Saturday, December 20, 2008

Michio Kaku: Type I, II & III Civilizations

Here's an interesting interview with Dr. Michio Kaku, a truly profound-thinking physicist, who is like a successor to Carl Sagan, imho. He talks about the 3 most significant types of civilizations that would exist in our universe, based on the Kardashev scale proposed in 1964.

For a civilization to rank as Type-I, it has to be capable of harnessing the entire power of a planet, and dominate its processes, including its weather, geothermal energy, etc. It should be able to construct facilities anywhere it wants to on the planet.

For a civilization to rank as Type-II, it has to be capable of harnessing the power of its local star, and subsidiary planets.

For a civilization to rank as Type-III, it has to become inter-stellar/multi-stellar, capable of expanding across multiple star systems, and eventually the entire galaxy.

We are of course currently at the zero-point-something mark on this scale.

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