Many of us have wondered what alien civilizations look like. How advanced can they get? Although I nor can any other scientist at the moment answer that first question, one Russian astronomer came up with a tool to measure the advancement of a civilization. His name was Nikoli Kardeshev.

Nikoli Kardashev came up with this tool known as the Kardashev Scale in 1964. It was a logarithmic scale (a scale based on exponents) that displayed the advancement of a civilization based on their energy output or energy available to them. His original idea showed three types: Type 1, Type 2, and Type 3. We will only talk about these 3 types because that was Kardashev’s original idea, but if you would like to see types 4, 5, and 6 there is lots of information about it everywhere.

A type 1 civilization is a civilization that has the energy output of an entire planet, thus they are called a planetary civilization. A planetary civilization would yield around 10^17 watts of energy, a civilization of this scale would theoretically be able to control the weather, expand out to other planets, control their planet’s geography, and maybe even build underwater cities. It would be great to think that modern day humanity falls on this part of the scale, but clearly not quite yet. Humans produce around 17.7 terawatts (1.77 x 10^12 watts) of energy, this plus our accomplishments puts us at a 0.7 on the Kardashev Scale. However, Dr. Michio Kaku, a famous theoretical physicist and professor at the City College of New York has made predictions for humanity’s future on this scale and says we will reach type 1 status in possibly 100-1000 years. A type 1 civilization is closest to the 2100’s Federation in Star Trek or humanity in the very popular game Halo. 

Source: https://www.amazon.com/

A type 2 civilization is a civilization that has all the raw energy available to them of their host star. This civilization is known as a stellar civilization and  produces around 10^27 watts of energy. Such a civilization would be able to fly around the galaxy with ease, be able to control the raw materials of multiple planets, mine asteroids at their leisure, and possibly be able to create a Dyson sphere or Dyson swarm. The idea of a Dyson sphere/swarm was proposed in the 1960’s by a mathematician named Freeman Dyson. The idea was that a civilization could build a large swarm or structure made of materials that could capture all of the energy produced by the star.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere

Examples of type 2 civilizations would be the federation in the later 2100’s through 2300’s as well as the Protoss from StarCraft. Dr. Michio Kaku predicts humanity will achieve type 2 status within the next 1,000 to 10,000 years.

Source:https://liquipedia.net/starcraft/Protoss

The final civilization calculated by Kardashev on this scale was a Type 3 civilization, otherwise known as a galactic civilization. This species would be able to control the energy of an entire galaxy and, because of this, would have a monstrous amount of energy at its disposal, 10^36 watts of energy to be exact. A civilization like this could be able to extract supernovae, move planets, warp massive amounts of space at a time, possibly make wormholes, who knows what else a civilization could do with this much power. The galaxy would be their sandbox and so much would be possible for them. An example of a type 3 civilization would be the Forerunners from Halo. Dr. Kaku predicted that humanity would be a type 3 civilization in 100,000 to 1,000,000 years.

Source: https://www.halopedia.org/Forerunner