The Kardashev scale ranks a civilization’s technological advancement, with Type I harnessing all power on a planet, Type II harnessing all power from a star, and Type III harnessing all power in a galaxy. Type IV and Type V civilizations consume the power of a galactic supercluster and the entire universe, respectively. Earth is currently a Type 0 civilization.
The Kardashev scale is a way of ranking how technologically advanced a civilization is. The scale originally ranged from Type I to Type III, although in recent years Type 0, Type IV and Type V civilizations have been added informally.
A Type I Kardashev civilization would be able to harness all the power available on a single planet. This figure has been quoted as being around 10^16 Watts, although it could be much larger. To truly harness the full power of a planet would require its disassembly and reconfiguration into a giant solar panel much thinner and larger than the original Earth. Theoretically it would also require the fusion of all atomic nuclei with a mass less than that of iron, and the fission of all atomic nuclei with a mass greater than that of iron, to extract the energy. The available energy would be several orders of magnitude larger than typical assumptions.
Since Earth’s current technological infrastructure has not yet used up all of the energy on this planet, it is informally known as a Type 0 civilization. Kardashev’s original definition for the threshold between a Type 0 and a Type I civilization was that with an available power level of 4 x 10^12 Watt.
A Type II Kardashev civilization would harness all the power available from a single star. This figure is about 10^26 Watts, but as in the last case it has probably been underestimated. While one might think that a Dyson sphere, a solar panel enclosing the entire sun, would be enough to harness all of the sun’s energy, to truly tap into it all would require taking the sun apart and creating a lattice of mini-reactors. that fuse nuclei together as efficiently as possible. While figures thousands of years into the future are sometimes given for humanity’s transformation into a Type II civilization, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence may make this possible much sooner than previously predicted.
A Type III Kardashev civilization would harness all power in a single galaxy. This has been estimated to be around 10^36 Watts, although Kardashev’s original definition was 4 x 10^37 Watts. With the power of an entire galaxy at its disposal, a civilization would likely be able to invent radical new energy sources, perhaps by extracting energy from the vacuum itself. With self-replicating space probes carrying the full set of capabilities needed to start a stellar civilization, galactic colonization could happen at nearly the speed of light.
A Type IV Kardashev civilization would be one that consumes the power of an entire galactic supercluster. Type V Kardashevs, of course, would be a civilization that occupies the entire universe.
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