In 1964 Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev broadly envisioned a classification system
for alien civilizations.
Known as the Kardashev scale, this originally three class system, and five and six class
variants of it, have formed the backbone of speculating about alien civilizations for
decades.
Trouble is, the Kardashev scale may be a severe oversimplification and the realities of living
and expanding into space may be very different from what he may have imagined.
Essentially, as Kardashev originally saw it, there are three types of civilizations.
Type 1 civilizations in the scale can harness the energy of their home planet.
Type 2 can harness the energy of their home star, and Type 3 could take advantage of the
energy available in an entire galaxy.
The variants of the scale include a type 0 civilization, which is essentially our own
current stage of development, though we inch closer to type 1 status all the time.
At the other end of the scale, there the far reaching type 4 and type 5 civilizations.
4 is a civilization that control an entire universe.
Type five controls a multiverse, or collection of universes.
These two are highly speculative and we see no evidence of them.
But, that’s also a problem for all classes except one example of a Type 0 civilization,
our own.
We have yet to see any convincing evidence of any alien civilizations, particularly type
III.
A type III civilization like Kardashev imagined should stick out like a sore thumb.
Yet, we see none.
And it’s not for lack of looking, several searches for galaxies that have been altered
by intelligent life have been done.
They typically envisioned such a galaxy as having most, or all of its stars encased in
Dyson spheres, or in the case of a galaxy actively being colonized, it would have an
expanding zone going dark as stars were encased.
The end result would be a dark galaxy in visible light, but very bright in infra-red from the
waste heat generated by the Dyson Spheres To date, no good candidates for this have
been found.
There are many possible reasons for this, such as the question of whether full on Dyson
spheres are even possible to construct no matter how advanced your civilization is.
That’s always the issue when envisioning far future technologies, by their nature they
are things we can’t yet build, and until we actually do build them, we can only hypothesize
about the realities of doing so.
It’s much the same with alien civilizations, until we actually see one, we can only hypothesize
about them based on what we know about ourselves.
And therein lies this potential solution to the Fermi Paradox.
While we maintain a presence on this world wherever it’s worth doing so, there are
places that we don’t.
Two examples of this come to mind.
The first is Antarctica.
While we do maintain a permanent presence there, we have not colonized or settled it
because, well, much of it is a frozen wasteland.
Essentially, it’s an entire continent set aside for scientific study.
Doing much else with it wouldn’t make sense under its present conditions.
Even as a type 1 civilization, we may never utilize Antarctica because it’s not simply
not preferable or advantageous to do so.
Are we still a type 1 if we aren’t using an entire continent?
Another example is Point Nemo.
This point in the south pacific marks the furthest point from land possible on earth.
And it’s very far from land, over 2,600 kilometers, or 1,670 miles.
Oddly, this point was where Lovecraft located Cthulhu's city, but other than being a nice
place for a god-alien to slumber, it’s essentially unusable.
Even life itself doesn’t maintain a strong presence here, being somewhat devoid of nutrients
partly from being so far from land runoff.
About the only thing it’s good for is aiming deorbiting spacecraft towards it so you don’t
endanger places that are inhabited.
But what of the galaxy?
Are there areas that are simply not worth ever colonizing?
Very likely, There may simply be no reason to colonize a star system if the star is going
to go supernova.
Likewise if a star just isn’t going to be stable enough for colonization, such as a
variable star.
Or, even if a civilization did decide to encase everything in Dyson spheres, there’s no
guarantee that they could maintain a cohesive empire.
This we also see on earth.
We have yet to unify the planet under a single culture or government, and may never do so.
Past attempts at doing so, the kingdoms and empires of old, more often than not illustrate
that, it may be that a truly unified, galactic spanning empire may never be feasible.
As an example, take the Roman Empire.
Hallmarking it in history was their expansion, during the Republic and the early empire.
But by the 2nd Century AD, it was becoming increasingly clear to the Romans that further
expansion was either impossible, or not worth it leading Emperors like Hadrian to adopt
policies of defense before conquest.
Eventually governing even what they had became an unwieldy affair, necessitating a reorganization
of the government under two co-emperors, one in the east at Constantinople and one in the
west based in Rome.
Of course warfare, economy and other factors played a huge role in the circumstances of
the Roman Empire, but also distance played a part.
The Roman Empire was huge, and sending messages from the government to the far reaches of
the empire took days and reacting to emergent situations was difficult.
But space is vastly larger than one small part of a planet and this is far more of a
problem.
A galactic civilization, should one ever form up in the milky way, would have severe communications
limits based on what we know today far beyond what the romans knew.
To send messages back and forth between colonies on either side of the galaxy would take hundreds
of thousands of years.
In this galaxy, separation likely becomes the status quo.
At what point do formerly human colonies become alien?
Needless to say from our own experience, cultures and languages change dramatically over these
kinds of time scales.
Any such message sent over such distances might fall on ears that despite having common
roots, may no longer have any idea how to to decipher the message.
Because of that all government necessarily would need to be local, rather than some central
imperial capital or even the next star system over.
Cultures would diverge, and even genetics might diverge in an age where technology allows
complete control over it.
At some point, it might no longer be a question of building empire, but rather defining borders.
And this may happen long before a civilization leaves its own star system.
Say someone founds a Mars colony.
Say a few hundred years pass and it becomes self-sufficient and, because of diverging
culture, decides go it’s own way, separate from any government on earth.
Well, who colonizes the nearest star system? Mars or Earth?
Even if it’s a joint venture, eventually when does that spirit of joint cooperation
stop?
Maintaining a cohesive galactic culture aside, another possible bottleneck for the spread
of a Type III civilization are resources.
What happens when you reach an area of a galaxy where resources are scarce, such as where
star systems that lack planets.
In such a case while there may be usable star systems beyond, it may not be worth colonizing
your way towards them.
Why spend more energy to get somewhere than what you’ll get out of it?
And it gets worse, other concerns might be population, it might be that the more advanced
a civilization becomes, the less they reproduce.
This could be the case in several ways.
One would be intentional population control to manage resources in light that life extension
technology has members of that society living for thousands of years or more, or conversely
they might not reproduce at all if they have abandoned biology entirely and have become
a machine civilization.
Biology may demand reproduction, but technology may not.
In such a scenario there would simply be too few aliens for there to be a need to colonize
star systems much past their home system.
At least until they need more resources to keep going, should their sun begin to change
as ours will.
Might we, as a species, become highly advanced, yet stay local until we absolutely have to
brave the far expanses of space to get to a star system where we can found a new earth,
or for that matter, Mars?
What resources would we need to marshall to get the population of Earth and any colonies
it founds in the solar system to another star system?
Kardashev assumed that Type III civilizations would support massive populations hungry for
resources, but say they don’t, and the opposite is true and the reason we do not see far reaching
Type III civilizations is simply because, for most of them there isn’t a compelling
reason to expand?
Thanks for listening!
I am science fiction author and futurist John Michael Godier currently delivering this episode’s
exoquip.
Of course we’re going to expand and take over the galaxy.
We’re humans.
And we’re backed by the plants, at least for now.
Look at a vegetable garden.
Leave it alone and the plants run away with themselves and a month later it’s all weeds.
Then it’s all fun and games while we pull weeds, until they adapt to become carnivorous.
Galaxy here we come and be sure to check out my books at your favorite online book retailer
and subscribe to my channel for regular, in-depth explorations into the interesting, weird and
unknown aspects of this amazing universe in which we live.