The Kardashev scale and beyond: How advanced can we become?

Photo by jimmy teoh from Pexels

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 energy and our ability to create energy extraction technology. Hence, we can examine future energy sources as a means to understand overall technological capability.

A species that limits itself to sending emails, commuting around small regions of its planet and sending the occasional person or probe into space probably doesn’t need a swarm of robots harnessing the energy of a star. Likewise, civilisations that do have such technology are probably using it for purposes far more advanced than us.

Kardashev proposed three categories into which we can place civilisations based on their energy extraction and consumption.

Type I

The first category is a civilisation that only uses the energy available directly from their host planet.

Humans almost fit into this category, though not quite. Carl Sagan, for example, claimed that given our current energy usage, we’re…