Types of Civilizations: Kardashev's Civilization Scale Analysis

In 1964 Nikolai Kardashev said that the most fundamental way to classify how advanced a civilization is/was, is/was based on Its energy consumption. The more energy they consume which means control, then the more sophisticated the civilization must be.

Kardashev even proposed a scale for quantifying how advanced civilizations are.

He called a civilization "Type I" if it was able to harness all of the energy striking its planet from the parent star which for the Earth is about 1.7e+17 Watts.

Such a civilization should have complete control of their planetary environment, weather and resources as well as their local orbit.

Going further a "Type II" civilization would have a power consumption comparable to the output of a star which for the Sun is 3.8e+26watts.

Such civilization would be using stars as engines effectively harnessing them using constructions such as Dyson spheres.

Finally, a "Type III" civilization would have a power consumption comparable to a Galaxy. That's something like 5e+36 watts.

Such a civilization would be so advanced it's very difficult for us to make any kind of predictions about what they would be like and thus there's probably not too much point in worrying about "Type IV" or "V" or "VI" beyond that either.

Now you might wonder where does humanity fall on this scale?

Well, it was Carl Sagan who extended Kardashev's idea to a continuous scale by noting that the energy levels are logarithmically uniformly distributed and this one can fit a straight line through the log of these three power levels.

So I'm showing you the three energy levels here,

let's repeat Sagan's calculation and fit the three power levels assuming a log-linear law. This gives us the following equation for our Kardashev level K where P is the power used by our civilization in watts.

Now in 2017 humanity's average power consumption was 17.9 terawatts. That would give us a Kardashev score of 0.60.

Yeah, you might say that 0.60 isn't too far off 1.0 but remember this scale is logarithmic, so to go from 0.60 to 1.0, we have to increase our power consumption by a factor of 1 million. Now there are those out there who would say no problem, humanity's growth is itself exponential and thus we should achieve type 1 status in a matter of centuries.

"But if you get a calculator you can calculate when we will attain type 1 status the answer is in about a hundred years"

Michio Kaku video clip from BigThink

But does this check out okay?

So here's the average power consumption of humanity over time

And at first glance, you know such a claim seems reasonable. It does look exponential. If we take the logarithm of the power axis there

then the growth certainly looks exponential even in log space up to the mid-twentieth century and that's something we call Hyper Exponential Growth. But in more recent decades that hyper exponential growth behavior has shirt off and so clearly extrapolating this data into the far future is going to be sensitive to what model you assume.

Okay so let me show you four models that I fitted to this data set.

First the most common is the Exponential = RED and a Hyper Exponential = ORANGE. Then a Logistic = GREEN and a Hyper Logistic = BLUE. A logistic function looks like a leaning S and it mimics the growth of biological populations which tend to explode and then saturate at some maximum capacity level. Now as you can see all four of these models do a pretty good job of explaining the current data but if we go forward in time

they give very different predictions about the future.

The exponential model sees us becoming a type one civilization by about 4100 AD whereas the hyper exponential is far sooner in the mid 2300 AD.

Now whilst those numbers seem promising, both of the logistic functions predict will stabilize our energy consumption way before becoming a "Type I" predicting a maximum Kardashev score for humanity of something like 0.65.

Now the real point here is to show you that you can come up with a wide variety of seemingly plausible models to explain the current energy trends we've seen in the last couple of centuries but extrapolating those models into the far future leads to wildly different predictions. But for the sake of this article let's be optimistic and let's assume that we do not saturate at some capped energy level but we keep on growing up to "Type I" status.

So what would that even look like, how would we increase our energy by a factor of a million?

Today humanity gets It's energy consumption from a variety of sources such as

1. FOSSIL FUELS:

First of all fossil fuels are not a contender as a pathway to becoming a "Type I" civilization because even at current levels of usage

we're likely to dry up our oil reserves in about a century let alone if we increased our energy demand by a factor of a million. It's not a candidate and that's not to say anything about the stupidity of turning your home planet into a giant greenhouse.

2. WIND & WAVE:

But what about using the earth itself. let's take wind and wave power. Well, the first thing to note there is the wave power is largely driven by the wind

Wind map movie courtesy of Rufinoman and earth.nullschool.net

so you can't double-dip on both. There is some debate about exactly how much energy is contained within the Earth's winds but we do know of course that winds are ultimately generated by the sun's energy warming up the atmosphere. So a starting point is to note that the Earth's surface absorbs about 9e+16Watts of solar radiation. Now that power warms the entire earth but wind power is generated by the residuals, the thermal differences between regions.

In 2004 Vaclav Smil estimated that at best about 2% of this instant energy ultimately gets transferred to the air in the form of kinetic energy. And so wind power has to be less than this number. So put together wind power and by proxy wave power would have a maximum theoretical power level of about 1800 terawatts and that's assuming 100% efficient energy extraction.

3. TIDAL:

Now, what about tidal energy though? Tidal energy is different. It is generated not by solar radiation but by the gravitational influence of the moon and the Sun

The total amount of power desiccated through tides by the Earth's oceans is now well determined with techniques such as satellite and lunar laser ranging all agreeing on a value of 3.7 terawatts. And it's a similar story for Geothermal energy which is ultimately driven by the internal heat of the earth itself that gives you about 47 terrawatts. Again not at the right level for what we need.

4. NUCLEAR FUSION:

Now, this just leaves us with two contenders left in the game, Solar Energy and Nuclear Energy. Present-day nuclear power plants use

fission to generate their energy. That's the splitting of heavy atomic elements. But it has long been a dream that we could exploit the nuclear fusion process in the future. That's the combination of lighter atomic elements together.

Now It's a long-running joke that nuclear fusion power plants are always 40 years away from us it never seems to get any closer but let's just make the assumption we'll figure this out one day and we will have nuclear fusion power.

Nuclear fusion can happen of the combination of really any two elements you want but the most energy-efficient process identified for nuclear fusion power

plants is the combination of Deuterium and Tritium.

Now, these two are heavy isotopes of hydrogen which is a fancy way of saying they just have extra and neutrons in their atomic nucleus than a hydrogen atom does. Fortunately, there's no shortage of deuterium here on the earth. Something like 40 trillion tons of the stuff just in our oceans. Tritium, however, is far rarer it's only found in trace amounts inside water. So typically it is produced by the reaction of free neutrons and lithium inside nuclear reactors. that sounds great but lithium is also a fairly rare commodity - there's only about 30 million tons of the stuff in the ground reserves that we have but there's probably an extra 200 billion tons of the stuff dissolved in seawater. So if we had access to all of that lithium that's dissolved we'll be able to make something like 90 billion tons of lithium.

Now since each deuterium-tritium fusion reaction creates 17.5 9 mega electron volts of energy, we would expect a total amount of energy that we could extract from nuclear fusion would be something like 5e+28 joules. That would be enough to power "Type I" civilization's energy needs for approximately 10,000 years. So nuclear fusion could be a viable pathway to becoming a type one civilization.

5. SOLAR:

But what about solar. Well, of course, solar energy is generated from the Sun and it's important to remember that the Sun is, in essence, a giant nuclear fusion power plant in the sky. Now on the earth one of the big problems with nuclear fusion is confinement, how do you keep this hot plasma

together at extreme enough pressures and temperatures to kick-start the nuclear fusion process. But on the Sun confinement happens for free, it happens from their self-gravity of the star itself. Yet space is very empty and thus the transmission of energy from the Sun to the top of the Earth's atmospheres is essentially lossless. Finally, there is enough power to become a "Type I" civilization from solar energy because that's actually how we define a "Type I" civilization, it's one which uses all of the solar radiation incidents upon its planet. So all you need to do is tie all your planet with solar cells

and hey you are a "Type I". Then I say wait where would I live? Well this doesn't mean there's no living space, It just means all of the living space is underneath the solar panels. However, even this extreme scenario is probably not enough because solar cells are not 100% efficient. Modern solar technology is something like 25% efficient and there are some laboratory demonstrations which approach 50% efficiency. But a 100% efficient solar cell is impossible and that's because the maximum theoretical efficiency of such a

device is governed by the ratio of the temperature of the receiver to the temperature of the emitter. in our case,

that's the Earth to the Sun. The so-called Carnot efficiency of this system would be at best 95%. We could never do better than that and you might say no worries I'll just build a giant solar cell farm in space and beam the energy back to the earth but even that has some problems.

The conservation of energy now becomes your enemy. Energy cannot be destroyed or created it can only be transformed from one form to another and that's not some Jedi doctrine that's the first law of thermodynamics. If a civilization uses a certain amount of energy to power their civilization that energy doesn't just disappear after they're done with it, it becomes waste heat, it warms their planet and that statement is true no matter what your energy source is be it Solar, Nuclear or Antimatter.

Right now the waste heat generated by humanity's activities is so minuscule it doesn't make any difference to the temperature of the planet. But for a "Type I" civilization, it's a different kettle of fish. One way to calculate this is to take the solar energy scenario and I'm gonna walk you through a very simple calculation for the equilibrium temperature of the earth. That's a very basic calculation .

Using the Stefan-Boltzmann law one can show that a planet's temperature approximately equals this, where I've labelled here the various terms for you. The albedo term is the key here. That's how much light is reflected into space without ever being absorbed by the planet.

For the earth, it's about 30%. Now if you are a "Type I" civilization you do not want 30% of this solar radiation to be reflected into space. That's the energy that you need to power your civilization.

So by tiling your planet with very efficient solar panels you essentially make your planet very very dark dropping the hour bead over here down to zero.

So hopefully you can see from this equation that if I decrease the albedo I'm gonna raise the temperature and it would raise the earth's

temperature by about 24 degree Celsius or 43 degree Fahrenheit. And that's huge. It would render large portions of your planet completely inhabitable and you can't Geo engineer your way out of this problem either for instance the idea of building a giant space mirror. That's not gonna work because then you're reflecting away the very energy that you need to power your civilization and switching to a different energy source than solar, say nuclear power is not gonna help you but it's going to make things even worse because now not only do you have to dissipate all of the waste heat generated by your nuclear reactors but you also still have to get rid of all of that energy which your planet is absorbing from the Sun.

Anyway you have twice the problem to deal with so no matter how you look at it, becoming a "Type I" civilization is going to cause your planet to warm up.

So I would claim that a "Type I" civilization maybe has two options for getting around this,

(let me know if you have other options you can think of)

One would just be to build a giant air conditioner and have everybody live inside and keep those small volumes cool.

Another option which might be a bit more realistic I think would be that to relax this assumption that we have to live on a single planet to let our civilization spread out to the other planets and moons in your solar system. That way you don't have to dissipate all of the energy in a single location which allows you to keep each of those bodies a bit cooler temperature.

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So hopefully I've convinced you at the end that becoming a Kardashev "Type I" civilization would dramatically change our way of life. It's not going to be business as usual now.

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