Across history up until this point, humans have built massive monuments and formed sprawling
societies all over the Earth; we can instantly send and receive messages from all over the
planet, and we’ve even left this world and landed on the moon.
But, despite all that it has already achieved, humanity still ranks notably low on the Kardashev
Scale of advanced civilizations.
This is Unveiled and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; What if humanity
was a Type II civilization?
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The Kardashev scale was developed in 1964 by the Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev,
as a means to measure the rate of advancement that any given civilization has acquired.
It does this primarily by examining the amount of energy that that civilization is able to
utilize.
Initially there were only three levels to the scale, but that number has since risen
to five as standard, or seven by some counts.
A Type I civilization can harness all of the energy of its home planet; Type II can harness
the energy of its entire planetary system; for Type III it’s their entire galaxy; with
Type IV it’s the universe; and a Type V civilization can harness all of the energy
of every universe, assuming a multiverse.
For extended versions, there’s also Type VI, which basically has god-like capabilities…
and Type 0 at the other end, which hasn’t yet mastered even its own planet.
According to most estimations, humanity currently ranks at a modest 0.7 on the Kardashev Scale.
If humanity were to accomplish a Type II level of advancement, they would first have to have
all the capabilities of a Type I.
This means that we would have full control over our home planet, Earth.
We’d be producing enough energy from wind, thermal, hydro, and every other renewable
energy solution available, to the point that we wouldn’t need fossil fuels anymore.
We’d also be able to fully utilize all of the solar energy that currently reaches our
planet from the sun.
It would be more than just harvesting power sources, though.
A Type I society would have complete planetary control - meaning it could predict and manipulate
all weather patterns, including rain, wind and cloud coverage, as well as controlling
specific natural disasters like earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis.
It’s also expected that by the time we reach Type I status, we’ll have expanded into
floating cities on the ocean.
Estimates vary as to how long it’ll take us to complete Type I, but the physicist Michio
Kaku has predicted it will take another 100 to 200 years.
The trademark of a Type II civilization, the one we’re most interested in today, isn’t
that it can control its home planet, but that it can fully harness the energy from its home
star.
In our case, that’s the sun.
If humanity was a Type II civilization, it would be taking all of the energy the sun
produces - more than 38,000 septillion watts per second - and using it all for its own
needs.
Quite how a civilization would go about doing this is a mystery to modern science, but there
are some ideas - the most famous of which being the Dyson Sphere.
A Dyson Sphere is a structure that somehow encircles the sun and absorbs all of the energy
released by it.
That energy is then somehow stored with maximum efficiency, before being transferred elsewhere
for use, again with maximum efficiency.
At this stage, humanity will most likely have spread out all across the solar system, so
splitting the untold solar power between Earth, Mars, the Asteroid Belt, the moons of Jupiter
and everywhere else would be a massive undertaking.
The Dyson Sphere itself, however, might also be fully habitable.
At the time of its completion, it would most likely be the most massive structure humanity
had ever built until that point, and easily big enough for some humans (like the technicians
trained to run it) to live actually on or in it.
If that were the case, then anyone listing the Dyson Sphere as their primary address
would have a unique, extremely close, and perhaps quite unsettling view of the sun.
A Dyson Sphere shouldn’t represent a health risk to a Type II civilization, though.
By the time humanity becomes advanced enough to build something like this, we should’ve
worked out and sidestepped all the dangers involved… which means we’d have shielded
ourselves from the otherwise intense radiation, and might even be able to look at the sun
up close without damaging our eyes - maybe through some solar-grade windows or specialist
goggles.
But, why would we ever want or need such a high level of control or such an incredible
amount of energy?
In some variations of the Dyson Sphere idea, it might be that this immense piece of machinery
could actually serve to lengthen the lifetime of the sun, buying Earth and the solar system
specifically more time before our star goes red giant.
For Freeman Dyson, though, the mind behind the Sphere, it’s more simply a natural progression
for any space-faring civilization.
Any alien society that continues to advance and settle on other planets would need to
consume greater and greater amounts of energy, until its home star becomes the only source
in its planetary system which offers enough.
The opportunities available to a civilization at this stage, though, would be incredible
to today’s mind.
Not only would we have spread out across the solar system, but we’d have likely mastered
all of its many environments, too.
Getting to and living on Mars would be easy; exploring the subsurface oceans believed to
exist on places like Europa and Enceladus would be a breeze; we’d be able to build
working colonies on any solar system body we wanted to.
Our spaceships at this point would be so much more improved as well, utilizing possible
technologies such as Laser Ion engines or nuclear fusion itself, to give us infinitely
faster access from Mercury to maybe even the Oort Cloud.
And, not only would we have all of that, but it would also be much more difficult to kill
us off.
The destruction of humanity would be a lot harder to achieve.
In fact, if we were a Type II civilization, there’d be very little currently known to
(or suspected by) science that could wipe us out.
Asteroid impacts which we’re now unable to prevent, for example, would be easy to
handle… at Type II we could disintegrate an oncoming rock, or potentially even move
the Earth - or whichever planet we’re on at the time - out of its path.
In general, though, for anything to threaten the whole of humanity, it would now have to
threaten the whole of the solar system… so one asteroid heading for one planet wouldn’t
spell the doom it does now.
In a worst-case scenario, humans would just evacuate that planet before the impact happened.
We wouldn’t be invincible, though.
There would still be some doomsday eventualities - like the appearance of a black hole nearby
or universe-wide vacuum decay - which we’d still have no hope of outrunning.
Plus, war would remain a viable threat, either between ourselves or against some other space-faring
civilization.
It’s thought a Type II society would still operate governments, to manage things like
trade, communication or conflicts between the various planets, moons and asteroids in
a star system.
There could still be competition and rivalry between these worlds, despite them all being
united by the Dyson Sphere tasked to power them.
And there’d still be a potentially dangerous “next frontier” to aim for and work towards;
interstellar travel.
According to the Kardashev Scale, the next move for a Type II civilization would be to
expand into other star systems, in a bid to reach Type III.
In our case, this would mean heading for Alpha Centauri, a three-star system that’s 4.3
lightyears away from us, and colonising it in the same way as, by then, we would’ve
already done with the solar system.
And, from Alpha Centauri it’d be onto the next star system, as humanity spreads out
across the galaxy, seemingly becoming more and more indestructible as it does so.
Before any of this becomes possible, however, we must first become a Type I civilization.
As is widely reported and commented on, the current generation appears to exist at a very
precarious time in human history; it holds the power to save this planet Earth or destroy
it.
And what we choose to do with that power will make or break our future.
The Kardashev Scale can seem like a set, even pre-determined pathway, but it’s the choices
a civilization makes which determine how its future unfolds.
And that’s what would happen if humanity were a Type II civilization.
What do you think?
Is there anything we missed?
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