Type A to Z Civilizations

Type A to Z Civilizations 

by : Aria Ratmandanu 

        Further refinements to the classification of civilizations can be made based on new technologies. Kardashev wrote down the original classification in the 1960s, before the explosion in computer miniaturization, advances in nanotechnology, and awareness of the problems of environmental degradation. In light of these developments, an advanced civilization might progress in a slightly different fashion, taking full advantage of the information revolution we are witnessing today.

       As an advanced civilization develops exponentially, the copious production of waste heat could dangerously raise the temperature of the atmosphere of the planet and pose climactic problems. Colonies of bacteria grow exponentially in a petri dish until they exhaust the food supply and literally drown in their own waste. Similarly, because space travel will remain prohibitively expensive for centuries, and terraforming nearby planets, if possible, will be such an economic and scientific challenge, an evolving type I civilization could potentially suffocate in its own waste heat, or it could miniaturize and streamline its information production.

      To see the effectiveness of such miniaturization, consider the human brain, which contains about 100 billion neurons (as many as there are galaxies in the visible universe) yet produces almost no heat. By rights, if a computer engineer today were to design an electronic computer capable of computing quadrillions of bytes per second, as the brain can apparently do effortlessly, it would probably be several square blocks in size and would require a reservoir of water to cool it down. Yet our brains can contemplate the most sublime thoughts without working up a sweat.

       The brain accomplishes this because of its molecular and cellular architecture. First of all, it is not a computer at all (in the sense of being a standard Turing machine, with input tape, output tape, and central processor). The brain has no operating system, no Windows, no CPU, no Pentium chip that we commonly associate with computers. Instead, it is a highly efficient neural network, alearning machine, where memory and thought patterns are distributed throughout the brain rather than concentrated in a central processing unit. The brain does not even compute very quickly, because the electrical messages sent down neurons are chemical in nature. But it more than makes up for this slowness because it can execute parallel processing and can learn new tasks at astronomically fast speeds.

        To improve on the crude efficiency of electronic computers, scientists are trying to use novel ideas, many taken from nature, to create the next generation of miniaturized computers. Already, scientists at Princeton have been able to compute on DNA molecules (treating DNA as a piece of computer tape based not on binary 0s and 1s, but on the four nucleic acids A, T, C, G); their DNA computer solved the traveling salesman problem for several cities (that is, calculate the shortest route connecting N cities). Similarly, molecular transistors have been created in the laboratory, and even the first primitive quantum computers (which can compute on individual atoms) have been constructed.

       Given the advances in nanotechnology, it is conceivable that an advanced civilization will find much more efficient ways to develop rather than to create copious quantities of waste heat that threaten their existence. 

     Sagan introduced yet another way of ranking advanced civilizations according to their information content, which would be essential to any civilization contemplating leaving the universe. A type A civi- lization, for example, is one that processes 106 bits of information. This would correspond to a primitive civilization without a written language but with a spoken language. To understand how much information is contained within a type A civilization, Sagan used the example of the game twenty questions, where you are supposed to identify a mysterious object by asking no more than twenty questions that can be answered by a yes or a no. One strategy is to askquestions that divide the world into two large pieces, such as, “Is it living ?” After asking twenty such questions, we have divided the world into 220 pieces, or 106 pieces, which is the total information content of a type A civilization.

       Once a written language is discovered, the total information content rapidly explodes. Physicist Phillip Morrison of MIT estimates that the total written heritage that survived from ancient Greece is about 109 bits, or a type C civilization by Sagan’s ranking.

      Sagan estimated our present-day information content. By estimating the number of books contained in all the libraries of the world (measured in the tens of millions) and the number of pages there are on each book, he came up with about 1013 bits of information. If we include photographs, this might rise to 1015 bits. This would place us as a type H civilization. Given our low energy and in- formation output, we can be classified as a type 0.7 H civilization.

       He estimated that our first contact with an extraterrestrial civilization would involve a civilization of a least type 1.5 J or 1.8 K because they have already mastered the dynamics of interstellar travel. At the minimum, such a civilization would be several centuries to millennia more advanced than ours. Similarly, a galactic type III civilization may be typified by the information content of each planet multiplied by the number of planets in the galaxy capable of supporting life. Sagan estimated that such a type III civilization would be type Q. An advanced civilization that can harness the information content of a billion galaxies, representing a large portion of the visible universe, would qualify the civilization as type Z, he estimated.

      This is not a trivial academic exercise. Any civilization about to leave the universe will necessarily have to compute the conditions on the other side of the universe. Einstein’s equations are notori- ously difficult because, to calculate the curvature of space at any point, you have to know the location of all objects in the universe, each of which contributes to the bending of space. You also have to know the quantum corrections to the black hole, which at present are impossible to calculate. Since this is vastly too difficult for ourcomputers, today physicists usually approximate a black hole by studying a universe dominated by a single collapsed star. To arrive at a more realistic understanding of the dynamics within the event horizon of a black hole or near the mouth of a wormhole, we necessarily have to know the location and energy content of all the nearby stars and compute quantum fluctuations. Again, this is prohibitively difficult. It is hard enough to solve the equations for a single star in an empty universe, let alone billions of galaxies floating in an inflated universe.

        That is why any civilization that attempts to make the journey through a wormhole would have to have computational power far beyond that available to a type 0.7 H civilization like ours. Perhaps the minimum civilization with the energy and information content to seriously consider making the jump would be a type III Q.

      It is also conceivable that intelligence may spread beyond the confines of the Kardashev classification. As Sir Martin Rees says, “It’s quite conceivable that, even if life now exists only here on Earth, it will eventually spread through the galaxy and beyond. So life may not forever be an unimportant trace contaminant of the universe, even though it now is. In fact, I find it a rather appealing view, and I think it could be salutary if it became widely shared.” But he warns us, “If we snuffed ourselves out, we’d be destroying genuine cosmic potentialities. So even if one believes that life is unique to the earth now, then that doesn’t mean that life is forever going to be a trivial piece of the universe.”

        How would an advanced civilization contemplate leaving their dying universe? It would have to overcome a series of large obstacles.