Have you ever wondered how advanced alien civilizations are (if they exist)? Well, scientists have wondered this for decades, and in 1964, a renowned astronomer from the Soviet Union named Nikolai Kardashev created a scale to measure that; the Kardashev Scale.
What is The Kardashev Scale?
To measure the level of advancement between an extraterrestrial civilization and humans, we would need to find a common ground. Assuming alien civilizations follow the same laws of physics as us, there is a common ground, and it’s energy. Civilizations need energy to do anything, from walking a step to interstellar travel. A Soviet astronomer, Nikolai Kardashev, created a scale to measure how advanced a civilization is based on its energy usage. So, what are the types of the scale?
The Types of the Scale
There are three official types in the Kardashev Scale, each of them multiplying energy use thousandfold. What do they mean?
Type I civilizations are those that can harness 10^16 W, or more simply put all of the energy on their planet. Now, many of you probably think this is humans, but humans are actually estimated to be a type 0.75 on the Scale, harnessing most of the energy, but not quite all, and making our planet uninhabitable at the same time. Type I civilizations are bound to look beyond their own planet, starting interplanetary travel. This type has also likely mastered fusion power, is using renewable energy, and has been able to produce large quantities of antimatter to be used as power.
What happens when that civilization masters interplanetary travel? Well, Type II civilizations have complete control of their solar system, using all of its power, 10^26 W. A way to do this would be to harness the energy of its sun, by creating a mega-structure such as a Dyson Sphere (a structure that surrounds a sun, absorbing its radiation and converting it to solar power). Guess what’s after the home solar system?
Type III civilizations are considered to have all the available energy in the home galaxy, or (10^36 W). These civilizations would be so advanced, that we’d be the ants trying to understand current human tech. The final official part of the scale could be accomplished by manipulating black holes to release energy bursts (which contain almost infinitesimal amounts of energy) on command. This type of manipulation could be used by flying things remotely into black holes, and having panels that convert the energy bursts into usable energy.
While that might seem very advanced, there are other proposed types that could work as a part of the scale. Humans are too technologically pathetic compared to these civilizations, so I won’t go too much into detail about them.
Type 0 civilizations are civilizations that aren’t considered part of the Kardashev Scale. Civilizations that don’t control all of their planet’s power. This can be pretty wide, but it’s ranged from primitive beings who are semi-intelligent, to slightly more advanced beings (but still not quite at Type I) than modern humans.
Of course there’s going to be more after III, right? There’s still more galaxies to conquer! Well, a Type IV civilization does just that. Type IV and Type V civilizations are very similar, but Type IV civilizations only can harness all of the energy in a few galaxies, while Type V civilizations can control galactic cluster.
Finally, there’s a Type Omega civilization. These civilizations would be hypothetical gods to us. They’d be able to manipulate the universe, and possibly others (the multiverse). They may have the power to create universes using atom smashing, and who knows, maybe they created the one we live in!
Is Any of this Realistic?
Nikolai Kardashev only created three types for a reason. That reason was the opinion that more would be too advanced. He was correct, because of the rate of universal expansion. Resulting from this, all things around our local galaxy cluster (consisting of the Milky Way, Andromeda, and other microgalaxies) are drifting away, faster than our technology can advance. By the time we can possibly reach other galaxies at the places they are currently, they’ll be far gone, disappeared into the abyss of space, unreachable to humans. The best we could do is harness the energy in the Andromeda as well as the Milky Way, but more energy would need to be harnessed to reach the proposed Type IV civilization. Theoretically, a Type Omega civilization would be reachable to a Type III civilization had the required energy to do so. The civilization would likely have the knowledge on how to do so, because humans do right now, and we’re not even Type I. Overall, however, it’s quite unlikely any civilizations are past a Type II, if there are any others. We would probably notice if an alien civilization had control of our galaxy or any others observable to us, because we’d see inconsistencies from our own.
What Do You Think Is Possible?
What do you think is possible? Do you think there are other civilizations out there, way more advanced than us? Do you think an Omega created our universe? The Kardashev Scale opens up so many doors to alien consideration and makes us question a lot about what we know about the universe.
