Energy on the Kardashev Scale

or throughout the universe. When I say out there, I usually mean space. What we count Earth is one intelligent civilization Earth, Earth as a as a whole. Uh, And how would you go about categorizing that particular type of things? Like if there if you knew there were multiple extraterrestrial intelligent civilizations out there, what sort of criteria would you use to kind of classify them? Um? Has James T. Kirk made out with any of them? That's a big one.

How many of them showed up? You can basically sort into two groups. You have you have positive on the made out scale or not or negative on the made out For me, is were they represented in moss Ic Lee's Cantina during the Star Wars episode for a New Hope and only in the pre uh special edition days because special edition changed up some stuff, like you don't have werewolves in the special edition one. UM. I would also say, uh, do you can sort them into psychic

fog and non psychic fog? So so we just call that fog, Joe, non psychic fog is just fog. Oh you're right, all right? So uh, Lauren an Well, I was just gonna say that I think that most of these definitions are are weirdly based in in science. I mean, because because you're assuming that if something has gotten to James T. Kirk to to allow him to make out with it, or if it has reached the masais La Cantina, that it has the enough power over its resources to

um to have interplanetary space travel. It's a big one. Oh yeah, so it might be from this distance actually worth trying to sort alien civilizations into stages of technological advancement, because we tend to try to do that with our own history on planet Earth, right, Like we can look at ourselves as pre or post agricultural. That's like a big turning joint or like pre or post industrial, pre

or post digital. Uh. And even in the future you could say we are like pre or post the technological singularity, right, And so this got us to thinking about a couple of different things. But you know, I was also thinking about other alternatives to discussing, you know, humans history, like how would we define our human civilization in terms of a galactic kind of view or even a universal view. So we've barely started an we're the tiniest of blips

when you look at the universal scale of time. We haven't been around for long at all, like not even a heartbeat yet on the galactic side of things. But I started thinking how would I define that? And one of one thing I thought it was, well, maybe you could define human history, uh in a way of like how far out did we have we gotten? Like how

far out have we explored? So that'd be one way you could explain a species ability at say their technological development is how far have they gone from their point of origin? So you mean like any kind of probe or like robust like colonization either way, either way, I mean,

it doesn't really matter. It's it's all stages of that exploration. Yeah, So so you, you know, you would have like, you know, qualifiers obviously, so you might be like, well, they've sent robots out to the neighboring solar systems, but no, actual men do not want to make out with that robot. Honestly, he probably does. I had a qualification to the James T. Kirk thing. I didn't mean he had to make out with every member of the species, at least one. I

feel like that was understand is only one man? So uh, one amazing man, James Tiberius Kirk. We salute you. But no, that would be one way of explaining it, right. The one way of describing it is how far out have we gone from our point of origin? Ok? Okay, So that's one way. Another one I thought of is just the way we define ourselves. So right now we define

ourselves as human beings were Homo sapiens. But one of the things we've talked about in the past is this idea of the singularity, which could end up making us redefine what we are depending upon how that singularity plays out.

There are a lot of different scenarios that are encompassed by this concept the singularity, that involved things like we become sort of robot people, or we figure out how to biologically manipulate aid ourselves to the point where we kind of evolved to another species, So that would be

an almost cyberneticus. Yeah, and that could be another way that we end up defining ourselves, although that gets problematic because theoretically we could have one version of the singularity that gives you lots of different choices, right, which means that we end up having crazy amounts of individualization, where

defining us as a broad species might even become problematic. Well, but again, that's a scale of how biological versus artificial you have made yourselves well, or even how you've enhanced yourself biologically, because if I if I've never even maybe I don't have my awesome robot arm that I totally want to get, but I've got like a super strong arm because I've been able to modify my my body

and some other biological means. Though, I want to offer a question, which is that, Okay, so maybe that might change the way we look at ourselves in a big way, Like whether or not you've got robotic limbs and can live for ten thousand years makes a big difference to us, but to someone say like at the other end of the Milky Way galaxy. That doesn't make a big difference

in how they view up now. They don't care because they don't have the context of all of human history to care about that, right, So that that seems like a thing that's more internally important than externally. So there's a another way of looking at this that goes back to the idea of how much energy are we able to harness, how much are we able to take advantage of, and how much of that are we dedicating to sending a signal out there saying, hey, guys, here we are.

And this is sort of what is the underlying idea behind what we call the kardashi of scale, right, the Cardashev scale, proposed by Nikolai Kardashev in the nineteen sixties. You know I love people named Nikolai. Yeah, Well, this guy you could you can tell him in person, because he's still alive. He's eighty one and deputy director of a space research institute in Russia. And for you, sir, and he uh. He was proposing that we needed to

think of civilizations in broad, incredibly broad categories. As it turns out, um too in a way to to narrow down what we're looking for when we're looking for evidence of those civilizations sending out messages out into space. Right, because following Frank Drake's work in nineteen sixty um and and we did a whole episode on the Drake equations, so you can check out um is anybody out there published on November six if you would like to hear

all about that. But but following up on his work talking about searching for signals, for extraterrestrial signals, Uh, this is what this is what Kardashiev was doing. Yeah. He was saying that if you assume that civilizations are able to, uh, to harness a certain amount of power, then you that changes what sort of signals you are actually looking for. Yeah, okay, And so this scale first showed up in a paper called Transmission of Information by Exterrestrial Civilizations in the Journal

of Soviet Astronomy in nineteen three. And he was taking this kind of hypothetical approach of categorizing civilizations into these broad broad buckets as a way of looking at things that were interesting they were popping up on on radio radio antenna's. For example, there was the c t A one oh two event, which was this this radio signal that was picked up that was really strong. It was clearly extraterrestrial or appeared to be extraterrestrial in origin, so

it didn't come from Earth. It came from somewhere else. And there were some people who were even saying that they were, uh, they were detecting some variability in the signal which could suggest some form of intelligent communication that was a quasar. So it definitely stirred a huge reaction in the scientific community, and it took some time to be able to kind of whittle this down. There was a there was another one in the seventies called the

Wow signal. You might have heard of that one, and that one it was named after what somebody wrote on the print out of it. Yeah. They they looked at they had a print out of the what the radio antenna had picked up, and they rode down next to it, circled it, and then wrote down Wow. Because it seemed to be something that would potentially be a sign of

extraterrestrial intelligence. And certainly any indication has to be studied uh quite a bit to get to that level of certainty, but it was certainly promising and um, that was another

one that got a lot of attention. Uh, it turned out that a lot of other more sensitive antenna did not pick up that particular signal, which kind of brings into question what this thing actually was could have been could some some have suggested that it was actually a reflection of an earth bound signal, that something was was broadcast out, bounced off space debris and bounced back down

to Earth and that's why I picked up. Although it appears upon further examination that that's not really likely unless it was some sort of military application, because it was on a bandwidth it's reserved for radio astronomy, So it shouldn't have been like a television station just boosting up their signal or something because it was on a prohibited band. Maybe those darn kids playing with their transistor it was, I think it was. It was Cosby's kids say the

darndest things. Actually it was what it was. Okay, So, so what did all old Nicolaike Hardischev have to say about the types of civilizations that we might find out there? Well, you know, again, this really concerns the civilizations that we would have a chance of detecting. Just start talking about bacteria, right, or even intelligent life that has yet to develop any form of radio communication, because even if those may exist, but there'd be no way for us to detect them

with our our radio astronomy. Right, And this ties back into if you listen to our episode on the Drake equation, what that is talking about. Also, it's an equation for determining the likelihood that we will encounter another civilization in our galaxy. And that's based on technological civilization, not like a planet full of goats, right, or even a planet full of pre industrial human like creatures, because they would have no way of goats yeah, or human well, I

have known a few. Um, actually not if you go like humans too, So it goes both ways. Kirk made it to that planet at any rate, that old goat.

So the the original version of this uh Kardashian divided civilizations into three broad types of categories, and this again was based on the amount of energy they could harness and make yourself, and the idea being that if the more energy they this civilization could harness, the more they could dedicate to things like broadcasting information out into the void so that someone else could hear it, whether or not it was intentional, because in some cases, Wait, you

might pick up a signal that was never meant to be a hey, we're here kind of thing. It might just be Yeah, it could be exactly like the alien equivalent of a rerun of Love Boat. Um. So, Type one civilization is a civilization that's capable of harnessing the energy of a planet. Now, that does not necessarily mean that the civilization would have reached some way of harnessing all the energy available on the planet. It might mean they are able to harness the energy equivalent to what

is available on a planet. So it may have multiple means of harnessing energy. Not just oh, this one civilization has gotten really good at processing oil. That's not what this means. It could mean that you don't You look at the mass of the planet and you calculate how much energy that planet could generate, and that's how much energy this particular civilization is able to harness in various ways. So that sounds like we're not even at type one yet. Not yet. No, this would be around ten to the

power of six team watts. And uh. There are other people, including Carl Sagan, who have proposed that there needs to be a slightly more fine gradient. But we'll we'll get into that in a little bit because I need to explain why. Yeah, because because that's type one, right, type was one planet's two. That sounds pretty huge. It's a star, so it's it's a bit of a jump from But essentially, you know, when you think about it from just a logical if you are able to harness all the energy

on your planet, where do you go next? Well, I mean you could harness energy of neighboring planets. That's basically the same thing over again, right, right, that tends to be something in between your planet, and so that would

be somewhere between type one and type two. Right. If you were able to harness the energy of multiple planets in your in your solar system, then sure you could increase the amount of energy you're able to generate, but you're still not anywhere close to what would be a type to the next big step up right, Yeah, so you'd have to have some way of harnessing all the energy being put off by the Sun in your solar system. Is that that would be ten to the twenty six power.

So we're talking you know, zeroswenty zeros. Yeah, we're this huge, so one plan is ten to six. This is ten to the twenty six, so much larger um. Yeah, huge amount of energy we're talking about here, and we'll talk more about you know, how would that possibly happen? Where would you go after a star? Well, you know there are other stars in the galaxy. So type three is a civilization capable of harnessing the energy of an entire galaxy.

That is, it's which is basically unimaginable, about billions of stars, and that would be that would be about ten to the thirty seven power. What's of course the creepy thing. Just let me stop and recognize there are so many galaxies out there, so far away from us, that it's possible this already exists. We don't even know. It's possible this exists multiple times. Like there there could be multiple civilizations out there. It could be that our galaxy is

the only one that's not on that list. Uh, that's not likely. Yeah, we might say why that's not likely in a bit, because it uh, something that's harvesting that much energy would seem to probably give off some kind of signal, probably show up. And unless what's showing up is exactly what we happened to see Yeah, well, I

guess we can talk about that. And you also you also have to keep in mind that any any signal emanating from such a galaxy would take thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of millions of years to get to us, right, I mean, it's not like it's it's unless those civilizations that span multiple galaxies themselves are billions of years old, we wouldn't even know. The timing would

have to be pretty spectacular. So anyway, those are the three big categories, and as some people have pointed out, there needs there might need to be some like wiggle room between them, because to go from planet to star is a big jump. To go from star to galley

see is a colossal jump. Yeah, though, I might wonder if you could imagine that harnessing energy technology is exponential in the same way that harnessing, say, information systems, has been exponential for us on Earth well, and and the point that Cardaschef was making again was more about assuming they are human like intelligent races out there in the sense that they have intelligence the way we have intelligence.

Assuming that there are those out there and that they are able to harness energy in similar ways that we are able to harness energy on our planet, and we assume that there are these three big categories, how would

civilizations in each of those categories broadcast information? And his point was saying that, well, if you're a type three civilization and you have this massive amount of energy that you are that you are harnessing your your broadcast would be really powerful, but they would also probably be really really short because you have reached a technological sophistication where you are able to pack in huge amounts of information

and relatively tiny bits of of of radio blasts. So the argument there is saying, let's look for things that fit into patterns that would that would emanate from these sorts of civilizations, and that will help us try and identify extraterrestrial intelligent civilizations out there. Okay, so wait a minute, so cardashianv identified one through three. Yeah, you want to

go higher, I can take it after a galaxy. So after a galaxy, you have intri galaxy or exit galaxy where you you have um multiple galaxies under your ability. But that's that's not come on, that's not that's not the topic. We can go all the way at to five. I'm gonna take it to five. You want to go to five to alight five? You're able to harness the energy of multiple universes. What, Yeah, it's a multiverse approach. Okay, I thought that the definition of the multiverse was non interacting. Yeah,

they don't really like to talk about it. Yeah, Type five is one of those things that other people have kind of added. It's not card ships, and it's not cardship carda ship stuck with the three. But even even even type four is the kind of thing that we can only imagine by thinking about like time lords with que continuum or uh, you know the creators of whatever

those modeliths are in two thousand one of space. Right, if you were to literally control multiple universes, I mean, you would essentially be omnipotent, but with it, you might be creating your own universes. So that that could you would you might extend that argument as any race that could do that could potentially be running our universe on a computer simulation. Right now, that's a really smart, smart

alien goat. Yeah, so k Kirk probably probably can hear us talking about them, right, and they think it's hilarious. I can see right through Kirk's moves, right through them. So and getting back I was I mentioned before that Carl Sagan had suggested that fine tuning this approach might be a good idea. According to what Sagan was looking at, he he tweaked karda Chev's approach a bit. I don't know, I to go into the fold, the tail, it's you know,

there's some subtle changes there. But ultimately he determined that humans were somewhere in the point seven range, So we weren't even type one yet, we would be type point zero point seven. We've kind of fine tuned that a little bit. It's I think the last one I saw, although I'm sure there are other more up to date ones. The one of the ones I saw was specifically point seven one seven. That really fine tunes it. Um, And it might take us a while to finally work up

the type one. Even though our uh energy production is increasing at what one could describe as, if not exponential, at least an alarming rate. Um, we will probably not hit type one for at least one to three centuries. Yeah, even very very optimistic people like Michio Kaku um estimate you know, a hundred two hundred years. Yeah, and there

are others. There's a Jason T. Right and who is an assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State, who suggests that it might be closer to three hundred years. By the way, I'll try and link this, But um, but James T Right or Jason T Right, I've got the James T. Kirts going on. Jason, I apologize, Jason. Jason writes blog on UM Astronomy and Astrophysics. Is is great. It was something I had not discovered until we started

researching this particular episode. But his his discussions about excess heat and the Kardashian scale and determining whether or not extraterrestrial life is out there, all of them were really fascinating stuff. So I'll try and link to those when this episode comes out. Uh so, what would we need

to have to call ourselves a type one civilization? What is that in the next few centuries going to hypothetically look like we'd have to be able to generate the amount of energy that our planet could conceivably Um, it's apply to us like that's we'd have to hit that limit, and that's going to require things like either fusion generators, We're gonna have to move to a lot more nuclear power.

Even if we go with something like renewable energy, we'd have to have a lot of renewable energy collection sources across the entire planet. Maybe improve solar panels, you know, from the fifteen that they're at now, to something like, well, not just improve them, but make tons of the coat the planet with them, and not keep in mind that, No, it's not necessary for us to rely on a single source of energy, so we could be relying on multiple sources.

It could be that that fusion, if we ever really make that work for us on a practical level, could provide the ground level, and then things like renewable energy sources might offset the rest, and then eventually we hit type one based upon Cardashov scale using that kind of method. So I doubt that it's ever going to be a single source. We might even dip into anti matter. WHOA yeah, not uncle matter, just antimatter. Lauren is judging me, Joe

is laughing. Things are as they should be, okay, Okay, So I can see how you could use a combination of all these things to harness maybe the energy equivalent of a planet. What do you have to start inventing in order to harvest the energy of a star. And before you answer that, I'm going to answer myself because I'm so excited about it. This is one of my dramatically this is one of my favorite sort of science

fiction science reality ideas out there. Well yeah, because LeMond Dyson posited this idea first, and it actually positive before the Kardashian scale was invented. This is this the dice the concept of the dicensphere sometime in the Fishies, right, I want to say, and uh, And the reason why we even look at this is because even if you were harnessing all the starlight that's hitting a planet, that's like, at most like a quarter of the power that you

could get. Oh well, yeah, I mean think about it like this, like say you, um, you have a stick of dynamite hanging in the middle of a room, and then you have a little ball hanging at some other corner of the room, like and the dynamite explodes, that ball receives only a tiny fraction with the energy of that explosion. What would you have to do to get all of the energy of that explosion to put balls or some kind of receiving mechanism around the completely surrounding

the stick of dynamite. Have you ever read the original dyce in paper that? Okay, so, so imagine taking Jupiter. Yeah, you take Jupiter, and you take all the matter of Jupiter and you and you create a hollow ball that uh, that encapsulates the entire part of the Solar System from the Sun out to twice the distance of Earth's or bit average orbit. Oh, I thought this was done one

astronomical unit. No, an the original one, the original one, the original one, the Dyson sphere because when you think about you're cutting off light, so you kind of still

need the light to hit the planet. So the way this works is that the Dyson sphere would actually be like a hollow ball that if you were to open up the hollow ball, you would see the Sun, you'd see Venus and mercury, and you'd see the Earth and then a little bit further out and I don't know if it would actually go all the way out to Mars.

I think it would. So um, you end up having it closed up and the inside of that Dyson sphere would be coated with some form of technology to harness all of the energy that was coming off that was radiating out from the Sun. Now, that was the original approach, although Dyson himself said, there's no reason why this would have to be an actual solid ball, it's just how I wrote it. But it could be. It could be a bunch of satellites that are all harnessing the energy

and then beaming it back someplace. Yeah, that's the swarm model. There's also a Dyson bubble of solar sales that would be balanced by by gravity and solar winds, which hypothetically, I guess would be a little bit closer into the Sun. But yeah, yeah, so, I mean, you certainly wouldn't want to design something that would block the light off from the planet entirely, unless you're able to create some sort

of artificial sun to keep your planet alot. Although I think that I think that a Type two would would have the amount of I mean, especially if they're harnessing all of that energy, they would certainly be able to you know, move off planet. Sure. Oh yeah, well, I mean, when you think about what's implied by the ability to create a Dicen sphere or Dicen swarm, I've also heard of this possibility involving, like say, completely disassembling the planet

mercury using that as the raw material to build all this. Yeah, so you're talking about complete material mastery of your solar system. Yeah, you know, like like really advanced nanotechnology, probably interstellar travel UH is going to be involved in this if if we can move within our own solar system fast enough to make it worthwhile. There's a h The great site

TV Tropes, which we've talked about before. I don't know if we've ever talked about on Mike, but we certainly talked about off Mike has It has an entire segment about the Kardashian scale and kind of placing various science fiction universes somewhere in that scale based upon observations of what's going on in those shows. So, for example, they would say most of the advanced civilizations in the Star Trek universe seemed to be type two. So they're falling

in this. They've got that mastery of a solar system, and they're able to harness the full power of a solar system, but not necessarily a galaxy unless you're someone like um well, even the QUE or beyond that, the board would be more of that level. The Q the Q continuum would be the yeah type four, or possibly five. I guess I think for they don't they don't talk about going between that universe another universe. I think type five is self contradictory. I'm not gonna Okay, well this

is getting really crazy. Okay, well we want to talk about how type three. What I was going to say, this is already like so out there. Let me just say one more thing I've heard about Type two is this concept. I don't know a whole lot about it, but i've heard float of the idea of star lifting, basically like capturing and incubating for your own purposes part

of a star's mass. So essentially you're creating a fusion generator that's you know, you're you're just siphoning off a bit of a star to make your own fusion generator that happens to be a smaller star. I mean, that just sounds so crazy. But there's also that's not even type three yet. There's also the idea of harnessing energy that's coming off of a black hole's accretion disc that's the stuff that's around the black hole that's breaking down

that hasn't quite been sucked into the black hole yet. Yeah, because because any other large enough energy body, you know, super neverse thing like that would probably also fall into this category of type two. So if we're talking about type three, so you remember everything about type two, Yeah, multiply that by you know, a billion stars. Also probably harnessing whatever energy could come out of the super black

holes that tend to be the center of spiraling galaxies. Yeah, you're talking about harnessing energy that's on a level that's that's really not it's beyond our imaginations. May I ask, how do you actually get energy out of a black hole? I mean I thought that black holes kind of like

everything goes in. You're talking about the accretion disk around a black hole is where Okay, I'm seeing So you're not getting it from the black hole cel if you're using sort of like the gravity field around it, Yeah, you're you're kind of you're kind of stealing all the all the energy you can out of the stuff that's circling the black hole but has not actually descended beyond the event horizon to go into the singularity and thus

go into puff. So yeah, you can really think of type three is just pulling up energy the same way type two is, except on a on a galactic scale, not on not even a solar scale. Beyond that, it's we don't have specifics about this one so much because it's really hard for us to physically conceive of it. Yeah, I mean it could be out there, but we certainly would have difficulty. I mean we we there's we're nowhere close to being able to do this in front like

more better nanobots. I think most estimations say that it would be like on the on the very optimistic side, where a hundred thousand years away from being a Type three, and on the more some would say realistic side, we're talking about a million years into human kind's future, right, I think that that. Karschev himself said that it would take some three thousand years to reach type two. Yeah,

so yeah, we're we're we're quite a ways out. Things could change, but I mean that's pretty You wouldn't expect him to change by a dramatic amount anyway. So that's that's the basic of you know, breakdown of of the types and how they would get their energy. When you get the type four, it's getting to the point where again you would just have to extend it across multiple galaxies.

It really starts to get ridiculous, because even if you were able to harness the power in multiple galaxies, you have to figure out how do you access all that power because we can only assume that they're bending space time to create engines that something, because otherwise it would take thousands of years for you to get the energy

that you've harnessed. If you are like if you're if most of your activity is in Galaxy A, but you're getting your energy from Galaxy B, how do you get the energy Galaxy B to Galaxy A in a time frame that's acceptable? Okay, So I have a question, Okay, just one. Yeah, Cardassiev was talking about talking about this, Uh, these energy categories based on what kind of transmitting power civilizations would have if they wanted to transmit their presence

or radio signal or something. But shouldn't act pivity on the scale of type two or type three be visible? Well, again, first you have to assume that's happening on a time scale that we would be able to observe. Now, granted, the assumption here is that that assuming that life exists in other places, which seems to be a fairly reasonable assumption, and assuming that at least some of that life is intelligent,

again fairly reasonable. It's also safe to assume that some of that life is probably much much much older than human life, and therefore they've been at this for a long time. They would have to to be at all type one, two or three civilization, right, So there that

takes care of some of it. We would assume that at least some of these civilizations, even if they're really really far away, have been at this level for perhaps millions or even more than a billion years, assuming they hadn't blown themselves up, right, So that would mean that there would be a possibility of us seeing them. But that does cut down on some of it. Right. Let's

say that there's one that is uh relatively advanced. Maybe it's the type two or even type three, but it's far enough away we might not have detected it yet. To clarify, I would think what it would be is we'd be looking for type two civilizations in our own galaxy and type three civilizations in others. Well, yeah, I mean that's what but type three would necessarily mean it's really far away. So the further away it is, the more time it would take for the relevant information to

reach us. So if that time is greater than the lifespan of that civilization or or the time when they actually achieved that level, we wouldn't detect it. Yet another thing is that we might need to look at something besides radio waves as a potential um sign that something's out there. So one example in fact that has been

proposed is based upon the whole Dicen sphere ideas. The idea is that if there are stars out there that are using some form of technology akin to a Dicen sphere, then we might not detect them by radio waves, we

might detect the by heat signatures. Yeah, just intuitively, I would think if you were trying to surround a star and get all of its usable energy, well, so you'd be absorbing that solar radiation, turning that into electricity or whatever kind of energy source that that you think is best to store and make use of in your infrastructure. But there would still be the escape of radiant heat, right,

and wouldn't that show up as infrared. Well, that is the argument that some astrophysicists have made that that's one of the things we need to look for, not just radio signatures out there, because it could very possibly be that some intelligent advanced civilization out there isn't broadcasting out to everybody, but that we might still detect them through other means, and therefore we should not limit ourselves to

one methodology. Okay, so I want to think about is there any reason that we're to think Obviously we can't know everything, we can't imagine what alien species are like. But this scale seems very useful to me because it's based on energy, and I would have to think that any complex system that's complex enough to um to create intelligence or technology has to have energy being fed into it,

right right, Yeah? I mean I can imagine an intelligent squid um space squid that that does not create a society the way that we did, but it would still need, you know, energy to get around or even psychic fog. I would still have to think that it's got to have energy coming into the system in order for it to maintain the functional complexity of intelligence. iPhone charger would still have to you know, get plugged in something. The way we define life is essentially a method of processing energy.

So assuming that we're talking about life as we have previously defined it, then obviously energy has to be there, and there there are people who would argue, you know, as we get more advanced, we figure out how to use energy more efficiently, which is true, but we're talking about gal take time scales here, and for a life form to continue to uh to to grow, to reproduce, to reach these levels, eventually they're going to hit a cap where they cannot generate enough energy to meet the

demand they have created just using say planet's resources. Therefore, they have to spread out. This is why Sagan had suggested that we look at a more graded scale, because there would be civilizations where they've spread out to neighboring plants, but they haven't captured all the energy of a star yet. So there's somewhere between one and two that kind of thing.

And it's a reasonable assumption to make that even if we are talking about making advances in efficiency over the grand scale of time, eventually we're going to need more energy than what we can generate just with one planet. That's just assuming that we haven't blown ourselves up right, Assuming that we haven't done that, then eventually we are going to need more energy than what we can conceivably

make on this planet. In my mind, I think it's more reasonable to assume that we are not imagining the correct technologies for this energy escalation than to think that there's somebody out there who's not using as much energy as we would or something like that. I think it's just as likely to say that we're imagining it just fine, we're just not close enough for us to be able to pick it up yet. Yeah, that's also a possibility.

There are other possibilities as well. I mean, it's clear that if we're talking about civilizations that use very refined means of communication, like like laser systems, that you know, they rely on this this, uh, this line of side approach, which seems like it probably wouldn't be something that you would imagine an advanced civilization using because it limits you if you have to use line of sight. But let's assume they found some other means of communicating beyond the

radio communication that we use. Uh, then that could also explain why we haven't It's just like what our Drake equation conversation, that could also explain what we haven't uncovered them. Uh. You know, so there are a lot of different possibilities. Right.

It could be no one's talking, it could be no one's out there, it could be people are talking, but they're really far away so we haven't heard them yet, Or it could just be that they're talking but they're talking in a way that we have yet to figure

out how to interface with. Yeah. Yeah, So the parallel here, I guess would be that somebody's out there and they are harvesting energy, but we can't see how they're doing it, Or they're harvesting energy but they're too far away, or they are harvesting energy but they're not harvesting enough of it that we can tell their signal is too weak for us to pick up, or perhaps even by the time you get to three or four, that maybe they're harvesting energy but they're taking steps to make it look

like they aren't, or that or that, or it's such a big picture that for us it's you know, we're in the middle of a massive forest, but all we can see are all these trees that around us. I can certainly imagine how a civilization of type three might be able to have a cloaking device for its use of galactic energy. I mean, if you're already able to harness the energy of an entire galaxy, you might as well also have a cloaking device. I mean even the

Klingons had that. No, Seriously, I mean, like, if you have that much technological capability, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that you could hide your use of it. Personally, I think that it's it's you know, again, Kardashev was the reason he was even positing this in the first place was just so that we could refine our our

methods of searching out there. Right, This is sort of like a tool he was using that's become sort of discussed in its own right, right, right, and and and from that respect, I still think it's generally speaking, a

pretty good idea. Again, you know, the fact that you have these massive jumps in magnitude from type to type is a little weird, you know, because you're like, well, I wouldn't expect there to be a narrow band of radio frequencies and and kind of activity to look for within a specific category, simply because the categories themselves are so broad. But still an interesting way of thinking about the problem. So yeah, I mean, this was a cool topic to cover another one of our you know what's

out there sort of podcast. I'm sure we'll have more of those in the future as well. Um, and eventually we'll maybe have an episode dedicated to every single species that James T. Kirk is made out with. That that sounds like a lot of podcasts. Yeah, I'll have to get on the phone with some friends of mine. I've got a friend who played one of those not not one that Kirk made out with, but one of the

species that he made out with. I just want to say, all due respect to James T. Kirk, I think he should have treated those alien species with a little more respect. Come on, alright, So anyway, Yeah, to be fair, the remake was not that long ago when he was still pretty much a bounder. Al Right, guys, Well we're wrapping up this discussion. Remember you can go to f w thinking dot com for all your forward thinking needs. We've got podcasts, blog posts, we've got the videos there. Check

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