The Future of Humanity

The Future of Humanity

by : Aria Ratmandanu

TYPE I, II, AND III CIVILIZATIONS

           How will this exponential rise in energy continue into the coming centuries and millennia? When physicists try to analyze civilizations, we rank them on the basis of the energy they consume. This ranking was first introduced in 1964 by Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev, who was interested in probing the night sky for signals sent from advanced civilizations in space.

           He was not satisfied with something as nebulous and ill defined as an “extraterrestrial civilization,” so he introduced a quantitative scale to guide the work of astronomers. He realized that extraterrestrial civilizations may differ on the basis of their culture, society, government, etc., but there was one thing they all had to obey: the laws of physics. And from the earth, there was one thing that we could observe and measure that could classify these civilizations into different categories: their consumption of energy.

            So he proposed three theoretical types: A Type I civilization is planetary, consuming the sliver of sunlight that falls on their planet, or about 1017 watts. A Type II civilization is stellar, consuming all the energy that their sun emits, or 1027 watts. A Type III civilization is galactic, consuming the “ consuming the energy of billions of stars, or about 1037 watts. The advantage of this classification is that we can quantify the power of each civilization rather than make vague and wild generalizations. Since we know the power output of these celestial objects, we can put specific numerical constraints on each of them as we scan the skies.

            Each type is separated by a factor of 10 billion: a Type III civilization consumes 10 billion times more energy than a Type II civilization (because there are roughly 10 billion or more stars in a galaxy), which in turn consumes 10 billion times more energy than a Type I civilization. According to this classification, our present-day civilization is Type 0. We don’t even rate on this scale, since we get our energy from dead plants, that is, from oil and coal. (Carl Sagan, generalizing this classification, tried to get a more precise estimate of where we ranked on this cosmic scale. His calculation showed that we are actually a Type . civilization.

            On this scale, we can also classify the various civilizations we see in science fiction. A typical Type I civilization would be that of Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon, where an entire planet’s energy resources have been developed. They can control all planetary sources of energy, so they might be able to control or modify the weather at will, harness the power of a hurricane, or have cities on the oceans. Although they roam the heavens in rockets, their energy output is still largely confined to a planet. A Type II civilization might include Star Trek’s United Federation of Planets (without the warp drive), able to colonize about 100 nearby stars. Their technology is barely capable of manipulating the entire energy output of a star.

           A Type III civilization may be the Empire in the Star Wars saga, or perhaps the Borg in the Star Trek series, both of which have colonized large portions of a galaxy, embracing billions of star systems. They can roam the galactic space lanes at will. Although the Kardashev scale is based on planets, stars, and galaxies for its classification, we should point out the possibility of a Type IV civilization, which derives its “energy from extragalactic sources. The only known energy source beyond our galaxy is dark energy, which makes up 73 percent of the matter and energy of the known universe, while the world of stars and galaxies makes up only 4 percent of the universe. A possible candidate for a Type IV civilization might be the godlike Q in the Star Trek series, whose power is extragalactic.

           We can use this classification to calculate when we might achieve each of these types. Assume that world civilization grows at the rate of 1 percent each year in terms of its collective GDP. This is a reasonable assumption when we average over the past several centuries. According to this assumption, it takes roughly 2,500 years to go from one civilization to the next. A 2 percent growth rate would give a transition period of 1,200 years. But we can also calculate how long it would take for our planet to attain Type I classification. In spite of economic recessions and expansions, booms and busts, we can mathematically estimate that we will attain Type I status in about 100 years, given an average rate of our economic growth.

FROM TYPE O TO TYPE I

           We see evidence of this transition from Type 0 to Type I every time we open a newspaper. Many of the headlines can be traced to the birth pangs of a Type I civilization being born right in front of our eyes. 

• The Internet is the beginning of a Type I planetary telephone system. For the first time in history, a person on one continent can effortlessly exchange unlimited information with someone on another continent. In fact, many people already feel they have more in common with someone on the other side of the world than with their next-door neighbor. This process will only accelerate as nations lay even more fiber-optic cables and launch more communications satellites. This process is also unstoppable. Even if the president of the United States tried to ban the Internet, he would be met only with laughter. There are almost a billion personal computers in the world today, and roughly a quarter of humanity has been on the Internet at least once.

• We are witnessing the birth of a planetary economy. The rise of the European Union and other trade blocs represents the emergence of a Type I economy. Historically, the peoples of Europe have fought blood feuds with their neighbors for thousands of years. Even after the fall of the Roman Empire, these tribes would continue to slaughter one another, eventually becoming the feuding nations of Europe. Yet today, these bitter rivals have suddenly banded together to form the European Union, representing the largest concentration of wealth on the planet. The reason these nations have abruptly put aside their famous rivalries is to compete with the economic juggernaut of nations that signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In the future, we will see more economic blocs forming, as nations realize that they cannot remain competitive unless they join lucrative trading blocs.

• We see graphic evidence of this when analyzing the great recession of 2008. Within a matter of days, the shock waves emanating from Wall Street rippled through the financial halls of London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Today, it is impossible to understand the economics of a single nation without understanding the trends affecting the world economy.

• The economy, not weapons, is the new criterion for a superpower. The rise of the EU and NAFTA underscores an important point: with the end of the Cold War, it is clear that a world power can maintain its dominant position mainly through economic might. Nuclear wars are simply too dangerous to fight, so it is economic might that will largely determine the destiny of nations. One contributing factor to the collapse of the Soviet Union was the economic stress of competing militarily with the United States. (As the advisers to President Ronald Reagan once commented, the strategy of the United States was to spend Russia into a depression, that is, increase U.S. military expenditure so that the Russians, with an economy less than half the size of the United States’, would have to starve their own people to keep up.) In the future, it is clear that a superpower can maintain its status only through economic might, and that in turn stems from science and technology.

TERRORISM AND DICTATORSHIPS

       There are groups, however, that instinctively resist the trend toward a Type I planetary civilization, because they know that it is progressive, free, scientific, prosperous, and educated. These forces may not be conscious of this fact and cannot articulate it, but they are in effect struggling against the trend toward a Type I civilization. These are :

•   Terrorists, who would prefer to go back a millennium, to the eleventh century, rather than live in the twenty-first century. They cannot frame their discontent in this fashion, but, judging from their own statements, they prefer to live in a theocracy where science, personal relations, and politics are all subject to strict dogmatic edicts. (They forget that, historically, the greatness and scientific and technological prowess of the medieval civilization were matched only by its tolerance of new ideas. 

•   Dictatorships that depend on keeping their people ignorant of the wealth and progress of the outside world. One striking example was the demonstrations that gripped Iran in 2009, where the government tried to suppress the ideas of the demonstrators, who were using Twitter and YouTube “in their struggle to carry their message to the world. In the past, people said that the pen was mightier than the sword. In the future, it will be the chip that is mightier than the sword.

      One of the reasons the people of North Korea, a horribly impoverished nation, do not rebel is because they are denied all contact with the world, whose people, they believe, are also starving. In part, not realizing that they do not have to accept their fate, they endure incredible hardship.

TYPE II CIVILIZATIONS

         By the time a society attains Type II status thousands of years into the future, it becomes immortal. Nothing known to science can destroy a Type II civilization. Since it will have long mastered the weather, ice ages can be avoided or altered. Meteors and comets can be also be deflected. Even if their sun goes supernova, the people will be able to flee to another star system, or perhaps prevent their star from exploding. (For example, if their sun turns into a red giant, they might be able swing asteroids around their planet in a slingshot effect in order to move their planet farther from the sun.

          One way in which a Type II civilization may be able to exploit the entire energy output of a star is to create a gigantic sphere around it that absorbs all the sunlight of the star. This is called a Dyson sphere. A Type II civilization will probably be at peace with itself. Since space travel is so difficult, it will have remained a Type I civilization for centuries, plenty of time to iron out the divisions within their society. By the time a Type I civilization reaches Type II status, they will have colonized not just their entire solar system but also the nearby stars, perhaps out to several hundred light-years, but not much more. They will still be restricted by the speed of light.

TYPE III CIVILIZATIONS

            By the time a civilization reaches Type III status, it will have explored most of the galaxy. The most convenient way to visit the hundreds of billions of planets is to send self-replicating robot probes throughout the galaxy. A von Neumann probe is a robot that has the ability to make unlimited copies of itself; it lands on a moon (since it is free of rust and erosion) and makes a factory out of lunar dirt, which creates thousands of copies of itself. Each copy rockets off to other distant star systems and makes thousands more copies. Starting with one such probe, we quickly create a sphere of trillions of these self-replicating probes expanding at near the speed of light, mapping out the entire Milky Way galaxy in just 100,000 years. Since the universe is 13.7 billion years old, there is plenty of time in which these civilizations may have risen (and fallen). (Such rapid, exponential growth is also the mechanism by which viruses spread in our body.

          There is another possibility, however. By the time a civilization has reached Type III status, its people have enough energy resources to probe the “Planck energy “or 1019 billion electron volts, the energy at which space-time itself become unstable. (The Planck energy is a quadrillion times larger than the energy produced by our largest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva. It is the energy at which Einstein’s theory of gravity finally breaks down. At this energy, it is theorized that the fabric of space-time will finally tear, creating tiny portals that might lead to other universes, or other points in space-time.) Harnessing such vast energy would require colossal machines on an unimaginable scale, but if successful they might make possible shortcuts through the fabric of space and time, either by compressing space or by passing through wormholes. Assuming that they can overcome a number of stubborn theoretical and practical obstacles (such as harnessing sufficient positive and negative energy and removing instabilities), it is conceivable that they might be able to colonize the entire galaxy.

            This has prompted many people to speculate “about why they have not visited us. Where are they ? the critics ask. One possible answer is that perhaps they already have, but we are too primitive to notice. Self-replicating von Neumann probes would be the most practical way of exploring the galaxy, and they do not have to be huge. They might be just a few inches long, because of revolutionary advances in nanotechnology. They might be in plain view, but we don’t recognize them because we are looking for the wrong thing, expecting a huge starship carrying aliens from outer space. More than likely, the probe will be fully automatic, part organic and part electronic, and will not contain any space aliens at all.

          And when we do eventually meet the aliens from space, we may be surprised, because they might have long ago altered their biology using robotics, nanotechnology, and biotechnology. Another possibility is that they have self-destructed. As we mentioned, the transition from Type 0 to Type I is the most dangerous one, since we still have all the savagery, fundamentalism, racism, and so on of the past. It is possible that one day, when we visit the stars, we may find evidence “of Type 0 civilizations that failed to make the transition to Type I (for example, their atmospheres may be too hot, or too radioactive, to support life.

KEY TO THE FUTURE: WISDOM

          The key, therefore, is to find the wisdom necessary to wield this sword of science. As the philosopher Immanuel Kant once said, “Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.” In my opinion, wisdom is the ability to identify the crucial issues of our time, analyze them from many different points of view and perspectives, and then choose the one that carries out some noble goal and principle.

           In our society, wisdom is hard to come by. As Isaac Asimov once said, “The saddest aspect of society right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.” Unlike information, it cannot be dispensed via blogs and Internet chatter. Since we are drowning in an ocean of information, the most precious commodity in modern society is wisdom. Without wisdom and insight, we are left to drift aimlessly and without purpose, with an empty, hollow feeling after the novelty of unlimited information wears off.

          But where does wisdom come from? In part, wisdom comes from reasoned and informed democratic debate from opposing sides. This debate is often messy, unseemly, and always raucous, but out of the thunder and smoke emerges genuine insight. In our “In our society, this debate emerges in the form of democracy. As Winston Churchill once observed, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried from time to time. So democracy is not easy. You have to work at it. George Bernard Shaw once said, “Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.

        Today, the Internet, with all its faults and excesses, is emerging as a guardian of democratic freedoms. Issues that were once debated behind closed doors are now being dissected and analyzed on a thousand Web sites.Dictators live in fear of the Internet, terrified of what happens “when their people rise up against them. So today, the nightmare of 1984 is gone, with the Internet changing from an instrument of terror into an instrument of democracy.

        Out of the cacophony of debate emerges wisdom. But the surest way to enhance vigorous, democratic debate is through education, for only an educated electorate can make decisions on technologies that will determine the fate of our civilization. Ultimately, the people will decide for themselves how far to take this technology, and in what directions it should develop, but only an informed, educated electorate can make these decisions wisely.

      Unfortunately, many are woefully ignorant of the enormous challenges that face us in the future. How can we generate new industries to replace the old ones? How will we prepare young people for the job market of the future? How far should we push genetic engineering in humans? How can we revamp a decaying, dysfunctional educational system to meet the challenges of the future? How can we confront global warming and nuclear proliferation ? The key to a democracy is an educated, informed electorate that can rationally and dispassionately discuss the issues of the day. The purpose of this article is to help start the debate that will determine how this century unfolds.