We have yet to make contact with an extraterrestrial refinement . If they ’re out there — and surely they must be — we have n’t the foggiest estimation what they might be like . Or do we ?
Given what we bang about the existence and our own civilization , we should be able to make some educated guesses . And in fact , several decades ago , a Russian astrophysicist come up with a compartmentalization system to describe suppositional aliens . Here ’s how the Kardashev Scale lick .
Top image bySteve Burg .
The musical scale was devised by Nikolai S. Kardashev , a Soviet - era cosmologist who is still combat-ready today . Though he ’s 81 , Kardashev ferment as the deputy director of the Russian Space Research Institute at Moscow ’s Russian Academy of Sciences . During the 1950s , while both his parents were in Stalin ’s hard worker labor camps , he became an uranology scholarly person at Moscow University ’s Mechanics and Mathematics department . His main interest was in astrophysics and the theoretical potentiality for wormholes , but he also shared a captivation with the lookup for extraterrestrial intelligence service ( ETIs ) .
It was around this time that Frank Drake launchedProject Ozma — a pioneering attempt to locate ETI ’s by scan the sky for radio emissions . Accordingly , Kardashev begin to question if a good number of alien civilisation might be millions of years ahead of us , and if so , what their radio signatures might be like . Just how “ gimcrack , ” he surmised , could alien transmittal truly get ?
This prompted Kardashev to pen his originative 1963 paper , “ Transmission of Information by Extraterrestrial Civilizations . ” In it , he proposed a simple numbering system — from one to three — that could be used to classify hypothetical alien civilizations according to the amount of vigor at their disposal . More specifically , he want to measure the power usable to them for their radio receiver transmissions .
Today , Kardashev ’s graduated table has been expanded and re - interpreted to let in more than just the capacity for communication technology . Astrobiologists and cosmologist now use the scale to simply describe the amount of energy uncommitted to an ETI for any form of function . As a result , the scale of measurement is often used to speculate about the kinds of engineering and existential modalities that characterise modern civilization .
Here ’s how it works .
In his paper , Kardashev wrote that a Type I civilization would be at a “ technological layer close to the floor presently attain on the Earth , with zip pulmonary tuberculosis ~4 x 1019 erg / sec . ” That ’s about 4 x 1012 Watts .
Kardashev ’s initial design was to line a civilization not too far removed from our own ( again , for the design of rating its communicatory capacities ) — but one that has yet to exploit all of the solar system ’s resources ( i.e. a pre - starring ETI ) .
A Type I is typically associated with a supposed culture that has rein in all the power useable to it on its home planet . Asphysicist Michio Kaku has tell , it ’s a planetary musical scale culture that can “ control quake , the weather — and even volcano . ” It will have deal vantage of every inch of space , and make “ city on the oceans . ”
For a civilization to strike Type I position , therefore , it needs to appropriate all of the solar free energy that reaches the planet , and all the other forms of energy it produces as well , like thermal , hydro , steer , ocean , and so on .
More radically , Type I status would only truly be achieved once the entire planet is physically reconfigured to maximise its energy acquire potential . For example , the entire mass of a planet could be reconstituted to take the form of a massive solar array to energize a civilization ’s great power - hungry machinery .
Quite obviously , we are not a eccentric I civilization ( at least not by this re - imagining of Kardashev ’s original verbal description ) . Not even stuffy . But Kaku prefigure that we ’ll get there eventually , perhaps in a century or two .
But it could happen earlier if computational growth continues at its current breakneck pace ( seeMoravec , Kurzweil , andBostrom ) . Hypothetically speaking , an artificial superintelligence ( SAI ) could get start up in about three to four decades ( either one-sidedly , or by purpose ) .
The next measure is a large jump . And indeed , each increment of the Kardashev musical scale is an order of magnitude greater than the last .
Pre - datingMoore ’s LawandKurzweil ’s Law of Accelerating Returns , Kardashev detect that the rate of human race ’s get-up-and-go use of goods and services was increase steadily . He wrote , “ … the annual addition in this energy using up is placed at 3 - 4 % over the next 60 years , on the base of statistical findings . ” accordingly , he predicted that , in about 3,200 years , “ the energy use of goods and services will be equal to the output of the Sun per second … i.e. 4 x 1033 erg / sec . ”
This led him to speculate about a Type II civilisation . For an ETI to reach K2 , it would need to beguile the total energy yield of its parent star .
The dear agency to attain this , of course , is to build up a Dyson Sphere .
Conjured by Freeman Dyson in 1959 , this hypothetic megastructure would envelope a star at a distance of 1 AU and cover an inconceivably turgid sphere of 2.72 x 1017 km2 , which is around 600 million times the surface area of the Earth . The sun has an energy output of around 4 x 1026 Watts , of which most would be available to do utile work .
It ’s unmanageable to promise when we ourselves could become a Type II , butphysicist Stuart Armstrong says we could start the undertaking in a few decades . And once underway , it would be subject to rapidly escalating expression pep pill ( fleets of robot would be powered by the newly - constructed portions of the Dyson shell ) .
With all this energy , an modern civilisation — probably one that ’s postbiological in nature — would use it to power its supercomputers and fire its other effort ( like interstellar colonization wave ) .
Which leads to the next increment in the scale . Kardashev discover a Type III like this : “ A civilization in monomania of DOE on the plate of its own galaxy , with free energy consumption at ~4 x 1044 erg / sec . ” Needless to say , that ’s a awful amount of energy — somewhere between 1036 Watts to 1037 Watts ( give or take a few ) .
Every inch of a K3 galax would be colonized , with every scrap of matter — and all its billions of star — exploited for energy . From the perspective of an outside beholder , a galaxy occupied by a K3 civ would appear completely invisible , save for the heating plant leakage which would register in the far infrared ( around 10 micrometer in wavelength ) .
It would take a civilization anywhere from 100,000 to a million years to transition itself from a Type II to a Type III . Even at modest speed , it would n’t take a civilisation very long ( from a cosmologic linear perspective ) to completely colonize a galaxy .
From our vantage point , this would look like a hole in a Galax urceolata , or an inexplicably large belt of receptive blank space .
Take theBoötes Void , for instance , a vast chunk of the existence that ’s almost all devoid of star and galaxies . Speculatively speaking , this could be a large portion of the universe that has been overtaken by K3 civilizations .
https://gizmodo.com/behold-the-bootes-void-the-spookiest-place-in-the-cosm-5923493
Interestingly , Fermilab ’s Richard Carrigan has argued that we should see for preindication of extraterrestrial civilizations not in our own galaxy , but in neighboring galaxy . His idea is that we should look for civilizations that are transitioning from Type II to Type III . These colonization Wave would count like a monumental house of cards that ’s spreading outwards from the rise wizard .
Discovery ’s Ray Villardelaborates :
https://gizmodo.com/why-we-should-look-for-extraterrestrial-bubbles-in-ne-5930827
It ’s conceivable that a superintendent - refinement would get a wafture of colonization that scatter out to neighboring solar type stars from its home base . Each branch would “ astro - course ” the settled planetary organization by constructing a Dyson sphere around the host star .
Carrigan envisions seeing “ Dyson bubble ” in nearby galaxy . These would be clustering of Dyson spheres that close in a grouping of stars colonize by a Type II Kardashev civilization . The logic is that after you ’ve work up a backyard fencing you may initiate to conceptualise build the Great Wall of China and still go for to gain perspective on the physical process , Carrigan writes .
These would be detected as anomalous dark void in a beetleweed ’s disk . When these voids were observed in infrared light they would glow brilliantly with the hotness radiation from the surfaces of Dyson spheres . This would show that they are not that simply voids where solar - type principal are prominently missing .
A good campaigner for such a hunting would be the Andromeda Galaxy , which is only 2.5 million light years away . At most , we ’d be glint back a couple of million years into the past , which is not significant from a cosmological view .
What would an sophisticated civ do with all this energy ? Well , if many futurists are to be believed , flipping one ’s and zero ’s . A Type II and III civilization may be completely based in digital substrate .
Though Kardashev never went past a Type III , others have make his melodic theme to the next level . A character IV would be an ETI ( or immix groups of ETIs ) that has rule all the mogul of a galactic supercluster , and a type 5 would — you guessed it — have the integral big businessman of the universe at its disposal .
While the Kardashev graduated table offers considerable food for thought for thought , it is not without its problems .
First and foremost , and state the obvious , no empirical evidence exists indicating the mien of K2 or K3 civilizations in our galaxy and/or galactic region . In fact , the Fermi Paradox — what ’s been dubbed “ The Great Silence ” — would indicate that civilizations never become migratory , thus making a Type III very unlikely . If Kardashev civilizations be , we should anticipate to see magnanimous swaths of neighboring galaxy “ vanish ” from the visual spectrum — yet we do not .
We have n’t found any Dyson spheres , either . But that does n’t intend they do n’t exist . Dysonian SETIis for the most part afoot — an attempt to find the “ gaps ” in the asterisk .
Another problem with the Kardashev Scale is the Assumption of Mary that modern civilizations have an insatiable appetence for energy . No doubt , a K3 civ seems a bit excessive . It ’s not a stretch to suggest that a Type II civilization might be as far as these things go . Even a Type I for that matter . Ultimately , it all comes down to the consumptive indigence of an “ end point ” civilisation — one that has successfully adapted to postbiological , post - SAI existence .
Alternately , civilization may choose to keep off these trajectories , either to observe some kind of Prime Directive , or for self - preservational purposes .
Indeed , turning a Galax urceolata into a monumental supercomputer may be the last thing an sophisticated civilisation need to do . ETIs may have other desires and goal that close out it from this kind of intergalactic imperialism .
But we do n’t get it on for sure . So in the meantime , let ’s be sure to keep listening and looking .
Images : David Darling , National News and Pictures , “ Trantor from Space ” by Slawek Wojtowicz .
AstrobiologyExtraterrestrialsScienceseti
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