Is the world we live in today too advanced in many ways or are we just scratching the surface of our potential as a civilization?

Today we take an intergalactic perspective to see just how much we have come together as a civilization!

In 1964 a Russian astrophysicist known as Nicolai Kardashev came to the conclusion that energy and technology came hand in hand: The greater the technological advances a civilization had meant the greater the energy consumption it needed to power those advances.

To visualize and quantify his ideas he made a scale of the possible types of civilizations that are either human or extraterrestrial in nature.

This is known today as the Kardashev Scale

Civilization Types

Type 0: Subglobal Civilization

The Subglobal Civilization is one where the inhabitants rely on scarce and raw energy resources available on their planet. Due to the inefficiencies and limited energy available the entire civilization is limited to stay on it's home world. Yup, that's us!

Type I: Planetary Civilization

The Planetary Civilization is one where the inhabitants have managed to effectively harness all the potential energy sources of the entire planet (without blowing it up). Some scientists are optimistic that with our current progress we will soon reach this stage -- in about 100 to 200 years...

Type II: Stellar Civilization

The Stellar Civilization is an advanced stage that goes beyond harvesting the energy of the planet but now has the technology to harvest and control the energy of its mother star!

In line with the idea of the Stellar Civilization a physicist and mathematician named Freeman Dyson had a thought experiment on how one day the energy needs of the human civilization would need to directly harvest the total energy output of the sun itself! And it would do this by surrounding the entire sun with orbiting structures or even a shell that would encapsulate the entire sun to absorb all its energy!

The Dyson Sphere named after Freeman Dyson

Type III: Galactic Civilization

The Galactic Civilization is a civilization with technology and energy needs in an unimaginable scale. The energy imagined would be 10 billion times that of a Stellar or Type II Civilization with massive advances in technology in need of that power provided. It may seem like a far stretch and just still a fantasy when compared to our current capabilities today, but who is to say that somewhere out there in the deep darkness of space some advanced alien civilizations have not yet achieved this level? Maybe they even created their own galactic empire...?

Lucasfilm

Type IV: Universal Civilization

The idea of a Universal Civilization now borders on the limits of human comprehension. To reach this level of civilization means that the beings of the civilization have the technology to command the energy of the entire Universe -- the power to command trillions of billions of stars! It wouldn't be so hard to go so far as to consider the possibility that they could even inhabit black holes and overcome the limits of reality we know today.

Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann

Type V: Multiverse Civilization

The Multiverse Civilization is a civilization that has reached the technology or energy to transcend the limits of its mother universe and travel to other universes beyond its own. It is considered that this civilization has the complete power to bend whole universes to its will with complete mastery and understanding of matter, space and time. Such inhabitants of this type of civilization would be no less than divine beings to the rest of the other civilization types.

Will we ever reach higher levels beyond Type 0 within this century? Or will we continue to struggle for thousands of years before reaching the next level? Only time will tell...

And there you have it: The Dyson Sphere and the Kardashev Scale!

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