The Kardashev scale and beyond: How advanced can we become?
In my previous post, I discussed the contradiction between the incredible likelihood of encountering aliens and their apparent absence. It’s possible that all life in the universe, including humankind, will simply not become sufficiently advanced to reach other worlds.
The great filter that prevents us from seeing extraterrestrial life might originate from a bottleneck between our technology today: fossil fuels, simple artificial intelligence, virtual reality and the occasional space mission, and that of our imagined future: interstellar travel.
However, with so many other factors at play, it is not as simple as dismissing our species as having reached its technological limit. Nor is it a good idea to impose such a requirement on any other of the inevitable species that occupy our universe.
If the unfettered growth of technology continues on an alien planet, or here on Earth, then how advanced could we become? Is it possible to think that one day we might dominate our solar system or galaxy? What about the entire universe?
In 1964 the Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev proposed a method for determining a civilisation’s level of technological advancement, that involved considering the energy usage of a species. As technology advances, so does our requirement for…
