Do you ever wonder why it is that we’re here?
How did it come to pass that we should be living and breathing on Earth, going about
our daily lives, thinking, feeling, laughing, crying, and everything else in between?
The question of our existence is one that has always intrigued the human mind… fascinating
and frightening us in almost equal measure.
But, what if all of this is really just a construct of a much higher power?
This is Unveiled, and today we’re exploring the extraordinary question; are we the creation
of a Type Five civilization?
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As arguably the most famous theorised model for advanced civilizations there is, the Kardashev
Scale needs little introduction… but we’re going to zoom through the basics to recap,
just in case!
First proposed by the Soviet astrophysicist, Nikolai Kardashev, in the 1960s, it’s a
means to measure the advancement of civilizations based on the amount of energy they could,
theoretically, harness.
The original Kardashev Scale had three levels, or types.
A Type One civilization can harness all the energy of its home planet.
For Type Two, it’s all the energy of its home star system.
And, for Type Three, it’s all the energy of its home galaxy.
Later versions of the scale, however, added a Type Four (which is all the energy of the
universe) and also a Type Five… which is what we’re most interested in today.
Accepting that a Type Five civilization could exist requires many moves away from the more
conventional ways of understanding reality.
That’s because a Type Five can harness all the energy from multiple universes.
In other words, it holds all the energy of the multiverse.
Briefly put, the multiverse is the idea that this universe isn’t the only universe in
existence.
It may be crammed full of planets and stars and galaxies, of everything we’ve ever known,
but the general multiverse theory says that there are many more just like it.
And Type Five on the Kardashev Scale is a civilization so advanced that it exists on
a high enough plain to see and access all of it.
To our minds, a Type Five is akin to a God.
It’s all-seeing and all-powerful.
And, while there are some theories that the Kardashev Scale could be extended further
still to Type Six and beyond, for this video we’re imagining that there’s nothing else
above Five.
Reach that point and you truly have completed the game of not just life, but reality.
What would a Type Five’s existence mean for us, though?
Humans are usually calculated as having reached just 0.7 on the Kardashev Scale to get to
this point.
We haven’t even fully mastered our own planet yet and, according to some more cynical worldviews,
we might never get past Kardashev Type One.
Type Five will always be almost incomprehensibly far away from us, then… so much so that
some theories suggest that we could be under its control.
The shape and form of a Type Five is something that no one can really agree upon.
In that way, it’s again like how we tend to picture gods.
In most basic, pop culture depictions, gods are shown as though they exist above the clouds,
taking up a position that mere human eyes never get to see… and, from there, they’re
able to pull the strings of life on Earth.
But it’s also often said that God is all around us or inside us.
There’s a metaphysical quality to God, as though divine entities exist outside of the
conventional laws of physics, time, and matter.
Again, a similar description could be given to a Type Five being.
They don’t so much have to obey the laws of physics or nature… they are the laws
of physics and nature.
We can quite confidently say, then, that if a Type Five does exist, then humans will likely
never recognise it for what it is.
The distance between us and the top of the Kardashev Scale is just too vast.
But, if we looked hard enough, might we find hints to its existence?
In some ways, this is what we’re trying to do whenever we search for alien life.
So far, across all human history, there’s no record of any life other than the life
on this planet.
But were we to finally discover an extraterrestrial presence somewhere, then we’d know that
our way isn’t the only way.
We’d know that other civilizations - and other civilization types - were, without a
doubt, possible.
It’s why, should we ever find one alien world, many scientists predict that we would
more quickly find a second, third, and more.
Our understanding, at least, of our place in the universe will have moved up a level…
which would force our technological development to catch up, to push us into the higher brackets
of the Kardashev Scale.
Then the thinking would be, if we can get to Type One, or Type Two… then why not Types
Three, Four, or even Five?
The fabled fifth level would seem to us so much less of a, well, fable.
Instead, it would feel like a goal waiting to be achieved.
Sure, it could take us literally billions of years to get there, and we might need to
change our physical being in the meantime, but we’d more firmly believe that it was
possible.
But for now, we still haven’t discovered alien life, nor any civilizations that are
more (or even less) advanced than our own.
So, where else could we go hunting for glimpses of a Type Five truth?
We could try searching for the equivalent of the miracles that feature so prominently
in some religions.
Or we could await with faith the arrival of some sort of Type Five disciple or prophet
onto Earth itself.
A Type Five being would absolutely be capable of travelling anywhere within the multiverse…
and wherever it was, it would always hold the total knowledge of the multiverse within
itself.
If, for some reason, it chose to manifest all of that into a human form, then we’d
have our prophet.
Whether or not the rest of humankind would believe someone who claimed to have come from
a Type Five world, though, is an altogether different matter.
Failing that, miracle-like events could be our only real sign that our Type Five overlords
were watching.
But, even then, would we (humans) really know or understand when a miracle was happening?
Say a Type Five power generously redirected an asteroid on the outskirts of Andromeda
so that it was no longer in line to strike us… we’d never realise that that momentous
event had ever taken place.
Equally, were a Type Five to have stepped in behind-the-scenes at the time of the Big
Bang to ensure that conditions were just right for, say, oxygen on Earth, then we’d simply
never know that that had ever happened.
These things would all be taking place many plains of reality above our own and would
therefore fail to register down here on our lonely planet.
But finally, if our continued existence really was reliant on the far-off actions of a higher
power, then what if those actions were to grind to a halt?
What if the miracles stopped?
Perhaps the scariest part of imagining a Kardashev Type Five is the realisation of just how insignificant
Earth and human beings probably are to it.
Consider that there could be trillions of planets in our universe, and that this universe
would be one of many under its power, then why would it pay particularly close attention
to us, at all?
Why should we ever hope to find proof of a Type Five’s existence, when we amount to
just a single grain of sand along the endless beach of its own reality?
If we are the creation of a Type Five civilization, then our insignificance could ultimately be
twofold.
First, that Creator will have created so much before and since us… that they may never
look in our direction again.
In their minds, our planet is buried beneath billions of others, kept in a universe amongst
millions more, and irretrievable unless there was ever a particular reason to dig it back
out again.
Second, while we generally consider life on Earth to be special, given that it’s the
only life we ourselves know about… that more than likely wouldn’t be the case at
Type Five.
And the 300,000 years or so of the modern human could feasibly amount to footnote on
a footnote in their own records.
Unless, of course, the opposite is true.
And life is so rare and unique that our universe, holding our planet, is actually treasured
by Type Five.
It’s certainly a more optimistic view to take.
Perhaps, what’s really happening is they peer down upon us, they see us chiselling
out our unlikely existence within an infinite multiverse, and they’re filled with hope.
Hope that one day, we might learn enough to join them at the top table of reality.
If (and when) that day comes… remember that you heard it here first!
What do you think?
Is there anything we missed?
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