Problems with the Kardashev Scale

You may have heard of the levels of technological civilization that might exist in the universe, called the Kardashev scale, named after the Soviet astronomer who thought it up, Nicolai Kardashev, in 1964. The scale depends mostly upon the size of the energy usage by the civilization in question. The scale normally goes from one to seven, but people have extended it - for instance Carl Sagan added detailing within the levels (it occurred to me on writing this that if this interest you, you might also like Olaf Stapledon’s science fiction book “Last and First Men” written in 1930, which in many ways predates Kardashev’s ideas).

The human species is not yet on the first rung of this ladder. An advanced cosmic civilization on the seventh rung would be able to control the entire universe or multiverse and harness its total energy. The first level is capable of using the power only of the planet that the civilization is born on. So, a type two civilization is capable of using the total energy of its planet and its local star. Etc.

 Our human definition of civilization is very likely to be biased towards what we currently think of as our civilized status, but setting this aside, in the original scale by Kardashev, as stated, it relies upon energy use as a way to decide its position on the scoreboard. One of the reasons why this might be flawed is that advances in science can find ways of making energy go further or have more dramatic effects with a smaller amount, or at least we might infer that advancement ought to mean this. But nevertheless, the scale as such assumes that the goal of advancement will always be greater power and greater power use. It is obsessed with power.

This assumption derives from the notion of technological advancement considered in isolation from other kinds of advancement, such as social and political. Peculiarly, but not surprisingly, the scale seems to fix the advancement at a technological level embedded in twentieth century Earth based Eurocentric capitalism, which fought imperialist wars over energy resources (and we are still doing this).

But clearly, we must not only consider technological advancement but also biological and evolutionary, as well as advancement in art and, design, and philosophy, and social and political advancement. Not all of these correspond to each other harmoniously or develop in time at the same rate. Kardashev, a pretty good astronomer, was not such a good philosopher. Imagine therefore if we kept to his scale the sheer amount of rubbish, pollution, and kitsch that the advanced technological civilizations would produce, say about Type 3. The cosmic scale equivalent of kitten videos but with the ability and power to have them transmitted everywhere all at once. Sagan once said that a lot also depended on the civilization’s storage and use of information. Our internet carries multiple terabytes of information for instance. Unfortunately, however, a great deal of it is lies, trolling, and fascist. A concept of quality has gone missing.

There are infinite resources available in the universe, so no need to fight over any of it. And even if civilizations were super abundant, the universe is so colossal that we might never be able to communicate even with just one, in any case. And the physical constraints on the speed of travel (light speed) would probably lead to advanced civilisations giving it up as unnecessary and concentrating instead on other areas of life, in other words they have eschewed the imperialist social misadventures of their distant past which led them to always want to physically expand. It is not impossible that an advanced civilization might even consider using such power a sign of gross immaturity, philosophically speaking, and they would snobbishly avoid such doltish aliens; as for us, we would not even be worth a glance.

Or what would a Type 7 civilization artist want to do with the universe? Maybe we are in fact living in one of their works of art, and Dark Matter is a kind of clue of this, a bit of Cow Gum used to fill in the gaps to make it all look good.

Fireball Earth, Our Extinction, and the Fermi Paradox

 Our Earth does not have an equilibrium that it tries to keep to. It does not balance itself to help us living things survive. That living things on this planet have evolved has led to some effects that cause the planet to be more habitable for a certain kind of life, but there is and has been no plan for this. The Earth does not care, or not care, about life or our human species. We tend to think of the story of our planet in humanized terms, as if it had feelings and a goal that should be nice for us. It does not. But the human species perhaps can. As we are creatures which are self-aware, and we have scientific knowledge, maybe we have the possibility of consciously intervening in our planet’s trajectory. It remains to be seen; at the present we are not capable of this, it is only potential.

Scientific findings based on data have demonstrated that the planet on which we live has had periods in its history when there have been mass extinction events in which a majority of life goes extinct, and that these periods correspond strongly to times when there have been rapid changes in climate, such as dramatic warming. Sometimes these have been in response to ice ages, as a kind of ‘over-correction’ when carbon in the atmosphere has risen due to the effects of continuing massive volcanism and when the ice and snow covering cannot absorb all the emissions, leading eventually to extreme heating.

The Earth still has periods of ice-ages, it oscillates between average temperature extremes, and we are currently in an interglacial period, in fact more near to the end of it than the beginning. Climate scientists say the evidence shows that fast human caused climate heating due to our burning of fossil fuels will prevent the next ice age from happening.

Yay! You might think. It will be nice to avoid all that cold. But every such dramatic change in temperature, and this human caused change is the fastest ever, has led to really big extinctions amongst Earth’s creatures.

Why? Because evolutionary alterations to adapt to such changes occur much slower than this rate of change. Living things cannot speed up evolution. What the science has noticed is that animals have instead had to, if they did not simply die out (which they did), migrate to colder regions of the globe if they could. Sea creatures migrated for instance, whilst some land creatures might have found it more difficult due to being cut-off by seas or the landscape. One of the science articles points to surface sea water temperature during a hot period of 40C, which meant that land temperatures must have been even hotter. Sustained general average temperatures of this size lead to the mass deaths of plants and animals.

The human species will be unable to change course from their current trajectory of burning fossil fuels and large-scale agriculture for crops and livestock, which causes the increasing emissions of carbon in the Earth’s atmosphere which in turn creates the heating effect. Political forces will be unable to tackle this problem in a scientific manner, as we have already clearly seen, because science is not the primary goal of our capitalist politics. To put it schematically, this is because the most powerful and profitable globally spanning industries: energy, security, and drugs, influence our politicians and shape their policies.

Just as importantly, these industries also decide the discourse that the rest of us perceive through the media. It therefore becomes unpopular to talk about climate warming, and again as we have seen increasingly climate science is being depicted in the press as crackpot. Add to this the fact that these industries provide a multitude of jobs for people who obviously do not want to lose their livelihoods, then we have a political environment which is totally opposed to doing anything substantial about climate heating, and will fight it even in the sneaky and subtle ways that our media industry knows how. It is the same with the offshoots of the petrochemical industry, such as plastics and plastic pollution. This industry is profitable and is hardly likely to give this up voluntarily, so there have been no agreements over preventing plastic pollution (as recently seen).

The interests that exist in these industries therefore are inevitably against the dismantling of their dominance, something which would be necessary to prevent further climate heating. But even if they wanted to do this, as a few people in the industries clearly do, they would find it very difficult to change course because they are massive juggernauts, and it would be too socially disruptive to capitalism. At the same time, it is also unlikely that the democratic consensus could agree on a globally unified approach to this enormous problem, given that all the different nation states compete economically, and it would need some short and probably medium term severe economic pain and disruption to even begin to ameliorate in a real way the effects of the pollution.

So, what is likely to happen in the future? Continuing the current course, we are likely, sooner than later, to experience more instances of deadly heatwaves, especially in areas that are already warm, such as nearer to the equator. Wildfires are likely to become a constant feature of summers in these regions, but also in regions more northern that still experience much less regular rainfall or only get the rainfall in overly large downpours onto dry and hard ground and so produce floods.

Quite soon, apart from the effect this will have on agriculture, these areas will become non-survivable in the warmer seasons. And mass animal and human migration from these regions will be likely. But this will be resisted by the cooler northern countries by default, as is already happening. It is similar with the rise in sea levels and the necessary abandonment of coastal cities, which will also lead to mass migration which will be resisted.

In short, in human terms, the social disruption and the massive numbers of refugees in combination usually lead to wars and wars always lead to even greater and faster emissions. We could call this and other factors of a similar nature the social feedback loops that add to the climate disaster. Given that this will happen quite quickly it will lead to great stress on the human population, and this will reach a tipping point beyond which it will not be survivable.

The ever-increasing temperatures may even lead to a Fireball Earth phenomenon, where the confluence of the normal volcanism and geologic tectonic activity from beneath the ground combines with the atmospheric heating caused by the burning of fossil fuels to squeeze the habitable space in the middle. We have all heard of Snowball Earth, where in the past our planet has been completely covered in glaciers, this will be the reverse phenomenon. But it may be harder for the Earth to recover from this hellish state and get back to its current fairly pleasant condition for our species. Venus, one of our neighbouring planets, is like this, essentially a fireball. Evidence suggests it once had oceans, long ago.

The Fermi Paradox is the idea that intelligent life should be prevalent and even abundant in the universe but strangely does not appear to be present to our astronomers. It is likely one of the reasons that we have not discovered intelligent alien species out in space is because this global catastrophe is the kind of thing that usually happens to the top predator in an ecosystem. Its own success becomes its failure because it cannot prevent itself from using up all the resources that it needs to continue to thrive and so destroys itself.

We like to think we are conscious and in charge of our destiny, but it is probable that we are not, and that this idea is mostly a self-delusion.

I have only been a little hyperbolic here, unfortunately. See:

 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/31/cop30-climate-us-officials