What If Humanity Was a Class 2 Society? | Unveiled

What If Humanity Was a Class 2 Society?

What will the humans of the future really be like? If you were to hop into a time machine right now, and jet one hundred, one thousand or one hundred thousand years into the future, would there be anything you’d recognise about the world you arrived in? And, if humans even still existed to greet you into this future realm, how much about them will have changed?

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; what if humanity was a Class Two Society?

There’s more than one way to rank future civilizations, you know! Regular viewers on this channel will know all about the Kardashev Scale, a tiered system used to measure hypothetically advanced societies based on their ability to harvest more and more energy. Kardashev Type One has all the energy from Earth. Type Two has all the energy from the sun. For Three, it’s the galaxy… and so on. But there are other, arguably better strategies for measuring predicted societal advancement, too. And one such strategy was proposed as part of a multi-authored study, published in the “Astronomy & Astrophysics” journal, in July 2020.

Written by the scientists Valentin Ivanov, Juan Carlos Beamín, Claudio Cáceres, and Dante Minniti - and headed “A Qualitative Classification of Extraterrestrial Civilizations” - this study proposes a subtle but exciting rethink of the Kardashev Scale. It argues that, while Kardashev’s technique does still serve an important purpose, if we just slightly change our perspective then we can think about alien societies (and our own future civilization) in a whole new way. And perhaps finally we’ll shed some light on the fabled Fermi Paradox!

The study argues that there should be a system which ranks, quote; “the abilities of extraterrestrial civilizations to modify their environment and to integrate with it”. Those two words, modify and integrate, are what chiefly sets this approach apart from the traditional, Kardashev way of thinking. Rather than measuring advancement based only on the unlocking of more and more available energy (ala Kardashev), we’re now asking; how efficiently and effectively does a civilization use the energy that it has?

There are four main levels to this particular model. Class Zero simply uses whatever environment it’s already in. it could do this efficiently or inefficiently, it doesn’t matter. Generally speaking, this relates to most simple animals without tools. Class One then advances by changing its environment in some way, to improve its experience. Maybe it invents the wheel, goes through a tech boom or travels to another planet. We can roughly understand present-day humans to be a high Class Zero society that’s busy becoming a high Class One.

But then, with the next level, we start to shake things up. Because Class Two changes itself to improve its standing and relationship with its environment. And, finally, Class Three - the highest level - is completely at one with the world around it. It helps the environment, the environment helps it, and everything exists in harmony.

So, what would life be like if humankind actually developed in this way? If it made the jump from an aspiring Class One to a self-improving Class Two?

Well, here already is one way in which this new model differs from the Kardashev standard… because it’s not as though you even have to complete Class One before you can begin ascending to Class Two. The key shift in a Class Two species can really be made at any time; it’s simply the understanding that it’s better to improve and upgrade yourself to suit your environment, rather than the other way around. For example, it’s better to somehow alter humans so that they can survive on Mars at all times, rather than to alter Mars by building human-friendly habitats. And, we can see, the Kardashev-style question of how much energy you have at your disposal doesn’t really come into it.

To continue looking at it just in relation to our plans for Mars, it’s clear that we will need a certain (probably high) level of energy to ever travel to and from the Red Planet. But then, according to most current proposals, we’d need even more energy to build biomes, and then even more to terraform whole landscapes… or to build checkpoints out in space between here and there and Venus and the asteroid belt and everywhere else. But, according to this new model, all of that can be avoided, all of that can be bypassed, if we instead just change humans so that we’re better suited to whatever the solar system can throw at us. The first, more traditional method requires us to generate more and more power, potentially pushing us toward Kardashev Type Two-style Dyson Spheres. But, with the second method, megastructures like a Dyson Sphere might not even be necessary.

Again, it’s all to do with what the authors of the 2020 paper call the quality of energy use. A Class Two society has modified itself so that it doesn’t need to just endlessly harvest more and more energy. Instead, it can potentially use less to achieve the same or better levels of advancement. For a closer to home analogy, we can think about, well, the home. On the Kardashev Scale, as soon as a Type Two civilization has electricity, it turns on every light in every room and leaves it on indefinitely, all the better to see the surrounding area, which it’s hoping to expand into. But, with this alternative model, a Class Two society only has the lights on if or when they’re needed… to the point that, if you were on the outside looking in, you might not know that anyone was home at all.

And herein lies another important distinction between the traditional and the contemporary models. The traditional Kardashev Scale implies that we should be able to detect civilizations more advanced than our own, because they should be sending out all sorts of noticeable technosignatures. If an alien species were advanced enough to reach Type Two and build a Dyson Sphere around its star, for example, then we - even at our lower level - should be able to detect the Dyson Sphere as proof that we’re not alone. But, to date, we’ve discovered no such thing.

The new model, though, allows for advanced civilizations that have what the paper’s authors refer to as “low detectability”. The idea is that it figures an advanced enough civilization would also be intelligent enough not to brazenly reveal its location to the rest of the universe. So, a Class Two would have all (or many) of the same capabilities that a Kardashev Type Two enjoys, but without the technosignatures that would blow its cover. Its energy use is efficient, and therefore untraceable, again because it has adapted itself to its environment - instead of its environment to itself. For the 2020 paper’s authors, this fresh perspective could offer one explanation for the Fermi Paradox… because it potentially allows for countless more advanced extraterrestrial civilizations to exist, it’s just that they’ve all adapted to their surroundings and are therefore impossible for us to see.

So, is this new-fangled Class Two something which humanity can aim for? Well, in many ways we’re already on the road to becoming it. In science and modern medicine, we’re always developing new ways to stave off illness, injury and even death. We’re recognising the obstacles that life as a human on Earth places before us, and we’re attempting to solve them - be that via pacemakers to counter heart problems, or via CRISPR-Cas9 gene therapy to target genetic disorders. But still, there are some environments just here on Earth that humans struggle to survive in, so we’re clearly a long way away from developing the biotech needed for us all to individually (and reliably) survive anywhere else in the universe.

In many ways, both models compliment and need each other. But, equally, so much of our search for extraterrestrial intelligence up until this point has been guided by the Kardashev Scale… and we have nothing to show for it. Not a single sniff of a stellar or galactic force, anywhere. But this fresh system of classification allows for advanced civilizations that aren’t just hungry for energy; for alien societies that don’t just ruthlessly expand out and out and out until they control everything.

On the one hand, it’s comforting. On the other, it means that advanced, intelligent alien species could be common, but just invisible to us. That they’re there, but we just don’t know about ‘em! According to the 2020 paper, this alternative model to the Kardashev Scale could also prompt us to rethink Arthur C. Clarke’s famous third law: instead of sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic, it’s now indistinguishable from nature. And that’s what humanity would be on its way to becoming, if it was a Class Two society.