at present, humanity has not even reached the first level.
Let’s be honest—we’ve gone through our fair share of impediments on our planet—wars, famines, floods, epidemics, environmental destruction (the list goes on and on). Fortunately, we also have a lot of propitious things going for us—the proliferation of electricity and the internet, expeditions to celestial bodies like the Moon and Mars, and the discovery of the Higgs Boson at LHC etc.
Mars Rover (Photo Credit: Pixabay)
So how can we weigh all the uplifting scientific innovations and discoveries against all the other mayhem and chaos? We are dealing with an ever-increasing list of calamities coupled with a relentless quest for technological innovation. With such an antithetical coupling of ghastly disasters and crafty innovations, how can we possibly estimate our progress as a civilization?
Russian physicist Nicolai Kardashev first attempted to scale and categorize the progress of civilization in 1964. His model is called the Kardashev scale, which measures civilization’s degree of technological advancements based on the amount of energy that the civilization is able to harness. Basically, the better the technology that a civilization has, the more energy they are able to utilize. With more energy utilization, the civilizations can further improve their technology. Kardashev reckoned that civilization would go as far as its technology and ability to harness energy could go.
In his paper published in 1964, Transmission of Information by Extraterrestrial Civilizations, Nicolai Kardashev proposed a three-tier system for the classification of a civilization based on their ability to harness energy:
Type I Civilization
This is the first level of technological advancement, in which civilization is able to harness all the energy on the planet where it dwells. For Earth, this value comes to roughly 7×1017 watts. At the moment, however, we are able to harness only 4 x 1012 watts of energy. Thus, we still have a ways to go to reach even the first stage of a technologically advanced civilization according to the Kardashev scale! Some scientists believe that, given the present pace of technological advancements, we might be able to achieve this a couple of centuries from now.
Type II Civilization
Type II is an intermediate technologically advanced civilization that can harness the energy radiated by its own star. This stage would consist of a civilization’s ability to construct a Dyson sphere—a theoretical idea of encapsulating the sun in a bid to extract all of its energy. If we were to move to this stage, we would be able to utilize 4×1026 watts from our star—the Sun.
A Type III civilization would be the most advanced of all civilizations, boasting the ability to utilize the energy output of the entire galaxy—roughly 10 billion times what a Type II civilization could achieve. This community could colonize the entire galaxy and harness energy from billions of stars residing there. Kardashev proposed that such a civilization would have access to power comparable to the luminosity of the galaxy, so if the Milky Way is considered as the example, it translates into harnessing 4 x 1037 watts of energy!
Estimation of energy consumption in the three types of civilizations defined in the Kardashev scale (Photo Credit : Indif /Wikimedia Commons)
Current Status of Human Civilization on the Kardashev Scale
As we have seen, despite our condescending belief of being the smartest creature on Earth, we as a civilization have yet to reach even the first level of this scale!
Futurist Michio Kaku opines that reaching Type I will still take a few hundred years. Type II status, on the other hand, could be attained a few thousand years from now, while the most elite, Type III status would require an incredibly long wait of a million years!
Michio Kaku, a renowned science communicator (Image Credit: Flickr)
Carl Sagan attempted to calculate a definite Kardashev value for the present progress of human civilization by considering intermediate values (not considered in the original Kardashev scale), more specifically, by interpolating and extrapolating the values given for Type I to III. He produced the following formula to do so:
Here:
K= Kardashev value
P= Power the civilization uses
Using extrapolation, he considered a ‘Type 0’ civilization, which was originally not defined by Kardashev, and calculated the Kardashev rating to be 0.7 in 1973, when humanity was apparently using 10 terawatts of power.
Modification and Extension of the Kardashev Scale
In recent times, scientists and astrologists have broadened this scale to further measure the advancement of hypothetical civilizations—civilizations that could be galactic, intergalactic or even capable of moving through the multiverse!
Let’s look at some of those extensions/modifications:
Type 0 to IV
Many felt that the range of Kardashev was too limited with only a 3-tier ranking system. Moreover, it failed to accommodate humanity as even being in Type I. Therefore, many preferred to define the Kardashev scale from 0 to IV. Type 0 included civilizations that were able to extract energy from raw materials or natural resources on their planet, just as we extract energy from wood, coal, oil, water (i.e., our natural resources). Humans naturally fell into this category. In this extended scale, it also cogitates civilizations that are able to extract all the universe’s energy, which was represented as Type IV.
Micro-dimensional Scale by John Barrow
Renowned cosmologist John Barrow offered an altogether different dimension for measuring the technological advancement of civilizations.
He opined that humans have been able to manipulate their environment to extract energy over increasingly smaller dimensions, rather than increasingly larger ones. Thus, he reversed the conventional classification of Kardashev down from Type I-minus to Type Omega-minus:
Type I-minus: This is most basic civilization, one that is capable of manipulating objects bigger than themselves by building structures, digging tunnels etc.
Type II-minus: This is a low-level advanced civilization that knows how to manipulate not just planetary objects, but also their own genes.
Type III-minus: This civilization not only understands genetic engineering, but can tinker with molecules and molecular bonds to create new materials.
Type IV-minus: This civilization can go on to manipulate individual atoms, creating technologies that work on the atomic scale to create complex forms of artificial life.
Type V-minus: This civilization could penetrate even inside the atom and manipulate the subatomic particles, e.g., electrons, protons, and neutrons.
Type VI-minus: This civilization would be powerful enough to manipulate even the most fundamental particles of matter—quarks and leptons.
Type Omega-minus: This is the most sophisticated civilization in this classification, which could alter the structure of space and time itself.
Despite thousands of years of progress from wheels to spaceships, we have yet to make it to the Type I category of the original Kardashev scale. What’s even more confounding is that a civilization that could reach the pinnacle of this scale—harnessing the power of the entire universe and altering the very fabric of space-time—something hard to even fathom with our present capacity!
Hussain Kanchwala is an Electronic Engineer from University of Mumbai. He is a tech aficionado who loves to explicate on wide range of subjects from applied and interdisciplinary sciences like Engineering, Technology, FinTech, Pharmacy, Psychology and Economics.More from this author.
Humanity is not even a Type 1 civilization. What would a Type 3 be capable of?
The Kardashev scale ranks civilizations from Type 1 to Type 3 based on energy harvesting.
Credit: maxpixel.net
KEY TAKEAWAYS
The Kardashev scale describes three basic levels of advancement in terms of harvesting energy through which a civilization should progress.
There are three types, and humanity has yet to achieve Type 1 status.
Type 2 and Type 3 civilizations have almost god-like abilities to manipulate solar systems and even galaxies.
How do technologically adept civilizations evolve over timescales measuring in the tens of thousands or even millions of years? This is a question that haunts me as a researcher in the search for “technosignatures” from other civilizations on other worlds. Since it is already known that longer-lived civilizations are the ones we are most likely to detect, knowing something about their possible evolutionary trajectories could be translated into better search strategies. But even more than knowing what to search for, what I really want to know is what happens to a civilization after so much time. What are they capable of? What do they become?
This was the question Russian SETI pioneer Nikolai Kardashev asked himself back in 1964. His answer was the now-famous “Kardashev Scale.” Kardashev was the first, but not the last, scientist to try and formalize the steps (or stages) of the evolution of civilizations. Today, I want to begin a series on this question. It is central to technosignature studies (of which our NASA team is hard at work), and it is also important for understanding what might lay ahead for humanity if we manage to get through the bottlenecks we face now.
The Kardashev scale
Kardashev’s question can be put another way. What steps in a civilization’s advancement up the ladder of technological sophistication will be universal? The basic idea here is that all (or at least most) civilizations will pass through some kind of quantifiable stages as they evolve, and some of these steps might be reflected in how we could detect them. But, while Kardashev’s main interest was finding signals from exo-civilizations, his scale gave us a clear way to think about their evolution.
The classification scheme Kardashev used was not based on social systems of ethics because these are things that we can probably never predict about alien civilizations. Instead, it was based on energy, which is something near and dear to the heart of anyone trained in physics. Energy use might provide the basis for universal stages of civilization evolution because you cannot do the work of building a civilization without using energy. So, Kardashev looked at what energy sources were available to civilizations as they progressed technologically and used those to build his scale.
From Kardashev’s perspective, there are three basic levels or “types” of advancement in terms of harvesting energy through which a civilization should progress.
Type 1: Civilizations that can capture all the energy resources of their home planet constitute the first stage. This would mean capturing all the light energy that falls on a world from its host star. This makes sense, since stellar energy will be the largest source available on most planets where life could form. For example, Earth gets hundreds of atomic bombs’ worth of energy from the Sun every second. That is a pretty potent energy source, and a Type 1 species would have all this power at their disposal for civilization building.
Type 2: These civilizations can harvest the entire energy resources of their home star. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Freeman Dyson famously anticipated Kardashev’s thinking on this when he imagined an advanced civilization constructing a vast sphere around their star. This “Dyson Sphere” would be a machine the size of the whole solar system for capturing stellar photons and their energy.
Type 3: These super-civilizations could use all the energy produced by all the stars in their home galaxy. A typical galaxy contains a few hundred billion stars, so that is a whole lot of energy. One way this could be done is if the civilization covered every star in their galaxy with Dyson spheres, but there could also be more exotic methods.
Implications of the Kardashev scale
Climbing from Type 1 upward, we go from the imaginable to the god-like. For example, it is not hard to imagine using lots of giant satellites in space to capture solar energy and then beaming that energy down to Earth via microwaves. That would get us to a Type 1 civilization. But making a Dyson sphere would require chewing up whole planets. How long until we get that kind of power? How would we have to change to get there? And once we get to Type 3 civilizations, we are almost thinking about gods with the capacity to engineer entire galaxies.
For me, this is part of the point of the Kardashev scale. Its use for thinking about detecting technosignatures is important, but even more potent is its capacity to help us guide our imaginations. The mind can go blank staring across hundreds or thousands of millennia, and so we need tools and guides to focus our attention. That may be the only way to see what life might become — what we might become — once it arises to set out across the frontiers of space and time and possibility.
We are nearing the point of mastering the resources of our planet. However, what will this mean for the future of our civilization? | Image by Alexander Mozymov | Shutterstock
How would humans rank against other alien civilizations? Physicists have devised a new civilization classification scheme based on the effect a civilization has on a planet’s evolutionary development.
While the Fermi Paradox may shed doubt on the existence of intelligent life beyond our world, the Drake Equation goes in the other direction.
If we refer to Drake’s famous formula and apply knowledge accumulated since the 1960s, the Milky Way alone could be harboring anywhere between 252 and 1008 alien civilizations.
That’s a steep drop from previous estimates (anywhere from 1000–100,000,000), but it’s still a big and more realistic number.
How advanced any intelligent civilization would be is another question to answer. For this, we need to bring another theoretical method to get a sense of it: the Kardashev Scale.
Humanity on a Cosmological Scale
It took billions of years for Earth to gather all the necessary ingredients for life to emerge and thrive.
Then, it took Homo Sapiens over 300,000 years to develop a technological civilization able to emit electromagnetic signs, like radio and TV signals, into space.
Humans have been able to milk the planet’s resources to make their life more easygoing. Now, to try to give it a meaning, we have started venturing into the cosmos.
We could argue that the human civilization is the most advanced one there is simply because we’ve yet to find evidence ours is not the only one.
If we put minimal values into each of the equation’s variables, we get an estimate of 280 civilizations with detectable electromagnetic signals in our galaxy.
However, this doesn’t necessarily mean these civilizations are easily contactable or even to find. Some of these civilizations could be just at the beginning of their industrial revolution while others could be thousands of years ahead of where we are today.
It’s important to note that life is fragile, especially in the society we have today. Nuclear winters, global warming, and even disease outbreaks can send a civilization back to square one in the blink of an eye.
These “Great Filters” could be the reason behind us not finding any other alien life so far. Or, it could merely be that we’re completely alone in this corner of the galaxy, which is just as likely, if not bleak.
But, even if we were to find another alien civilization, how would we be able to conceptualize their level of development?
In 1964, Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev proposed a method for categorizing intelligent civilizations based on the amount of energy captured and consumed.
Without getting into much theoretical and mathematical aspects of the method, the Kardashev Scale classifies civilizations into three types.
A Type I civilization can use all the energy available in its home world.
A Type II civilization can harvest all the energy of its host star.
A Type III civilization has access to all energy available in its host galaxy.
Immediately a question arises: where are we on the Kardashev Scale?
Well, we haven’t yet broken even into the first class, but we might be close.
Carl Sagan did some calculations and estimated that the human civilization scores 0.72 on the Kardashev Scale.
Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku predicts that humans will reach a Type I civilization in one to two hundred years.
According to Nikolai Kardashev, it will take around 3,200 years for a Type I civilization to reach the next level, and another 5,800 years to get to the last.
Some civilizations may not have enough time to haul themselves further up the scale due to various reasons. It is important to note that these are only predictive models, but they could be indicative of the future direction of our species.
Maybe some civilizations, like certain countries on Earth, just happen to be in a poor region of the galaxy where resources are scarce, or they mismanage them through lack of science application and good governance.
But how do we measure our development on a smaller, less long term scale? Recent studies may help us answer this question.
We Could be Heading Toward a Hybrid Earth
If you feel like we’ve been left out from the concert of civilizations in the cosmos, a group of researchers has been working on a new scale to better conceptualize our current level of development.
On this one, we do a little better on the podium, yet still not in a good way.
Unlike the Kardashev Scale, which is based on the amount of controlled energy, the new schema is based on the level at which a civilization disrupts the energy systems in a world.
The team calls it “non-equilibrium thermodynamics” or the study of energy flows within a planet that hosts intelligent life.
On this new classification method, we find a range of planets from those bereft of atmosphere, “agency-dominated biospheres”, and planets with a “technosphere”.
We, as a species, have completely altered the layout and makeup of our planet’s land, sea, and air.
Our growth and development are changing the way animals evolve, how weather patterns develop, and even how our planet looks from space. Scientists have begun to call this period the Anthropocene Era to describe the period of time where humans directly affected the layout, makeup, and future of planet Earth.
The model focuses on how humans have disrupted the evolutionary flow of the Earth and will form as a model for any other potential alien species we may find.
In their study, published in the Anthropocene journal, the authors described how:
“the beginning of the Anthropocene can be seen as the onset of the hybridization of the planet – a transitional stage from one class of planetary systems interaction to another. For Earth, this stage occurs as the effects of human civilization yield not just new evolutionary pressures, but new selected directions for novel planetary ecosystem functions and their capacity to generate disequilibrium and enhance planetary dissipation.”
Do we Have to Destroy Earth on our Progress March?
We are a sub-planetary civilization on the Kardashev Scale because we have yet to be able to harvest all the energy in our home planet.
Claiming a Type I status does not mean exhausting the resources of a planet. Instead, it means utilizing renewable resources to further the progress of a civilization.
To reach this stage, we have to capture power from every photon of light that reaches us, every wave, every blast of wind, and from every source available in the planet that we can.
Would there still be a planet to call it home after that, especially regarding our history at managing the stability of ecosystems while looking for energy?
For eons, the only way to produce power was burning things. In fact, we’re still burning things, only in a more efficient way in coal and fossil fuel.
However, our capabilities for capturing and using clean energy from different sources are growing slowly but steadily.
After we exhaust all the resources on Earth, we’ll probably set our eyes on the Sun and its tremendous, yet finite, power output. Maybe we’ll even build a Dyson sphere.
If we get to the point where we need to lay a technosphere, for example, over Earth, it’d be long since the planet’s face has changed and ecosystems within disrupted, at least.
From a statistical point of view, it’s only a matter of time before we deplete all the planet’s resources. But, this doesn’t becessarily mean that Earth has to be completely destroyed, though it will certainly be irreversibly altered.
Do you think we as a species will ever become a Type I civilization?
