Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. Hay there, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
Speaker 1: podcast that looks at the future and says I'd studied
Speaker 1: your cartoons, radio music, TV, movies, magazines. I'm Jonathan Strickland Lauren,
Speaker 1: and I'm Joe McCormick. And uh, I gotta I got
Speaker 1: a question for you guys. How would you Uh, let's
Speaker 1: assume for a moment that there are a few intelligent
Speaker 1: civilizations out there? Okay, are we talking about on Earth
Speaker 1: or throughout the universe. When I say out there, I
Speaker 1: usually mean space. What we count Earth is one intelligent
Speaker 1: civilization Earth, Earth as a as a whole. Uh, And
Speaker 1: how would you go about categorizing that particular type of things?
Speaker 1: Like if there if you knew there were multiple extraterrestrial
Speaker 1: intelligent civilizations out there, what sort of criteria would you
Speaker 1: use to kind of classify them? Um? Has James T.
Speaker 1: Kirk made out with any of them? That's a big one.
Speaker 1: How many of them showed up? You can basically sort
Speaker 1: into two groups. You have you have positive on the
Speaker 1: made out scale or not or negative on the made
Speaker 1: out For me, is were they represented in moss Ic
Speaker 1: Lee's Cantina during the Star Wars episode for a New
Speaker 1: Hope and only in the pre uh special edition days
Speaker 1: because special edition changed up some stuff, like you don't
Speaker 1: have werewolves in the special edition one. UM. I would
Speaker 1: also say, uh, do you can sort them into psychic
Speaker 1: fog and non psychic fog? So so we just call
Speaker 1: that fog, Joe, non psychic fog is just fog. Oh
Speaker 1: you're right, all right? So uh, Lauren an Well, I
Speaker 1: was just gonna say that I think that most of
Speaker 1: these definitions are are weirdly based in in science. I mean,
Speaker 1: because because you're assuming that if something has gotten to
Speaker 1: James T. Kirk to to allow him to make out
Speaker 1: with it, or if it has reached the masais La Cantina,
Speaker 1: that it has the enough power over its resources to
Speaker 1: um to have interplanetary space travel. It's a big one.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, so it might be from this distance actually
Speaker 1: worth trying to sort alien civilizations into stages of technological advancement,
Speaker 1: because we tend to try to do that with our
Speaker 1: own history on planet Earth, right, Like we can look
Speaker 1: at ourselves as pre or post agricultural. That's like a
Speaker 1: big turning joint or like pre or post industrial, pre
Speaker 1: or post digital. Uh. And even in the future you
Speaker 1: could say we are like pre or post the technological singularity, right,
Speaker 1: And so this got us to thinking about a couple
Speaker 1: of different things. But you know, I was also thinking
Speaker 1: about other alternatives to discussing, you know, humans history, like
Speaker 1: how would we define our human civilization in terms of
Speaker 1: a galactic kind of view or even a universal view.
Speaker 1: So we've barely started an we're the tiniest of blips
Speaker 1: when you look at the universal scale of time. We
Speaker 1: haven't been around for long at all, like not even
Speaker 1: a heartbeat yet on the galactic side of things. But
Speaker 1: I started thinking how would I define that? And one
Speaker 1: of one thing I thought it was, well, maybe you
Speaker 1: could define human history, uh in a way of like
Speaker 1: how far out did we have we gotten? Like how
Speaker 1: far out have we explored? So that'd be one way
Speaker 1: you could explain a species ability at say their technological
Speaker 1: development is how far have they gone from their point
Speaker 1: of origin? So you mean like any kind of probe
Speaker 1: or like robust like colonization either way, either way, I mean,
Speaker 1: it doesn't really matter. It's it's all stages of that exploration. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So so you, you know, you would have like, you know,
Speaker 1: qualifiers obviously, so you might be like, well, they've sent
Speaker 1: robots out to the neighboring solar systems, but no, actual
Speaker 1: men do not want to make out with that robot. Honestly,
Speaker 1: he probably does. I had a qualification to the James T.
Speaker 1: Kirk thing. I didn't mean he had to make out
Speaker 1: with every member of the species, at least one. I
Speaker 1: feel like that was understand is only one man? So uh,
Speaker 1: one amazing man, James Tiberius Kirk. We salute you. But no,
Speaker 1: that would be one way of explaining it, right. The
Speaker 1: one way of describing it is how far out have
Speaker 1: we gone from our point of origin? Ok? Okay, So
Speaker 1: that's one way. Another one I thought of is just
Speaker 1: the way we define ourselves. So right now we define
Speaker 1: ourselves as human beings were Homo sapiens. But one of
Speaker 1: the things we've talked about in the past is this
Speaker 1: idea of the singularity, which could end up making us
Speaker 1: redefine what we are depending upon how that singularity plays out.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of different scenarios that are encompassed
Speaker 1: by this concept the singularity, that involved things like we
Speaker 1: become sort of robot people, or we figure out how
Speaker 1: to biologically manipulate aid ourselves to the point where we
Speaker 1: kind of evolved to another species, So that would be
Speaker 1: an almost cyberneticus. Yeah, and that could be another way
Speaker 1: that we end up defining ourselves, although that gets problematic
Speaker 1: because theoretically we could have one version of the singularity
Speaker 1: that gives you lots of different choices, right, which means
Speaker 1: that we end up having crazy amounts of individualization, where
Speaker 1: defining us as a broad species might even become problematic. Well,
Speaker 1: but again, that's a scale of how biological versus artificial
Speaker 1: you have made yourselves well, or even how you've enhanced
Speaker 1: yourself biologically, because if I if I've never even maybe
Speaker 1: I don't have my awesome robot arm that I totally
Speaker 1: want to get, but I've got like a super strong
Speaker 1: arm because I've been able to modify my my body
Speaker 1: and some other biological means. Though, I want to offer
Speaker 1: a question, which is that, Okay, so maybe that might
Speaker 1: change the way we look at ourselves in a big way,
Speaker 1: Like whether or not you've got robotic limbs and can
Speaker 1: live for ten thousand years makes a big difference to us,
Speaker 1: but to someone say like at the other end of
Speaker 1: the Milky Way galaxy. That doesn't make a big difference
Speaker 1: in how they view up now. They don't care because
Speaker 1: they don't have the context of all of human history
Speaker 1: to care about that, right, So that that seems like
Speaker 1: a thing that's more internally important than externally. So there's
Speaker 1: a another way of looking at this that goes back
Speaker 1: to the idea of how much energy are we able
Speaker 1: to harness, how much are we able to take advantage of,
Speaker 1: and how much of that are we dedicating to sending
Speaker 1: a signal out there saying, hey, guys, here we are.
Speaker 1: And this is sort of what is the underlying idea
Speaker 1: behind what we call the kardashi of scale, right, the
Speaker 1: Cardashev scale, proposed by Nikolai Kardashev in the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 1: You know I love people named Nikolai. Yeah, Well, this
Speaker 1: guy you could you can tell him in person, because
Speaker 1: he's still alive. He's eighty one and deputy director of
Speaker 1: a space research institute in Russia. And for you, sir,
Speaker 1: and he uh. He was proposing that we needed to
Speaker 1: think of civilizations in broad, incredibly broad categories. As it
Speaker 1: turns out, um too in a way to to narrow
Speaker 1: down what we're looking for when we're looking for evidence
Speaker 1: of those civilizations sending out messages out into space. Right,
Speaker 1: because following Frank Drake's work in nineteen sixty um and
Speaker 1: and we did a whole episode on the Drake equations,
Speaker 1: so you can check out um is anybody out there
Speaker 1: published on November six if you would like to hear
Speaker 1: all about that. But but following up on his work
Speaker 1: talking about searching for signals, for extraterrestrial signals, Uh, this
Speaker 1: is what this is what Kardashiev was doing. Yeah. He
Speaker 1: was saying that if you assume that civilizations are able to, uh,
Speaker 1: to harness a certain amount of power, then you that
Speaker 1: changes what sort of signals you are actually looking for. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: And so this scale first showed up in a paper
Speaker 1: called Transmission of Information by Exterrestrial Civilizations in the Journal
Speaker 1: of Soviet Astronomy in nineteen three. And he was taking
Speaker 1: this kind of hypothetical approach of categorizing civilizations into these
Speaker 1: broad broad buckets as a way of looking at things
Speaker 1: that were interesting they were popping up on on radio
Speaker 1: radio antenna's. For example, there was the c t A
Speaker 1: one oh two event, which was this this radio signal
Speaker 1: that was picked up that was really strong. It was
Speaker 1: clearly extraterrestrial or appeared to be extraterrestrial in origin, so
Speaker 1: it didn't come from Earth. It came from somewhere else.
Speaker 1: And there were some people who were even saying that
Speaker 1: they were, uh, they were detecting some variability in the
Speaker 1: signal which could suggest some form of intelligent communication that
Speaker 1: was a quasar. So it definitely stirred a huge reaction
Speaker 1: in the scientific community, and it took some time to
Speaker 1: be able to kind of whittle this down. There was
Speaker 1: a there was another one in the seventies called the
Speaker 1: Wow signal. You might have heard of that one, and
Speaker 1: that one it was named after what somebody wrote on
Speaker 1: the print out of it. Yeah. They they looked at
Speaker 1: they had a print out of the what the radio
Speaker 1: antenna had picked up, and they rode down next to it,
Speaker 1: circled it, and then wrote down Wow. Because it seemed
Speaker 1: to be something that would potentially be a sign of
Speaker 1: extraterrestrial intelligence. And certainly any indication has to be studied
Speaker 1: uh quite a bit to get to that level of certainty,
Speaker 1: but it was certainly promising and um, that was another
Speaker 1: one that got a lot of attention. Uh, it turned
Speaker 1: out that a lot of other more sensitive antenna did
Speaker 1: not pick up that particular signal, which kind of brings
Speaker 1: into question what this thing actually was could have been
Speaker 1: could some some have suggested that it was actually a
Speaker 1: reflection of an earth bound signal, that something was was
Speaker 1: broadcast out, bounced off space debris and bounced back down
Speaker 1: to Earth and that's why I picked up. Although it
Speaker 1: appears upon further examination that that's not really likely unless
Speaker 1: it was some sort of military application, because it was
Speaker 1: on a bandwidth it's reserved for radio astronomy, So it
Speaker 1: shouldn't have been like a television station just boosting up
Speaker 1: their signal or something because it was on a prohibited band.
Speaker 1: Maybe those darn kids playing with their transistor it was,
Speaker 1: I think it was. It was Cosby's kids say the
Speaker 1: darndest things. Actually it was what it was. Okay, So,
Speaker 1: so what did all old Nicolaike Hardischev have to say
Speaker 1: about the types of civilizations that we might find out there? Well,
Speaker 1: you know, again, this really concerns the civilizations that we
Speaker 1: would have a chance of detecting. Just start talking about bacteria, right,
Speaker 1: or even intelligent life that has yet to develop any
Speaker 1: form of radio communication, because even if those may exist,
Speaker 1: but there'd be no way for us to detect them
Speaker 1: with our our radio astronomy. Right, And this ties back
Speaker 1: into if you listen to our episode on the Drake equation,
Speaker 1: what that is talking about. Also, it's an equation for
Speaker 1: determining the likelihood that we will encounter another civilization in
Speaker 1: our galaxy. And that's based on technological civilization, not like
Speaker 1: a planet full of goats, right, or even a planet
Speaker 1: full of pre industrial human like creatures, because they would
Speaker 1: have no way of goats yeah, or human well, I
Speaker 1: have known a few. Um, actually not if you go
Speaker 1: like humans too, So it goes both ways. Kirk made
Speaker 1: it to that planet at any rate, that old goat.
Speaker 1: So the the original version of this uh Kardashian divided
Speaker 1: civilizations into three broad types of categories, and this again
Speaker 1: was based on the amount of energy they could harness
Speaker 1: and make yourself, and the idea being that if the
Speaker 1: more energy they this civilization could harness, the more they
Speaker 1: could dedicate to things like broadcasting information out into the
Speaker 1: void so that someone else could hear it, whether or
Speaker 1: not it was intentional, because in some cases, Wait, you
Speaker 1: might pick up a signal that was never meant to
Speaker 1: be a hey, we're here kind of thing. It might
Speaker 1: just be Yeah, it could be exactly like the alien
Speaker 1: equivalent of a rerun of Love Boat. Um. So, Type
Speaker 1: one civilization is a civilization that's capable of harnessing the
Speaker 1: energy of a planet. Now, that does not necessarily mean
Speaker 1: that the civilization would have reached some way of harnessing
Speaker 1: all the energy available on the planet. It might mean
Speaker 1: they are able to harness the energy equivalent to what
Speaker 1: is available on a planet. So it may have multiple
Speaker 1: means of harnessing energy. Not just oh, this one civilization
Speaker 1: has gotten really good at processing oil. That's not what
Speaker 1: this means. It could mean that you don't You look
Speaker 1: at the mass of the planet and you calculate how
Speaker 1: much energy that planet could generate, and that's how much
Speaker 1: energy this particular civilization is able to harness in various ways.
Speaker 1: So that sounds like we're not even at type one yet.
Speaker 1: Not yet. No, this would be around ten to the
Speaker 1: power of six team watts. And uh. There are other people,
Speaker 1: including Carl Sagan, who have proposed that there needs to
Speaker 1: be a slightly more fine gradient. But we'll we'll get
Speaker 1: into that in a little bit because I need to
Speaker 1: explain why. Yeah, because because that's type one, right, type
Speaker 1: was one planet's two. That sounds pretty huge. It's a star,
Speaker 1: so it's it's a bit of a jump from But essentially,
Speaker 1: you know, when you think about it from just a
Speaker 1: logical if you are able to harness all the energy
Speaker 1: on your planet, where do you go next? Well, I
Speaker 1: mean you could harness energy of neighboring planets. That's basically
Speaker 1: the same thing over again, right, right, that tends to
Speaker 1: be something in between your planet, and so that would
Speaker 1: be somewhere between type one and type two. Right. If
Speaker 1: you were able to harness the energy of multiple planets
Speaker 1: in your in your solar system, then sure you could
Speaker 1: increase the amount of energy you're able to generate, but
Speaker 1: you're still not anywhere close to what would be a
Speaker 1: type to the next big step up right, Yeah, so
Speaker 1: you'd have to have some way of harnessing all the
Speaker 1: energy being put off by the Sun in your solar system.
Speaker 1: Is that that would be ten to the twenty six power.
Speaker 1: So we're talking you know, zeroswenty zeros. Yeah, we're this huge,
Speaker 1: so one plan is ten to six. This is ten
Speaker 1: to the twenty six, so much larger um. Yeah, huge
Speaker 1: amount of energy we're talking about here, and we'll talk
Speaker 1: more about you know, how would that possibly happen? Where
Speaker 1: would you go after a star? Well, you know there
Speaker 1: are other stars in the galaxy. So type three is
Speaker 1: a civilization capable of harnessing the energy of an entire galaxy.
Speaker 1: That is, it's which is basically unimaginable, about billions of stars,
Speaker 1: and that would be that would be about ten to
Speaker 1: the thirty seven power. What's of course the creepy thing.
Speaker 1: Just let me stop and recognize there are so many
Speaker 1: galaxies out there, so far away from us, that it's
Speaker 1: possible this already exists. We don't even know. It's possible
Speaker 1: this exists multiple times. Like there there could be multiple
Speaker 1: civilizations out there. It could be that our galaxy is
Speaker 1: the only one that's not on that list. Uh, that's
Speaker 1: not likely. Yeah, we might say why that's not likely
Speaker 1: in a bit, because it uh, something that's harvesting that
Speaker 1: much energy would seem to probably give off some kind
Speaker 1: of signal, probably show up. And unless what's showing up
Speaker 1: is exactly what we happened to see Yeah, well, I
Speaker 1: guess we can talk about that. And you also you
Speaker 1: also have to keep in mind that any any signal
Speaker 1: emanating from such a galaxy would take thousands and thousands
Speaker 1: and thousands and thousands of millions of years to get
Speaker 1: to us, right, I mean, it's not like it's it's
Speaker 1: unless those civilizations that span multiple galaxies themselves are billions
Speaker 1: of years old, we wouldn't even know. The timing would
Speaker 1: have to be pretty spectacular. So anyway, those are the
Speaker 1: three big categories, and as some people have pointed out,
Speaker 1: there needs there might need to be some like wiggle
Speaker 1: room between them, because to go from planet to star
Speaker 1: is a big jump. To go from star to galley
Speaker 1: see is a colossal jump. Yeah, though, I might wonder
Speaker 1: if you could imagine that harnessing energy technology is exponential
Speaker 1: in the same way that harnessing, say, information systems, has
Speaker 1: been exponential for us on Earth well, and and the
Speaker 1: point that Cardaschef was making again was more about assuming
Speaker 1: they are human like intelligent races out there in the
Speaker 1: sense that they have intelligence the way we have intelligence.
Speaker 1: Assuming that there are those out there and that they
Speaker 1: are able to harness energy in similar ways that we
Speaker 1: are able to harness energy on our planet, and we
Speaker 1: assume that there are these three big categories, how would
Speaker 1: civilizations in each of those categories broadcast information? And his
Speaker 1: point was saying that, well, if you're a type three
Speaker 1: civilization and you have this massive amount of energy that
Speaker 1: you are that you are harnessing your your broadcast would
Speaker 1: be really powerful, but they would also probably be really
Speaker 1: really short because you have reached a technological sophistication where
Speaker 1: you are able to pack in huge amounts of information
Speaker 1: and relatively tiny bits of of of radio blasts. So
Speaker 1: the argument there is saying, let's look for things that
Speaker 1: fit into patterns that would that would emanate from these
Speaker 1: sorts of civilizations, and that will help us try and
Speaker 1: identify extraterrestrial intelligent civilizations out there. Okay, so wait a minute,
Speaker 1: so cardashianv identified one through three. Yeah, you want to
Speaker 1: go higher, I can take it after a galaxy. So
Speaker 1: after a galaxy, you have intri galaxy or exit galaxy
Speaker 1: where you you have um multiple galaxies under your ability.
Speaker 1: But that's that's not come on, that's not that's not
Speaker 1: the topic. We can go all the way at to five.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna take it to five. You want to go
Speaker 1: to five to alight five? You're able to harness the
Speaker 1: energy of multiple universes. What, Yeah, it's a multiverse approach. Okay,
Speaker 1: I thought that the definition of the multiverse was non interacting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they don't really like to talk about it. Yeah, Type
Speaker 1: five is one of those things that other people have
Speaker 1: kind of added. It's not card ships, and it's not
Speaker 1: cardship carda ship stuck with the three. But even even
Speaker 1: even type four is the kind of thing that we
Speaker 1: can only imagine by thinking about like time lords with
Speaker 1: que continuum or uh, you know the creators of whatever
Speaker 1: those modeliths are in two thousand one of space. Right,
Speaker 1: if you were to literally control multiple universes, I mean,
Speaker 1: you would essentially be omnipotent, but with it, you might
Speaker 1: be creating your own universes. So that that could you
Speaker 1: would you might extend that argument as any race that
Speaker 1: could do that could potentially be running our universe on
Speaker 1: a computer simulation. Right now, that's a really smart, smart
Speaker 1: alien goat. Yeah, so k Kirk probably probably can hear
Speaker 1: us talking about them, right, and they think it's hilarious.
Speaker 1: I can see right through Kirk's moves, right through them.
Speaker 1: So and getting back I was I mentioned before that
Speaker 1: Carl Sagan had suggested that fine tuning this approach might
Speaker 1: be a good idea. According to what Sagan was looking at,
Speaker 1: he he tweaked karda Chev's approach a bit. I don't know,
Speaker 1: I to go into the fold, the tail, it's you know,
Speaker 1: there's some subtle changes there. But ultimately he determined that
Speaker 1: humans were somewhere in the point seven range, So we
Speaker 1: weren't even type one yet, we would be type point
Speaker 1: zero point seven. We've kind of fine tuned that a
Speaker 1: little bit. It's I think the last one I saw,
Speaker 1: although I'm sure there are other more up to date ones.
Speaker 1: The one of the ones I saw was specifically point
Speaker 1: seven one seven. That really fine tunes it. Um, And
Speaker 1: it might take us a while to finally work up
Speaker 1: the type one. Even though our uh energy production is
Speaker 1: increasing at what one could describe as, if not exponential,
Speaker 1: at least an alarming rate. Um, we will probably not
Speaker 1: hit type one for at least one to three centuries. Yeah,
Speaker 1: even very very optimistic people like Michio Kaku um estimate
Speaker 1: you know, a hundred two hundred years. Yeah, and there
Speaker 1: are others. There's a Jason T. Right and who is
Speaker 1: an assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State,
Speaker 1: who suggests that it might be closer to three hundred years.
Speaker 1: By the way, I'll try and link this, But um,
Speaker 1: but James T Right or Jason T Right, I've got
Speaker 1: the James T. Kirts going on. Jason, I apologize, Jason.
Speaker 1: Jason writes blog on UM Astronomy and Astrophysics. Is is great.
Speaker 1: It was something I had not discovered until we started
Speaker 1: researching this particular episode. But his his discussions about excess
Speaker 1: heat and the Kardashian scale and determining whether or not
Speaker 1: extraterrestrial life is out there, all of them were really
Speaker 1: fascinating stuff. So I'll try and link to those when
Speaker 1: this episode comes out. Uh so, what would we need
Speaker 1: to have to call ourselves a type one civilization? What
Speaker 1: is that in the next few centuries going to hypothetically
Speaker 1: look like we'd have to be able to generate the
Speaker 1: amount of energy that our planet could conceivably Um, it's
Speaker 1: apply to us like that's we'd have to hit that limit,
Speaker 1: and that's going to require things like either fusion generators,
Speaker 1: We're gonna have to move to a lot more nuclear power.
Speaker 1: Even if we go with something like renewable energy, we'd
Speaker 1: have to have a lot of renewable energy collection sources
Speaker 1: across the entire planet. Maybe improve solar panels, you know,
Speaker 1: from the fifteen that they're at now, to something like, well,
Speaker 1: not just improve them, but make tons of the coat
Speaker 1: the planet with them, and not keep in mind that, No,
Speaker 1: it's not necessary for us to rely on a single
Speaker 1: source of energy, so we could be relying on multiple sources.
Speaker 1: It could be that that fusion, if we ever really
Speaker 1: make that work for us on a practical level, could
Speaker 1: provide the ground level, and then things like renewable energy
Speaker 1: sources might offset the rest, and then eventually we hit
Speaker 1: type one based upon Cardashov scale using that kind of method.
Speaker 1: So I doubt that it's ever going to be a
Speaker 1: single source. We might even dip into anti matter. WHOA yeah,
Speaker 1: not uncle matter, just antimatter. Lauren is judging me, Joe
Speaker 1: is laughing. Things are as they should be, okay, Okay,
Speaker 1: So I can see how you could use a combination
Speaker 1: of all these things to harness maybe the energy equivalent
Speaker 1: of a planet. What do you have to start inventing
Speaker 1: in order to harvest the energy of a star. And
Speaker 1: before you answer that, I'm going to answer myself because
Speaker 1: I'm so excited about it. This is one of my
Speaker 1: dramatically this is one of my favorite sort of science
Speaker 1: fiction science reality ideas out there. Well yeah, because LeMond
Speaker 1: Dyson posited this idea first, and it actually positive before
Speaker 1: the Kardashian scale was invented. This is this the dice
Speaker 1: the concept of the dicensphere sometime in the Fishies, right,
Speaker 1: I want to say, and uh, And the reason why
Speaker 1: we even look at this is because even if you
Speaker 1: were harnessing all the starlight that's hitting a planet, that's like,
Speaker 1: at most like a quarter of the power that you
Speaker 1: could get. Oh well, yeah, I mean think about it
Speaker 1: like this, like say you, um, you have a stick
Speaker 1: of dynamite hanging in the middle of a room, and
Speaker 1: then you have a little ball hanging at some other
Speaker 1: corner of the room, like and the dynamite explodes, that
Speaker 1: ball receives only a tiny fraction with the energy of
Speaker 1: that explosion. What would you have to do to get
Speaker 1: all of the energy of that explosion to put balls
Speaker 1: or some kind of receiving mechanism around the completely surrounding
Speaker 1: the stick of dynamite. Have you ever read the original
Speaker 1: dyce in paper that? Okay, so, so imagine taking Jupiter. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you take Jupiter, and you take all the matter of
Speaker 1: Jupiter and you and you create a hollow ball that uh,
Speaker 1: that encapsulates the entire part of the Solar System from
Speaker 1: the Sun out to twice the distance of Earth's or
Speaker 1: bit average orbit. Oh, I thought this was done one
Speaker 1: astronomical unit. No, an the original one, the original one,
Speaker 1: the original one, the Dyson sphere because when you think
Speaker 1: about you're cutting off light, so you kind of still
Speaker 1: need the light to hit the planet. So the way
Speaker 1: this works is that the Dyson sphere would actually be
Speaker 1: like a hollow ball that if you were to open
Speaker 1: up the hollow ball, you would see the Sun, you'd
Speaker 1: see Venus and mercury, and you'd see the Earth and
Speaker 1: then a little bit further out and I don't know
Speaker 1: if it would actually go all the way out to Mars.
Speaker 1: I think it would. So um, you end up having
Speaker 1: it closed up and the inside of that Dyson sphere
Speaker 1: would be coated with some form of technology to harness
Speaker 1: all of the energy that was coming off that was
Speaker 1: radiating out from the Sun. Now, that was the original approach,
Speaker 1: although Dyson himself said, there's no reason why this would
Speaker 1: have to be an actual solid ball, it's just how
Speaker 1: I wrote it. But it could be. It could be
Speaker 1: a bunch of satellites that are all harnessing the energy
Speaker 1: and then beaming it back someplace. Yeah, that's the swarm model.
Speaker 1: There's also a Dyson bubble of solar sales that would
Speaker 1: be balanced by by gravity and solar winds, which hypothetically,
Speaker 1: I guess would be a little bit closer into the Sun.
Speaker 1: But yeah, yeah, so, I mean, you certainly wouldn't want
Speaker 1: to design something that would block the light off from
Speaker 1: the planet entirely, unless you're able to create some sort
Speaker 1: of artificial sun to keep your planet alot. Although I
Speaker 1: think that I think that a Type two would would
Speaker 1: have the amount of I mean, especially if they're harnessing
Speaker 1: all of that energy, they would certainly be able to
Speaker 1: you know, move off planet. Sure. Oh yeah, well, I mean,
Speaker 1: when you think about what's implied by the ability to
Speaker 1: create a Dicen sphere or Dicen swarm, I've also heard
Speaker 1: of this possibility involving, like say, completely disassembling the planet
Speaker 1: mercury using that as the raw material to build all this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you're talking about complete material mastery of your solar system. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, like like really advanced nanotechnology, probably interstellar travel
Speaker 1: UH is going to be involved in this if if
Speaker 1: we can move within our own solar system fast enough
Speaker 1: to make it worthwhile. There's a h The great site
Speaker 1: TV Tropes, which we've talked about before. I don't know
Speaker 1: if we've ever talked about on Mike, but we certainly
Speaker 1: talked about off Mike has It has an entire segment
Speaker 1: about the Kardashian scale and kind of placing various science
Speaker 1: fiction universes somewhere in that scale based upon observations of
Speaker 1: what's going on in those shows. So, for example, they
Speaker 1: would say most of the advanced civilizations in the Star
Speaker 1: Trek universe seemed to be type two. So they're falling
Speaker 1: in this. They've got that mastery of a solar system,
Speaker 1: and they're able to harness the full power of a
Speaker 1: solar system, but not necessarily a galaxy unless you're someone
Speaker 1: like um well, even the QUE or beyond that, the
Speaker 1: board would be more of that level. The Q the
Speaker 1: Q continuum would be the yeah type four, or possibly five.
Speaker 1: I guess I think for they don't they don't talk
Speaker 1: about going between that universe another universe. I think type
Speaker 1: five is self contradictory. I'm not gonna Okay, well this
Speaker 1: is getting really crazy. Okay, well we want to talk
Speaker 1: about how type three. What I was going to say,
Speaker 1: this is already like so out there. Let me just
Speaker 1: say one more thing I've heard about Type two is
Speaker 1: this concept. I don't know a whole lot about it,
Speaker 1: but i've heard float of the idea of star lifting,
Speaker 1: basically like capturing and incubating for your own purposes part
Speaker 1: of a star's mass. So essentially you're creating a fusion
Speaker 1: generator that's you know, you're you're just siphoning off a
Speaker 1: bit of a star to make your own fusion generator
Speaker 1: that happens to be a smaller star. I mean, that
Speaker 1: just sounds so crazy. But there's also that's not even
Speaker 1: type three yet. There's also the idea of harnessing energy
Speaker 1: that's coming off of a black hole's accretion disc that's
Speaker 1: the stuff that's around the black hole that's breaking down
Speaker 1: that hasn't quite been sucked into the black hole yet. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because because any other large enough energy body, you know,
Speaker 1: super neverse thing like that would probably also fall into
Speaker 1: this category of type two. So if we're talking about
Speaker 1: type three, so you remember everything about type two, Yeah,
Speaker 1: multiply that by you know, a billion stars. Also probably
Speaker 1: harnessing whatever energy could come out of the super black
Speaker 1: holes that tend to be the center of spiraling galaxies. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're talking about harnessing energy that's on a level that's
Speaker 1: that's really not it's beyond our imaginations. May I ask,
Speaker 1: how do you actually get energy out of a black hole?
Speaker 1: I mean I thought that black holes kind of like
Speaker 1: everything goes in. You're talking about the accretion disk around
Speaker 1: a black hole is where Okay, I'm seeing So you're
Speaker 1: not getting it from the black hole cel if you're
Speaker 1: using sort of like the gravity field around it, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're you're kind of you're kind of stealing all the
Speaker 1: all the energy you can out of the stuff that's
Speaker 1: circling the black hole but has not actually descended beyond
Speaker 1: the event horizon to go into the singularity and thus
Speaker 1: go into puff. So yeah, you can really think of
Speaker 1: type three is just pulling up energy the same way
Speaker 1: type two is, except on a on a galactic scale,
Speaker 1: not on not even a solar scale. Beyond that, it's
Speaker 1: we don't have specifics about this one so much because
Speaker 1: it's really hard for us to physically conceive of it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it could be out there, but we certainly
Speaker 1: would have difficulty. I mean we we there's we're nowhere
Speaker 1: close to being able to do this in front like
Speaker 1: more better nanobots. I think most estimations say that it
Speaker 1: would be like on the on the very optimistic side,
Speaker 1: where a hundred thousand years away from being a Type three,
Speaker 1: and on the more some would say realistic side, we're
Speaker 1: talking about a million years into human kind's future, right,
Speaker 1: I think that that. Karschev himself said that it would
Speaker 1: take some three thousand years to reach type two. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so yeah, we're we're we're quite a ways out. Things
Speaker 1: could change, but I mean that's pretty You wouldn't expect
Speaker 1: him to change by a dramatic amount anyway. So that's
Speaker 1: that's the basic of you know, breakdown of of the
Speaker 1: types and how they would get their energy. When you
Speaker 1: get the type four, it's getting to the point where
Speaker 1: again you would just have to extend it across multiple galaxies.
Speaker 1: It really starts to get ridiculous, because even if you
Speaker 1: were able to harness the power in multiple galaxies, you
Speaker 1: have to figure out how do you access all that
Speaker 1: power because we can only assume that they're bending space
Speaker 1: time to create engines that something, because otherwise it would
Speaker 1: take thousands of years for you to get the energy
Speaker 1: that you've harnessed. If you are like if you're if
Speaker 1: most of your activity is in Galaxy A, but you're
Speaker 1: getting your energy from Galaxy B, how do you get
Speaker 1: the energy Galaxy B to Galaxy A in a time
Speaker 1: frame that's acceptable? Okay, So I have a question, Okay,
Speaker 1: just one. Yeah, Cardassiev was talking about talking about this, Uh,
Speaker 1: these energy categories based on what kind of transmitting power
Speaker 1: civilizations would have if they wanted to transmit their presence
Speaker 1: or radio signal or something. But shouldn't act pivity on
Speaker 1: the scale of type two or type three be visible? Well, again,
Speaker 1: first you have to assume that's happening on a time
Speaker 1: scale that we would be able to observe. Now, granted,
Speaker 1: the assumption here is that that assuming that life exists
Speaker 1: in other places, which seems to be a fairly reasonable assumption,
Speaker 1: and assuming that at least some of that life is intelligent,
Speaker 1: again fairly reasonable. It's also safe to assume that some
Speaker 1: of that life is probably much much much older than
Speaker 1: human life, and therefore they've been at this for a
Speaker 1: long time. They would have to to be at all
Speaker 1: type one, two or three civilization, right, So there that
Speaker 1: takes care of some of it. We would assume that
Speaker 1: at least some of these civilizations, even if they're really
Speaker 1: really far away, have been at this level for perhaps
Speaker 1: millions or even more than a billion years, assuming they
Speaker 1: hadn't blown themselves up, right, So that would mean that
Speaker 1: there would be a possibility of us seeing them. But
Speaker 1: that does cut down on some of it. Right. Let's
Speaker 1: say that there's one that is uh relatively advanced. Maybe
Speaker 1: it's the type two or even type three, but it's
Speaker 1: far enough away we might not have detected it yet.
Speaker 1: To clarify, I would think what it would be is
Speaker 1: we'd be looking for type two civilizations in our own
Speaker 1: galaxy and type three civilizations in others. Well, yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean that's what but type three would necessarily mean it's
Speaker 1: really far away. So the further away it is, the
Speaker 1: more time it would take for the relevant information to
Speaker 1: reach us. So if that time is greater than the
Speaker 1: lifespan of that civilization or or the time when they
Speaker 1: actually achieved that level, we wouldn't detect it. Yet another
Speaker 1: thing is that we might need to look at something
Speaker 1: besides radio waves as a potential um sign that something's
Speaker 1: out there. So one example in fact that has been
Speaker 1: proposed is based upon the whole Dicen sphere ideas. The
Speaker 1: idea is that if there are stars out there that
Speaker 1: are using some form of technology akin to a Dicen sphere,
Speaker 1: then we might not detect them by radio waves, we
Speaker 1: might detect the by heat signatures. Yeah, just intuitively, I
Speaker 1: would think if you were trying to surround a star
Speaker 1: and get all of its usable energy, well, so you'd
Speaker 1: be absorbing that solar radiation, turning that into electricity or
Speaker 1: whatever kind of energy source that that you think is
Speaker 1: best to store and make use of in your infrastructure.
Speaker 1: But there would still be the escape of radiant heat, right,
Speaker 1: and wouldn't that show up as infrared. Well, that is
Speaker 1: the argument that some astrophysicists have made that that's one
Speaker 1: of the things we need to look for, not just
Speaker 1: radio signatures out there, because it could very possibly be
Speaker 1: that some intelligent advanced civilization out there isn't broadcasting out
Speaker 1: to everybody, but that we might still detect them through
Speaker 1: other means, and therefore we should not limit ourselves to
Speaker 1: one methodology. Okay, so I want to think about is
Speaker 1: there any reason that we're to think Obviously we can't
Speaker 1: know everything, we can't imagine what alien species are like.
Speaker 1: But this scale seems very useful to me because it's
Speaker 1: based on energy, and I would have to think that
Speaker 1: any complex system that's complex enough to um to create
Speaker 1: intelligence or technology has to have energy being fed into it,
Speaker 1: right right, Yeah? I mean I can imagine an intelligent
Speaker 1: squid um space squid that that does not create a
Speaker 1: society the way that we did, but it would still need,
Speaker 1: you know, energy to get around or even psychic fog.
Speaker 1: I would still have to think that it's got to
Speaker 1: have energy coming into the system in order for it
Speaker 1: to maintain the functional complexity of intelligence. iPhone charger would
Speaker 1: still have to you know, get plugged in something. The
Speaker 1: way we define life is essentially a method of processing energy.
Speaker 1: So assuming that we're talking about life as we have
Speaker 1: previously defined it, then obviously energy has to be there,
Speaker 1: and there there are people who would argue, you know,
Speaker 1: as we get more advanced, we figure out how to
Speaker 1: use energy more efficiently, which is true, but we're talking
Speaker 1: about gal take time scales here, and for a life
Speaker 1: form to continue to uh to to grow, to reproduce,
Speaker 1: to reach these levels, eventually they're going to hit a
Speaker 1: cap where they cannot generate enough energy to meet the
Speaker 1: demand they have created just using say planet's resources. Therefore,
Speaker 1: they have to spread out. This is why Sagan had
Speaker 1: suggested that we look at a more graded scale, because
Speaker 1: there would be civilizations where they've spread out to neighboring plants,
Speaker 1: but they haven't captured all the energy of a star yet.
Speaker 1: So there's somewhere between one and two that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: And it's a reasonable assumption to make that even if
Speaker 1: we are talking about making advances in efficiency over the
Speaker 1: grand scale of time, eventually we're going to need more
Speaker 1: energy than what we can generate just with one planet.
Speaker 1: That's just assuming that we haven't blown ourselves up right,
Speaker 1: Assuming that we haven't done that, then eventually we are
Speaker 1: going to need more energy than what we can conceivably
Speaker 1: make on this planet. In my mind, I think it's
Speaker 1: more reasonable to assume that we are not imagining the
Speaker 1: correct technologies for this energy escalation than to think that
Speaker 1: there's somebody out there who's not using as much energy
Speaker 1: as we would or something like that. I think it's
Speaker 1: just as likely to say that we're imagining it just fine,
Speaker 1: we're just not close enough for us to be able
Speaker 1: to pick it up yet. Yeah, that's also a possibility.
Speaker 1: There are other possibilities as well. I mean, it's clear
Speaker 1: that if we're talking about civilizations that use very refined
Speaker 1: means of communication, like like laser systems, that you know,
Speaker 1: they rely on this this, uh, this line of side approach,
Speaker 1: which seems like it probably wouldn't be something that you
Speaker 1: would imagine an advanced civilization using because it limits you
Speaker 1: if you have to use line of sight. But let's
Speaker 1: assume they found some other means of communicating beyond the
Speaker 1: radio communication that we use. Uh, then that could also
Speaker 1: explain why we haven't It's just like what our Drake
Speaker 1: equation conversation, that could also explain what we haven't uncovered them. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, so there are a lot of different possibilities. Right.
Speaker 1: It could be no one's talking, it could be no
Speaker 1: one's out there, it could be people are talking, but
Speaker 1: they're really far away so we haven't heard them yet,
Speaker 1: Or it could just be that they're talking but they're
Speaker 1: talking in a way that we have yet to figure
Speaker 1: out how to interface with. Yeah. Yeah, So the parallel here,
Speaker 1: I guess would be that somebody's out there and they
Speaker 1: are harvesting energy, but we can't see how they're doing it,
Speaker 1: Or they're harvesting energy but they're too far away, or
Speaker 1: they are harvesting energy but they're not harvesting enough of
Speaker 1: it that we can tell their signal is too weak
Speaker 1: for us to pick up, or perhaps even by the
Speaker 1: time you get to three or four, that maybe they're
Speaker 1: harvesting energy but they're taking steps to make it look
Speaker 1: like they aren't, or that or that, or it's such
Speaker 1: a big picture that for us it's you know, we're
Speaker 1: in the middle of a massive forest, but all we
Speaker 1: can see are all these trees that around us. I
Speaker 1: can certainly imagine how a civilization of type three might
Speaker 1: be able to have a cloaking device for its use
Speaker 1: of galactic energy. I mean, if you're already able to
Speaker 1: harness the energy of an entire galaxy, you might as
Speaker 1: well also have a cloaking device. I mean even the
Speaker 1: Klingons had that. No, Seriously, I mean, like, if you
Speaker 1: have that much technological capability, it doesn't seem unreasonable to
Speaker 1: me that you could hide your use of it. Personally,
Speaker 1: I think that it's it's you know, again, Kardashev was
Speaker 1: the reason he was even positing this in the first
Speaker 1: place was just so that we could refine our our
Speaker 1: methods of searching out there. Right, This is sort of
Speaker 1: like a tool he was using that's become sort of
Speaker 1: discussed in its own right, right, right, and and and
Speaker 1: from that respect, I still think it's generally speaking, a
Speaker 1: pretty good idea. Again, you know, the fact that you
Speaker 1: have these massive jumps in magnitude from type to type
Speaker 1: is a little weird, you know, because you're like, well,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't expect there to be a narrow band of
Speaker 1: radio frequencies and and kind of activity to look for
Speaker 1: within a specific category, simply because the categories themselves are
Speaker 1: so broad. But still an interesting way of thinking about
Speaker 1: the problem. So yeah, I mean, this was a cool
Speaker 1: topic to cover another one of our you know what's
Speaker 1: out there sort of podcast. I'm sure we'll have more
Speaker 1: of those in the future as well. Um, and eventually
Speaker 1: we'll maybe have an episode dedicated to every single species
Speaker 1: that James T. Kirk is made out with. That that
Speaker 1: sounds like a lot of podcasts. Yeah, I'll have to
Speaker 1: get on the phone with some friends of mine. I've
Speaker 1: got a friend who played one of those not not
Speaker 1: one that Kirk made out with, but one of the
Speaker 1: species that he made out with. I just want to say,
Speaker 1: all due respect to James T. Kirk, I think he
Speaker 1: should have treated those alien species with a little more respect.
Speaker 1: Come on, alright, So anyway, Yeah, to be fair, the
Speaker 1: remake was not that long ago when he was still
Speaker 1: pretty much a bounder. Al Right, guys, Well we're wrapping
Speaker 1: up this discussion. Remember you can go to f w
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