What If We're the Remnants of a Type III Civilization? | Unveiled

What If We’re the Remnants of a Type III Civilization?

It’s generally accepted that humans, and all life on earth, evolved from simple organisms - gradually becoming more complex and more specialized with the passing of time. However, there are still significant gaps in our knowledge when it comes to the origins of everything. What was the spark that ignited the explosion of life on Earth? Did that spark occur spontaneously? Or is life merely a torch passed down through the eons, and we’re just the latest version of it?

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question: What if we’re the remnants of a Type Three civilization?

For those unaware, a Type Three civilization is a classification from the Kardashev Scale. Proposed by the Russian astrophysicist, Nikolai Kardashev, the scale organizes theoretical civilizations into classes based on the energy they can harness. Originally containing three levels, it was later expanded to five. Briefly, a Type One can harness all planetary energy sources with one hundred percent efficiency. Type Two can harness all energy from a nearby star, via megastructures like a Dyson Sphere. Type Three - the original upper limit, and the civilization we’re exploring today - would have the ability to harness all energy in a galaxy. And, beyond that, you have Type Four which has all the energy in the universe… and Type Five, which would basically be god-mode, with the ability to manipulate even the fabric of the universe itself.

So where does that leave us? Well, we’re somewhere between Zero and One. A roughly 0.7-level civilization, according to calculations made by Carl Sagan. We’re no longer stone-age hunter-gatherers at around 0.2 on Kardashev’s scale… but we also cannot harness the full potential of our planet yet. The physicist Michio Kaku figures that within 100 to 200 years, humans might advance beyond Type One… but, for today’s question, if we’re still not even beyond the first level, how could we possibly have descended from a Type Three time?

Well, while we might suppose an extremely advanced civilization, like a Type Three, would live in the far reaches of outer space, far away from our world and reality… there’s a chance they could be a lot closer. Like, right here on Earth close. Broadly speaking, if everything we’ve ever known was to constitute the remnants of another society, then it would mean that a Type Three civilization must have either long since died off on this planet, or at least in this galaxy, or long since moved away leaving only traces of themselves behind. And, while that may all sound a lot like science fiction or conspiracy theory, some legitimate questions are being raised within the scientific community about what the planet was like long before we arrived.

One problem is that it’s difficult to find direct evidence of extremely old things. While it stands to reason to expect remnants of an ancient civilization to be buried in the earth, that’s not likely to be the case. Artifacts from thousands or tens of thousands of years ago are relatively easy to find, but when looking for something that’s millions or tens of millions of years old… it’s almost impossible. That’s because the geological record is only really preserved back to the beginning of the Quaternary period, which is about 2.6 million years ago. There are fossils from earlier of course, but they become rarer and rarer, and we have on extremely rare occasions uncovered tools that are more than three million years old… but, because of how Earth works to refresh its crust over long periods of time, the suggestion is that some things may have been erased. Wiped out by the long game of nature and forgotten about. Here’s where today’s what-if-scenario comes in.

And under the ground isn’t the only place we can look to, either. We can also peer into the atmosphere to find, for example, that there are certain similarities between the climate modelling of today… and that of around 55.5 million years ago. In both periods there’s a spike in the global temperature. Our spike can be attributed to human activity, but the question is; what about the spike from 55.5 million years ago? Might that also be human (or something similar to human) activity?

For two academics in 2018, there were grounds at least to investigate. The director of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, Gavin Schmidt, and the astrophysicist, Adam Frank, were intrigued enough to publish a paper exploring the possibility of a pre-human civilization. They call the idea “The Silurian Hypothesis”, with a name inspired by a classic episode of “Doctor Who”. The Silurian Hypothesis has since become a key point of study. Was the spike in temperature more than fifty million years ago the result of something natural or was it something else? Because blatant physical evidence will have long been wiped out, Schmidt and Frank propose that we need other signifiers to look into this incredibly ancient period. Were we to transport ourselves 55 million years into the future to look back at our time, then some evidence of plastics and fertilizers may still be detectable, for example… so we need, then, a Type Three version of that. Perhaps an advanced society would leave behind similar chemical traces… and that would, if nothing else, tell us something about our own progress. But, more likely, a Type Three civilization will have used technology that’s completely alien to us. So, we need to look for something we’ve never seen before.

But herein lies something of a paradox because there’s some argument that an advanced enough society will’ve also completely (and deliberately) removed all evidence of itself from any given planet or star system it had existed in. Whether underground, in the air, or embedded in the very fabric of the life it may have left behind, a Type Three would be knowledgeable enough to know that it could never be revealed that it was here. For this reason, many believe that the best probability of us being descended from an advanced civilization may involve extra-terrestrials.

Given that a Type Three force will’ve mastered all the energy in the galaxy, the imagined links between us and it may well exist not on this planet (which has hidden or erased them) but somewhere else within the Milky Way. Of course, the big question when it comes to aliens, advanced or not, is; where are they? In the 1950s, the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi encapsulated the problem in the now-famous Fermi Paradox. And, here, the issue is that if we are the remnants of a Type Three world, then there should be other, easily identifiable remnants in the galaxy around us, too. Megastructures, interstellar ships, signs of terraforming on distant planets (and on Earth). But, so far, nothing. Could our proposed Type Three ancestors possibly have been efficient enough to hide all evidence of themselves from all the skies above? Or is something else going on?

In the 1970s, the US scientist Michael Hart proposed four potential reasons why we haven’t encountered aliens on Earth yet. One, it’s physically impossible for them to traverse space. Two, they’re simply choosing not to visit us. Three, it’s too early in their development for interstellar travel. And four, most significantly for today’s video, they have visited us but in our distant past, perhaps at a time when humans didn’t exist.

In this version of events, for those who suggest that we came from some other advanced group, this is the key moment. The key window, for when the emergence of life could have been kickstarted by the arrival of an early, advanced civilization. It’s the theory of panspermia, but on a massive scale when we’re not just imagining stray microbes on a far-off probe… but whole, intelligent creatures specifically leaving their seed. In a recent video, we found how it may be possible for life to survive embedded in asteroids, and how it could also be possible for that life to be picked up by a chunk of space rock just in passing - without even the need for an impact event. But now, what we’re picturing is neither accidental panspermia nor a biological boom following an asteroid strike… its alien colonization, and we’re the results of it.

Finally, consider the headline-making 2020 multi-authored paper that suggested that the Milky Way may actually be full of long-dead civilizations. The four researchers behind the claim found that the factors for emerging life may have peaked about eight billion years after our galaxy formed and about 13,000 lightyears from its centre. Humans arose some 13.5 billion years after the galaxy formed, and Earth today is located about 25,000 lightyears from the galactic core. So, in the context of our question, in many ways we can be considered relative newcomers to this corner of space, with perhaps many advanced civilizations rising and falling before we ever came to be.

For now, it should be remembered that scientists are confident they have a reasonably solid understanding of how and where life originated. And yet, there’s certainly some mystery remaining. Could it be, then, that rather than emerging here, we were put here? Could it be that we’re carrying on the torch from a long-dead civilization? As it stands, these are hypothetical questions and alternate realities, only… but that’s what would happen if we were remnants of a Type Three civilization.