The Kardashev Scale | Answers With Joe

When discussing topics like The Fermi Paradox, one of the measurements scientists use to classify potential alien civilizations is by using the Kardashev Scale, which is a fascinating look at potential advanced alien technologies as well as a road map to where we can go as a species here on Earth.

The Kardashev scale was created in 1964 by Russian astronomer Dimitri Kardashev, and it rates potential alien civilizations by the amount of energy they are able to utilize.

Why energy usage? Because it’s an important indicator of how technologically advanced a species is.

Take humans, for example, for hundreds of thousands of years, the most energy we were able to create was from burning things.

As our technology advanced, so did our ability to harness energy, although we’ve mostly just made advancements in how we burn things, which is really kind-of embarrassing when you think about it.

Kardashev hypothesized that there are three types of advanced civilizations, type 1 is able to harness all the energy on their home planet, type 2 can harness all the energy in their home star, and type 3 can harness all the energy in their galaxy.

Let’s talk about these one at a time and see what they mean.

(Type 1)

So what does it mean to harness all the energy in your planet?

It’s a lot more than just burning every last drop of oil out we’ve sucked out of the ground, it’s also harnessing every gust of wind, every ocean wave, every tide, every geothermal vent, and every last photon of sunlight that lands on Earth.

Which scientists have calculated to be somewhere in the neighborhood of ten to the power of 17 watts. That’s ten with 17 zeroes behind it. Almost as much as my last electric bill.

Of course, doing all that would make our planet unlivable, so how does a civilization become type one without destroying itself? Enter nuclear fusion.

If you ever wondered why people make such a big deal about nuclear fusion, consider that to make that same amount of energy, you would need to fuse 280 kg of hydrogen into helium per second.

At that rate, you would use 8.9 x10 to the 9th kilograms of hydrogen per year. That sounds like a lot, but you can pull more hydrogen than that out of 1 cubic kilometer of water.

And our oceans hold 1.3 x 10 to the 9th number of cubic kilometers of water. So, we’ll run out about a trillion years after the sun explodes.

Speaking of the sun...

(Type 2)

While the methods to become a type 1 civilization are not quite in our grasp, they at least seem feasible. To imagine a type 2 civilization, we have to get a little more imaginative.

The most widely-known option to collect all the energy from a star is a Dyson sphere.

This idea was proposed by Freeman Dyson in 1960, and it involves building a massive sphere around a star to collect all or most of its energy.

Freeman Dyson is still around, by the way, 91 years old and still kicking, good show old chap.

Such a massive structure would require more materials and manpower than we could ever find here on Earth, but some have suggested self-replicating robots could mine the solar system and construct it on its own.

Especially if it was controlled by an artificial super intelligence here on Earth… just sayin’...

It’s not too far-fetched, really, in fact, many scientists are looking for stars that show signs of interruptions in the light patterns that could signal dyson spheres.

Other ideas involve actually throwing a star into a black hole and then collecting the energy from the accretion disk that forms during what’s called the Penrose Process, which causes the black hole to lose some of it’s angular momentum, which could possibly cause it to eventually lose its rotation and become a Swarzchild black hole. And I have no idea what any of that means.

But if the idea of throwing a star into a black hole sounds looney toons, a type 3 civilization is crazyville.

(Type 3)

How in the name of Xenu, does a species extract all of the energy in a galaxy?

Well, you can put dyson spheres around every star in a galaxy… That’s only 100 billion or so of them.

Or, you could tap the energy of a supermassive black hole, which most galaxies have in the center,

Gamma ray bursts are the most powerful explosions in the universe, you could tap that,

And there’s a theoretical white hole, that spews matter and energy out of a singularity that you could collect all the energy out of...

Pretty much when you start talking about type 3 civilizations, you’re just playing around in science fiction territory, which is what makes it fun