What If Humanity Was A Type II Civilization?

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What If Humanity Was A Type II Civilization?</h4>

The sun releases about 380 septillion watts of energy every second. That’s more than a million times more than the Earth uses in a year… every second. It does this by converting 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium, 60 times a minute, over and over again. Imagine what a type two civilization could do with all that juice.

Across history up until this point, humans have built massive monuments and formed sprawling societies all over the Earth. We can instantly send and receive messages from all over the planet, and we’ve even left this world and landed on the moon. But, despite all that it has already achieved, humanity still ranks notably low on the Kardashev Scale of advanced civilizations.

This is Unveiled and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; What if humanity was a Type II civilization? 

The Kardashev scale was developed in 1964 by the Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev, as a means to measure the rate of advancement that any given civilization has acquired. It does this primarily by examining the amount of energy that that civilization is able to utilize. Initially there were only three levels to the scale, but that number has since risen to five as standard, or seven by some counts. A Type I civilization can harness all of the energy of its home planet; Type II can harness the energy of its entire planetary system; for Type III it’s their entire galaxy; with Type IV it’s the universe; and a Type V civilization can harness all of the energy of every universe, assuming a multiverse. For extended versions, there’s also Type VI, which basically has god-like capabilities… and Type 0 at the other end, which hasn’t yet mastered even its own planet. According to most estimations, humanity currently ranks at a modest 0.7 on the Kardashev Scale.

If humanity were to accomplish a Type II level of advancement, they would first have to have all the capabilities of a Type I. This means that we would have full control over our home planet, Earth. We’d be producing enough energy from wind, thermal, hydro, and every other renewable energy solution available, to the point that we wouldn’t need fossil fuels anymore. We’d also be able to fully utilize all of the solar energy that currently reaches our planet from the sun. It would be more than just harvesting power sources, though. A Type I society would have complete planetary control - meaning it could predict and manipulate all weather patterns, including rain, wind and cloud coverage, as well as controlling specific natural disasters like earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis. It’s also expected that by the time we reach Type I status, we’ll have expanded into floating cities on the ocean. Estimates vary as to how long it’ll take us to complete Type I, but the physicist Michio Kaku has predicted it will take another 100 to 200 years.

The trademark of a Type II civilization, the one we’re most interested in today, isn’t that it can control its home planet, but that it can fully harness the energy from its home star. In our case, that’s the sun. If humanity was a Type II civilization, it would be taking all of the energy the sun produces - more than 38,000 septillion watts per second - and using it all for its own needs. Quite how a civilization would go about doing this is a mystery to modern science, but there are some ideas - the most famous of which being the Dyson Sphere.

A Dyson Sphere is a structure that somehow encircles the sun and absorbs all of the energy released by it. That energy is then somehow stored with maximum efficiency, before being transferred elsewhere for use, again with maximum efficiency. At this stage, humanity will most likely have spread out all across the solar system, so splitting the untold solar power between Earth, Mars, the Asteroid Belt, the moons of Jupiter and everywhere else would be a massive undertaking. The Dyson Sphere itself, however, might also be fully habitable. At the time of its completion, it would most likely be the most massive structure humanity had ever built until that point, and easily big enough for some humans (like the technicians trained to run it) to live actually on or in it. If that were the case, then anyone listing the Dyson Sphere as their primary address would have a unique, extremely close, and perhaps quite unsettling view of the sun. A Dyson Sphere shouldn’t represent a health risk to a Type II civilization, though. By the time humanity becomes advanced enough to build something like this, we should’ve worked out and sidestepped all the dangers involved… which means we’d have shielded ourselves from the otherwise intense radiation, and might even be able to look at the sun up close without damaging our eyes - maybe through some solar-grade windows or specialist goggles.

But, why would we ever want or need such a high level of control or such an incredible amount of energy? In some variations of the Dyson Sphere idea, it might be that this immense piece of machinery could actually serve to lengthen the lifetime of the sun, buying Earth and the solar system specifically more time before our star goes red giant. For Freeman Dyson, though, the mind behind the Sphere, it’s more simply a natural progression for any space-faring civilization. Any alien society that continues to advance and settle on other planets would need to consume greater and greater amounts of energy, until its home star becomes the only source in its planetary system which offers enough. 

The opportunities available to a civilization at this stage, though, would be incredible to today’s mind. Not only would we have spread out across the solar system, but we’d have likely mastered all of its many environments, too. Getting to and living on Mars would be easy; exploring the subsurface oceans believed to exist on places like Europa and Enceladus would be a breeze; we’d be able to build working colonies on any solar system body we wanted to. Our spaceships at this point would be so much more improved as well, utilizing possible technologies such as Laser Ion engines or nuclear fusion itself, to give us infinitely faster access from Mercury to maybe even the Oort Cloud. And, not only would we have all of that, but it would also be much more difficult to kill us off. The destruction of humanity would be a lot harder to achieve. 

In fact, if we were a Type II civilization, there’d be very little currently known to (or suspected by) science that could wipe us out. Asteroid impacts which we’re now unable to prevent, for example, would be easy to handle… at Type II we could disintegrate an oncoming rock, or potentially even move the Earth - or whichever planet we’re on at the time - out of its path. In general, though, for anything to threaten the whole of humanity, it would now have to threaten the whole of the solar system… so one asteroid heading for one planet wouldn’t spell the doom it does now. In a worst-case scenario, humans would just evacuate that planet before the impact happened.

We wouldn’t be invincible, though. There would still be some doomsday eventualities - like the appearance of a black hole nearby or universe-wide vacuum decay - which we’d still have no hope of outrunning. Plus, war would remain a viable threat, either between ourselves or against some other space-faring civilization. It’s thought a Type II society would still operate governments, to manage things like trade, communication or conflicts between the various planets, moons and asteroids in a star system. There could still be competition and rivalry between these worlds, despite them all being united by the Dyson Sphere tasked to power them. And there’d still be a potentially dangerous “next frontier” to aim for and work towards; interstellar travel.

According to the Kardashev Scale, the next move for a Type II civilization would be to expand into other star systems, in a bid to reach Type III. In our case, this would mean heading for Alpha Centauri, a three-star system that’s 4.3 lightyears away from us, and colonising it in the same way as, by then, we would’ve already done with the solar system. And, from Alpha Centauri it’d be onto the next star system, as humanity spreads out across the galaxy, seemingly becoming more and more indestructible as it does so.

Before any of this becomes possible, however, we must first become a Type I civilization. As is widely reported and commented on, the current generation appears to exist at a very precarious time in human history; it holds the power to save this planet Earth or destroy it. And what we choose to do with that power will make or break our future. The Kardashev Scale can seem like a set, even pre-determined pathway, but it’s the choices a civilization makes which determine how its future unfolds. And that’s what would happen if humanity were a Type II civilization.