Kardashev Scale - Extensions To The Original Scale

Extensions To The Original Scale

The state that human civilization currently occupies was originally Type I in the Kardashev scale, but has a K value below 1 using Sagan's logarithmic formula (described above).

Zoltan Galantai has defined a further extrapolation of the scale, a Type IV level which controls the energy output of the visible universe; this is within a few orders of magnitude of 1045 W. Such a civilization approaches or surpasses the limits of speculation based on current scientific understanding, and may not be possible. Frank J. Tipler's Omega point would presumably occupy this level, as would the Biocosm hypothesis. Galantai has argued that such a civilization could not be detected, as its activities would be indistinguishable from the workings of nature (there being nothing to compare them to).

However, Milan M. Ćirković has argued that "Type IV" should instead be used to refer to a civilization that has harnessed the power of its supercluster, or "the largest gravitationally bound structure it originated in." For the Local Supercluster, this would be approximately 1042 W.

Dr. Michio Kaku has discussed a Type IV civilization, which could harness "extragalactic" energy sources such as dark energy, in his book Parallel Worlds.

In contrast to simply increasing the maximum power level covered by the scale, Carl Sagan suggested adding another dimension: the information available to the civilization. He assigned the letter A to represent 106 unique bits of information (less than any recorded human culture) and each successive letter to represent an order of magnitude increase, so that a level Z civilization would have 1031 bits. In this classification, 1973 Earth is a 0.7 H civilization, with access to 1013 bits of information. Sagan believed that no civilization has yet reached level Z, conjecturing that so much unique information would exceed that of all the intelligent species in a galactic supercluster and observing that the universe is not old enough to exchange information effectively over larger distances. The information and energy axes are not strictly interdependent, so that even a level Z civilization would not need to be Kardashev Type III.

John D. Barrow, going by the fact that humans have found it more cost-effective to extend any abilities to manipulate their environment over increasingly smaller dimensions rather than increasingly larger ones, reverses the classification downward from Type I-minus to Type Omega-minus:

Type I-minus is capable of manipulating objects over the scale of themselves: building structures, mining, joining and breaking solids; Type II-minus is capable of manipulating genes and altering the development of living things, transplanting or replacing parts of themselves, reading and engineering their genetic code; Type Ill-minus is capable of manipulating molecules and molecular bonds, creating new materials; Type IV-minus is capable of manipulating individual atoms, creating nanotechnologies on the atomic scale and creating complex forms of artificial life; Type V-minus is capable of manipulating the atomic nucleus and engineering the nucleons that compose it; Type VI-minus is capable of manipulating the most elementary particles of matter (quarks and leptons) to create organized complexity among populations of elementary particles; culminating in. Type Omega-minus is capable of manipulating the basic structure of space and time.