What could an alien civilisation be able to do? Well, as we have not found any alien civilisations then everything is guesswork based on the laws of physics and our experiences here on earth. This could be completely wrong or it could be completely right or it could be somewhere in between. It is great jumping into the future and theorising but the time involved in moves from type to type in some cases is enormous and unless we start living forever, a little off putting to say the least.
The Kardashev scale is a method of measuring how advanced a civilisation could be. It relies on energy consumption of the whole civilisation and then applies it to the universe. As you might have guessed a bloke called Kardashev, a Soviet Russian astronomer, thought of it in 1964. It sounds a little out of date but is still a good idea and today SETI, science fiction writers and futurists use it.
Type 0 Civilisation.
You can probably guess that our poor old civilisation or should I say new civilisation is in this category. We’re
Solar power
basically a day old child not even being able to walk yet. Most of our power use is from natural resources, oil, gas and coal which as we all know we can’t win renew. We are only just thinking about using solar power, geothermal power, wind power and similar. Our civilisation is around 0.73 on the civilisation scale and slowly climbing, I wonder if we get a present when we reach type 1 status.
There is speculation that we will reach type 1 civilisation status in 100 to 200 years. It’s all big jumps and achievements that move a type 1 civilisation up the scale after this. As we rise up through the civilisation types we begin to learn more and more and move up the scale exponentially. Remember that it took over 3000 million years for humans to evolve to this state today (and what a state).
The Kardashev scale covers from levels 1 to 3 and just covers energy used. SF goes further and puts some detail in so the following is a best guess. If anyone is in contact with a type 7 then please let me know and I’ll edit the post.
1 The discovery of fire.
2 The development of stone tools.
3 The industrial revolution.
4 The technological expansion of the 19th century to the 20th century.
5 Nuclear weapons and fission power.
6 Achievements from the late 20th century to the early 21st century.
7 Fusion power and Space elevators.
8 Up to the Type I technological breakpoint, with either civilization destruction or survival.
Type 1
Controls the energy of an entire planet. This civilization can control the weather, can prevent earthquakes. Though advanced, a Type I civilization still faces danger of extinction by natural disasters such as comet impacts.
Advancing from type 1 to type 2 civilisation could take about 1000 years exponentially. To put it another way, the more you know the more you can know. Currently, the total sum of human knowledge roughly doubles every 10 years.
1 Near space industry and colonization.
2 Asteroid mining.
3 Planet Mining for fuels and energy.
4 First Interstellar travel.
6 Ringworld
7 Construction begins on Dyson Sphere or Alderson disk.
8 Civilization extends to the entire Solar System.
9 One nation without boundarys on earth.
Type 2
Controls the energy of an entire star. It has the ability to directly mine a star. This civilization will have completely explored its own star system and will have established a number of colonies in neighboring star systems. The energy factor mastered by a Type 2 civilization is about a 10 billion fold increase over that controlled by Type 1. A Type 2 civilization is virtually immune to extinction.
1 Dyson Sphere completion, where a star is totally or partially enclosed to gather the suns energy.
2 Creation of the nearest star colony.
3 Star lifting, where stars are mined for raw materials.
4 Colonization of the nearest 100 stars.
5 Star Trek type civilization. Perhaps but then again perhaps not.
Type 3
Controls the energy of an entire galaxy, show offs. Such a civilization can manipulate space-time and possesses almost godlike powers. It would be threatened with extinction only by the death of the universe itself (and even this might be avoided). Energy mastery for a Type 3 civilization marks a 10 billion-fold increase. There begins to be events and things we don’t understand at this level and onwards.
1 Space time manipulation control of the energy output of a galactic supercluster.
2 Star Wars type civilization (debatable).
3 Ability to survive the end of the Universe.
4 Controls the whole galaxy and has controlled it for millennia.
Type 4
Extra-dimensional beings but not Gods although they may seem like it to type 0. The Star Trek character Q would fit into this categoryr. There is possible harnessing of Dark Energy.
Type 5
Energy control over the entire universe. Such a civilization approaches or surpases the limits of speculation based on current scientific understanding, and may not be possible. Frank J. Tipler’s Omega point may ocupy this level.
Type 6
Energy control over multiple universes, a power level that is technically infinite.
The civilization may have gained the ability to alter physical laws across multiple universes
These civilizations can escape a dying universe, and thereby become eternal, it is possible that less advanced civilizations can do so as well.
Type 7
This would be a God or a deity, able to create universes at will, using them as an energy source, and a large one at that. Type 7 though is well beyond the stage of understanding that humans can incur beyond a technological singularity.
The above skills are reliant on the energy produced by the civilisation but there could be other ways of classifying steps in our evolution into the universe. Information available to the civilisation could be used and has been suggested by Ray Kurzwell.
Dyson Sphere
As you might have guessed, we cannot understand alien civilisations we can only dream about what they would be like. Therefore some people argue that the above types of civilisation may not actually occur and future development might occur differently.
There may also be unique conditions on Earth that allow quicker development (or slower development perhaps) than the civilisations forming around us. There could be lots of unique things about the earth from the tilt to the Moon producing tides and it’s protection from asteroids, comets, and radiation.
The existence of these types of civilisations may be incorrect considering the little we know about the universe. It’s a good start though. Let’s hope there is a party every time we advance a civilisation type.
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Great post!, I enjoyed reading it all!
Keep up the good work.
Hi ALL of you there.
I immensely enjoyed your article about Advanced Civilisation Types.
I just wonder whether software designers have ever devised ‘strategy’ games based on this idea!!!
There is another point on which your excellent article has naturally made me think:
What about the Civilisation types 1A 1B .. etc…?
I mean instead of mastering the macrospace type of things, ( ^_^), why not think of mastering the microspace also !!!!
For instance the equivalents of type 1 civilisation advances would be tentatively:
1. Human race total mastery of the whole range of nanoscale technologies: including reduction of human sizes to micro or even better scales
2. Near / sub – atomic or nano industry and colonisation at microscopic levels ( with legions of nano-fied humans living / working at such scales…this would solve the human overpopulation problems at once!)
3. Atomic or subatomic mining. A universe of Energy out of a drop of water. This philosophical saying would take a rather concrete form then.
4. First mind travel ( ranging from the bio-physical to the metaphysical …!)
5. Civilisation extends further to leptonic levels or at several deeper physical or subphysical levels simultaneously. This would take care of character Q of the Star Trek saga. We would have characters Q^2 , Q^3 … infinitely more powerful imanent ‘beings’ who would not be merely eternal or ubiquitous … beyond good and evil…
There is a God in each human being.
6. The notion of parallel universes is tempting but our subcivilisation type 1A 1B etc would rather defy other types of civilisations by transcending the distance barriers, time travel. We would be mind travellers. The beauties of the human imagination are endless and this is just a drop in an ocean of possibilities.
Oki. Thanking you for reading!!
Have a good time thinking.
HUMAN LIFE is the most unique , wonderful and unanswerable riddle we wish to uncover and promote.
it would be an excellent idea to have a game following these guidelines. Civilisation building games have been around a long time but none that quite take the technology tree that far.
Any person that has played these types of games will always remember” Sid Meier’s Civilization
” and Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri
but I can’t think of any others that fit the bill of universal expansion over millennia with a truly massive technological tree.
If anyone knows of a game like this then please post.
The technology tree that I have written in this post is just a good guess taken from research all over the Internet. There must be quite a few different ways of looking at this. Thanks for the post Michael.
there is a game called “civilization” but it only reaches the type of civilization we are at, somewhat. there is the opportunity to build a space elevator (which we are in the mock development stages irl.)
it would be wonderful if sid himself would elaborate on the game and make it type 1, 2 and 3 civs eventually.
i’d play that crap out of those.
it’s a great came, i suggest it to everyone.
I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don’t know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.
Margaret
I enjoyed the article. But I had a fealing like, when you read th ultimate encyclopedia, which contains everything, you almost think that your real life is useless, and small. I would never exchange my life in exchange for a future one. And I really find disgusting this kind of human life, because you will become somtehing else, but not human, robotic, cybernetic, or nano, but not human. I am not against science, but think about it, at some point, the limits of the human body and consciousness become a handicap and undesirable. God, I would never give up nature, running in the forest, cycling, living in a small city, having conversations with my friends about these kind of things, and experiance love. In this kind of future humans inevitably become more godlike, and after some point, they will be unable to detach their thoughts from one another. One more step, and they become one, ultimate power, but nil human. And the greatest lost will be the thing which started the whole Odyssey: motivation, curiosity, desire for achievements, survival, art, love (I couldn’t stop myself to add this) . And the most important, being human. Sad, but my people will disappear, and all other languages soon (if something doesn’t happen soon), and the World will lose some great values and will pay high price for the first Type 1, and we will become lesser and lesser in our grand rise. I am grateful that I will die before this happens. Long live Hungary! Éljen soká Magyarország.
O Lord, bless the nation of Hungary
With your cheer and plenty
Extend over it your guarding arm
During strife with its enemies
Long torn by ill fate
Bring upon it a time of relief
This nation has suffered for all sins
Of the past and of the future!
Best wishes to you, who read this.
What is this angry face?
It’s auto generated.
Also what do you think of this whole thing? Is there anyone who agree or disagree with me?
To find the future human form disgusting is saying that you prefer to remain a caveman so to speak, not evolving into perhaps what we are made to evolve into.
There is so much wrong with us at the moment- the body and mind fail regularly in people. If someone designed a human and it failed as much as we do they would go back to the drawing board.
Look forward to the future.
Wouldn’t it be better to have no countries to rid ourselves of war etc? Boundarys cause wars, nationalism causes wars.
If this God person took a little longer over what he was doing perhaps we wouldn’t have so many problems?
Perhaps a God could only spare 7 days if he had to do an infinite amount of life creation in the universe and perhaps parallel universes?
Well you don’t have to convince me about God, because my belief is very specific, and I don’t consider myself religious. Also think about it, that you could meet a future human, but you are unable to recognise him/her as human because his/her looks and how he/she thinks is so alien, that you find it disgusting. I prefer only mental artificial evolution and restricted material artificial evolution. Like making the human body more resistant, and eventually we bocome immune to all diseases, deformations, etc. But remain human. But the human knowledge altogeather doubles after 10 years, let’s assume that we live for a million years. We have time and want to remove all biological errors, but a biological organism will always have some failures. No matter how hard we try, the most efficient form of life is a robot. So I think we will become robots (with human brains, or uploaded brains), aliens (to our current form) or computers (our brain is uploaded to a system much like internet, to communicate with eachother. The most efficient way is the third, because you don’t need any body or space like in the first and second ways. And eventually you become pure energy, but as I said before, in this form the creation of new individuals is unefficient. All unification murders the person, that or those who differ from the standard (we can see this even today) are obstacles, and eventually become the handicap of the civilization. So there will be a trend to unite all energy humans (or electric brains), and there you go, you have a God. It is like when ants try to become an organism, or when the first protista become fungi, plant or animal.
If think that the diversity of countries is the responsible for wars, than you ignore all the other thousand reasons for war. Civil, class and race war don’t need two countries.
And s I said before for an American, Australian, English or Kiwi it is not important that all the other languages will die out, because they speak the language that will eventually prevaild all above others, its not a tragedy for them. For example look the American Indians, Aboriginals, Africans or Maoris. At that time they tried to kill them all. They even hunted aboriginals as animals. And what is their reward? Their language and culture will be dominant, and exclusive.
Yes, yes I agree to unite Earth, not the way it will happen. I see this everywhere China, Russian, USA, Brasil, India, Afghanistan, France, Spain, UK, Slovakia, Ukrain, Romania. Serbia, EU. All the unification caused so much pain and tragedy to humanity, that do not belive in ut and I must not belive in it.
The typical reason for against me is: the majority must not suffer. But for example in China there are 1.3 billion people, 300 millions are minority, so we convert the to mandarin or kill them of if they don’t want to, right? In the sake of unity.
Yes, conventional wars will stop, but in modern days, the other wars economic, cultural, etc. Are more dangerous. I doubt you never heard of these. Also don’t exept from a World Government to be better than the current ones. They don’t need smart people or free, it’s not profitable.
No thanks I won’t become English. And I think we need all the other 6000 languages and their culture too.
Last but not least, I don’t think we failed, to find the human race failed is saying the people before you have failed and their descendants have failed and the people after you have failed. So you have failed too? Than your opinion is an opinion of a failed human, a mine too. How could two failed humans decide which one’s opinion is more failed, in order to build a future which leads the humans out of this “failness”?
If we would perfect that would mean we would imperfect because a perfect being don’t love, eat, drink, do sports, read books, learn, work, help others, solve problems, take care for others, have pets, teach, think, create, etc. Because a perfect being don’t need anything, and nothing or nobody needs a perfect being. Try to convince some amazonians to become human, and not remain caveman.
Who should decide what kind of evolutionary path we will follow? Would you force the good on other for their sake? That is the Third side, neither good or bad, and not between good or bad. It is hard to describe the Third side, but here is an example, with colors. If bad is black and good is white, acts between them are grey, but the Third side is something different in this example it is colorless or transparent. And I think we should avoid the Third side as much as we should avoid the Bad side.
I am not so sure we will have a choice anyway, we will evolve as we have done in the past and end up in the future.
In evolution in the past as I expect it will be in the future species will die and species will survive, man is trying to mould his own evolution and I expect will become a master builder at this. The human brain will also be mapped as well they are halfway there at the moment and new ones will appear.
We were a very short time ago cavemen who knows what the future will hold but let’s hope it’s not orange.
Orange? Fidesz?
two things that need to be updated
1. we’re on the virge of colonizing the moon based on a recent study and NASA’s lunar bombardment experiment.
2. by 2010 (from what i know) knowledge will double every 72 hours
and about type 3 and 6 been there imagined that bought the dreamed up shirt and wore it out :O
On the verge is in probably 40 years as the Ares may get scrapped.
Where did you get 2 from? If it were true I’d be a genius in a few days.
@Chris’s reply to Jeremy: Lol, yeah, almost everyone on earth would have surpassed Steven Hawking’s IQ in two days, and steven would be able to levitate himself with his freaking mind because he’d have a 560 IQ. Try again Jeremy or give us a reputable source.
Edit above post: Everyone on earth would have ALMOST surpassed steven, they’d be at an average of 200 IQ.
Edit again: Maybe he means the words overall knowledge.. But I still doubt it will be every 72 hours..
Perhaps it’s Moore’s law Jeremys thinking of?
Yeah, that’s what I was talking about in my third “Edit”. Except I scrwed up and said “words” instead of “worlds”
It must be knowledge and not IQ as if you look around, people are getting more stupid everyday.
Lol, yeah, that’s quite true. Seems like we’re headed in the wrong direction.
Hi to all of you. I just came back here for the 3rd time. Crowd is growing fast here and I greatly enjoy reading you as usual. ( re-reading all and especially Gabor’s notes!!! quite technical at times but well..
) )
I do have some small (vague)comments lurking in my mind…lol: so here goes…
There would be ideally :
- no other civilisation apart us in the universe
- really more advanced civilisations than ours elsewhere right now
- some other less advanced types other than our own civilisation
In each case it would be interesting to speculate :
+ how we would find a way to survive from our dreadful war-ridden human history?
+ if we would become better sentient beings if we were NOT alone?
+ what should the human race do collectively to improve and be secured at least on this survival issue ?
It would be most imperative first to ensure our survival and preserve human nature ( environment, physical forms, social interactions etc) from going in ‘wrong’unpredictable and unwanted (super-human) paths…
Only then shall we take a chance at the Higher Civilisation Levels…
Well if you are not yet asleep by now, I mean that the has to be drastically improved first. What is the purpose of , say, living forever while we haven’t found solution to end human suffering yet?
Ok I quit for now. Good reading!
missing text* sorry
:
…I mean that the human condition has to be drastically improved first. What is the purpose for some of us living forever while we haven’t found a solution to end human suffering for others…
better medicine etc…
Gabor said it much more nicely..
I also think that human form is a frail envelope but..( Buddhist scriptures say that ) to be human is to benefit from the highest available intellectual disposition to view one’s world, to define one’s life, to ask questions about and even to shape one’s own destiny.
If we don’t realise our own potential of self development and of helping our brothers & sisters in need, then there would be no great point of aspiring for better Type/s for humanity eventually.
Okay. hope you won’t mind too much the long priestly sermons this time. see ya all soon. mike. mauritius indian ocean.
I YTHINK HUMAN IS QUICKER THAN OTHE R CIVILIZTION MAYBE WE ARE MORE INTELIGENT OR JUST DUMB LUCK
[...] is hypothesized that the energy control factor harnessed by Type II civilizations is 100 billion folds more than [...]
Very interesting blog post thanks for writing it I have added your site to my favorites and will be back.
http://www.spore.com/what/ga
this game is a good example of these ideas!
Type 7 Civilization:
The ACUniversal/Man being in the end of Asimov´s story THE LAST QUESTION.
btw, the multiple universes thing is up to debate, since multiple universes are still just a theory.
Interesting read, 1 problem however! If multiple universes exist they would have much rules and laws to our univderse, which would render crossing universes impossible.