Fictional Civilizations and the Kardashev Scale — Types II & III
What Do Our Stories Predict About Our Future?
In this post, I’ll be diving into more analysis of the Kardashev Scale using fictional civilizations. If you haven’t read my first two blog posts on the subject, I recommend clicking the links below to check them out before you read this one.
I’d also like to leave a warning that this post will contain spoilers for various books, TV shows, movies, etc. Now, let’s do some math!
Type 2 Civilizations (1.86≤K<2.9)
Humanity with a Mobile Solar System (K=1.9)
The motion of objects in our galaxy is chaotic and messy. Supernovas, black holes and other dangerous objects could one day drift close enough to do serious damage to our solar system. We would probably see them coming millions of years ahead of time, but avoiding them would require a lot of cooperation and effort from humanity. This is because the best way to avoid coming too close to these objects is to actually move our solar system out of the way. One proposed way to do this is with a Caplan Thruster, a giant solar-powered rocket that could push against the sun and control its motion through the universe. The idea comes from a real physicist’s paper which has been peer-reviewed, so it’s probably possible to build one and would be an incredible achievement for humanity if we did. It would show our ability to work together and plan for our future millions of years in advance.
The Caplan Thruster works by using many satellites to reflect sunlight onto a small area on the Sun’s surface. This area of the Sun heats up and ejects plasma in the form of solar wind. The plasma is then collected by the thruster using strong magnetic fields and further heated in fusion reactors. The products of these reactions are blasted in two different directions. One jet hits the Sun to push on it while the other pushes the combined system of the Sun and the thruster while the rest of the Solar System is pulled along by the Sun’s gravity. It’s estimated the Caplan thruster could accelerate the Sun up to 1/10⁹ meters per second² and transport the Sun up to 50 lightyears every million years. This would require a power output of 10²⁵ watts. Therefore, building a Caplan Thruster would require our civilization to reach a Kardashev number of 1.9.
The United Federation of Planets (K=2.2)
I admit I don’t know very much about Star Trek, so I’m probably not the best person to assess what it says about the progression of society. Star Trek does still give us a great example of what a Type 2 human civilization might look like. There are three major ways that the Federation from Star Trek uses energy with which I’m familiar: 1) the energy used by the people living on planets within the Federation, 2) the energy used by the warp drives on all of their starships, and 3) the energy used by their transporters. As we’ll see, the transporters alone are an example of technology that would likely be exclusive to Type 4 and 5 civilizations because of their insane energy implications. Starting with the energy used by people living on Federation planets, we’ll assume each planet uses the amount of energy estimated to be used by humanity by the year 2100, or 7.0x10¹³ watts. According to startrek.com, there are 150 planets in the Federation, which means a total energy usage for all these planets of 1.0x10¹⁶ watts.
As for warp drives, there are an estimated 6000–9000 starships in the Federation fleet, which averages out to 7500 ships. Hypothetically, warp drives work by creating a bubble of spacetime and moving it faster than light while anything inside the bubble still travels below light-speed relative to the spacetime within the bubble. According to calculations from NASA’s Johnson Space Center, creating a warp bubble would require 6.5x10¹⁹ joules of energy. In the original series, it takes about 4 seconds for the Starship Enterprise to reach warp speed. This means one warp drive uses 1.6x10¹⁹ watts. Therefore, the entire Federation fleet would require 1.2x10²³ watts to power all of its warp drives. (I should note that I didn’t factor in the speed or size of the warp bubbles, which could have a dramatic effect on their final energy requirements.)
However, these numbers are negligible when we consider the third piece of advanced technology I listed earlier: transporters. The transporters in Star Trek appear to work via quantum teleportation. Teleportation involves the transfer of information, and information is entropy. Therefore, to find the energy required to teleport an object, we just need to calculate how much energy would be necessary to produce the maximum possible change in entropy across some amount of space. The maximum amount of entropy a volume of space can have is given by the Bekenstein bound:
This formula will also be important later, so I’ll take a moment to explain what it means. S is the maximum amount of entropy that can be contained within a physical system of mass-energy E in a sphere of radius R. The denominator is the product of the reduced Planck’s constant and the speed of light. If a region of space contains more entropy than allowed by this inequality, the system will collapse into a black hole. The entropy will be given by the equation in bits, but I’ll convert this value to joules per kelvin to find the energy required to change the entropy of a system.
For simplicity, I’ll be modeling all the physical systems to which I apply the Bekenstein Bound as perfect spheres of the same volume as the actual systems. That way, the underestimates of how much surface area encloses those systems, to which their maximum possible information content is directly proportional, will hopefully balance out the inherent overestimation of solving for the maximum amount of information that could fit on those surfaces.
We can use the Bekenstein Bound to find the maximum energy required to teleport human beings. The global average body mass is 62 kilograms. That means a system of one person has a mass energy of 5.6x10¹⁸ joules. Assuming a density of the human body equal to that of water, a 62 kilogram person would have a total volume of 0.062 meters³. This corresponds to a sphere with a radius of 0.25 meters. Using our formula, we find that the maximum change in entropy to teleport the average human is 1.2x10²¹ joules per kelvin. At Earth’s average temperature, changing entropy by this much would require 3.4x10²³ joules. In Star Trek, it appears to take about 4 seconds for someone to be beamed up. This requires the transporters to be using 8.5x10²² watts. There are about six transporters per ship in Star Trek, so for 7500 ships the Federation would need to supply 3.8x10²⁷ watts of power. This gives the Federation a total power usage of 3.8x10²⁷ watts and a Kardashev number of 2.2.
The Margatheans (K=2.2)
In the book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Margatheans are a hyper intelligent race that creates a computer tasked with finding the ultimate answer to life, the universe and everything. The computer does this and tells them its answer: 42. That’s it. Being understandably confused, the Margatheans ask what 42 means and the computer explains that to understand the answer they must construct an even larger computer to figure out the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything. This computer ends up being the Earth and everyone living on the planet is just part of the hardware.
This is similar to the idea of a Matrioshka Brain, a computer the size of Jupiter. Estimates for the processing speed of a Matrioshka Brain are around 10⁴² operations per second. This estimate assumes that the device uses classical computing instead of quantum computing, which is reasonable to assume for a computer the size of the Earth because it would be difficult to keep the entire planet in the very controlled conditions necessary for quantum computing. As I mentioned in my last post, our fastest classical computers can run at 4.155x10¹⁷ operations per second using 2500 kilowatts. According to the laws of physics, our current technology is already pushing the limits of what is possible for classical computing, so we’ll assume the Margatheans are using similar designs on a much larger scale. A Matrioshka Brain using classical computing would need 6.0x10³⁰ watts of power to run. However, the Earth is only 0.315% the mass of Jupiter. If we assume that the energy consumption of these colossal computers is directly proportional to their masses, then an Earth-sized computer would need 1.9x10²⁸ watts to operate. This gives the Margatheans a Kardashev number of 2.2.
The idea of an entire planet as a computer is already mind-boggling, but the idea of all the natural processes of our Earth being part of a computer feels completely alien. This demonstrates why multiple physicists are so enamoured with the Kardashev scale. Science is about exploring the unknown and trying to understand the unfamiliar. We’ve never definitively witnessed any living things utilizing a whole planet, star or galaxy’s worth of energy, so it’s only natural inquisitive minds would conduct thought experiments about what civilizations could do with that much energy.
The Vogons (K=2.6)
Also in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the planet Earth and everyone on it is destroyed by an alien race called the Vogons in order to make way for an interstellar highway. To them, destroying a planet is just like tearing down a building. Destroying a planet requires overcoming its gravitational binding energy. The gravitational binding energy for the Earth is 2x10³² joules. In the film adaptation, the Vogons destroy the Earth in less than a second, which means they were using over 2x10³² watts. This gives them a Kardashev number of 2.6.
Humanity manages to make contact with the Vogons moments before their destruction and the Vogons are surprised that humans didn’t already know about the highway. They explain that the plans have been available for review in the solar system of Alpha Centauri for 50 earth-years. When the human race exclaims that they’ve never been to Alpha Centauri, the Vogons respond that it isn’t their fault humanity has refused to take part in “local affairs.” The Vogons essentially treat humans like insects living in the middle of their construction site, yet speak to them like it’s their fault they haven’t developed the necessary technology to interact with extraterrestrials. Their outlook on humanity is that if they lack the level of technology Vogons possess, their lives don’t matter. These sorts of meetings between peoples of very different Kardashev rankings happen a lot in fiction. Sometimes the civilizations clash and the one with the lower ranking prevails, other times the fate of the civilization with the higher ranking depends on the aid of the other. I think that the Vogons show pretty clearly that just having better batteries doesn’t give you any sort of moral high ground. Hitchhiker’s Guide also teaches us that the people of a truly advanced civilization should consider the perspective and needs of those who live very different lives from their own.
Type 3 Civilizations (2.9≤K<4.4)
The Gems (K=3.1)
The Gems are an alien race from the fantastic show Steven Universe. They can live forever and have bodies made almost entirely of hard-light constructs. In the show, a young boy named Steven lives on Earth with three of these aliens. As time goes on, we learn that the Gems are colonizers who wipe out life on inhabited planets in order to make new Gems to colonize more worlds. Gems are born fully grown and immediately put to work doing the jobs for which they were made. The story focuses on Steven working to help the Gems realize that life is about more than just fulfilling objectives that lack personal significance. By the end, the Gem Homeworld has ended its reign of terror and Gems have begun learning how to find individual meaning in their lives. The show is a truly beautiful depiction of how the desire to accomplish seemingly important goals can rob people of true fulfillment and happiness.
In the show, the Gems have three major ways they use energy: 1) Using the energy present in living things to produce new Gems, 2) connecting colonized worlds through warp pads, and 3) the construction of an enormous superweapon called the Cluster. The Gem’s empire extends to at least two galaxies, so we’ll assume they’ve colonized at least one galaxy’s worth of habitable planets. Our galaxy is estimated to have 40 billion Earth-like planets within the habitable zone of their stars. Let’s assume the galaxies the Gems colonize are filled to the brim with life. Then, they will have absorbed the chemical energy present in the biomass of 40 billion Earth-like worlds. In my last post, I calculated that the Earth’s biomass contains 1.0x10²² joules of energy stored in easy-to-break chemical bonds, so extracting that amount of energy from 40 billion worlds would total 4x10³² joules. It’s unclear how old the Gem race is, but it’s been described as eons old. Let’s use two eons as the age of the Gem civilization, or two billion years. This means that the Gems average power intake from colonization is 1.7x10⁵ watts. This won’t make much of a difference in the final total. Now let’s talk about the warp pads. We can assume that every planet is connected to the Gem homeworld by at least one pair of warp pads. The warp pads take about a second to charge up. Based on the energy requirement we established for creating warp bubbles, it would take 2.6x10³⁰ watts to power all the warp pads in the Gem’s network.
Finally, we need to figure out how much energy would be output by the Cluster. The Cluster was the fusion of many Gem shards and was supposed to be larger than the Earth once it formed a body out of light. If we assume this means it would be able to confine a certain amount of light energy into an object with a mass greater than the Earth, then E=mc² tells us the cluster would need to output 5.3677x10⁴¹ joules of energy. The Cluster is never fully activated in the show, so it’s unclear exactly how long it would have taken for the Cluster to form. However, there are several times in the show where characters think its body is forming and behave as if the Earth will be destroyed almost immediately. Assuming the Cluster could fully form within a day, it would require an energy input of at least 6.2x10³⁶ watts. So taken all together, the Gems would have a total power usage of 6.2x10³⁶ watts. (The warps pads didn’t end up making a very large difference either.) This gives the Gems a Kardashev number of 3.1.
The Asgardians (K=3.2)
I’ve already assessed the advancement of Thor’s people from a societal standpoint in my last post. Here, let’s just look at they’re Kardashev ranking. Asgard’s most impressive piece of technology across the Marvel films is the Bifrost, a type of wormhole they can use to travel across the vast universe with incredible speed. Since I’m not a wormhole expert, please take my calculations with an enormous grain of salt. As you may have heard, creating a wormhole large enough to be traversed requires negative mass, and a potentially astronomical amount of it. Finding out how much negative mass a wormhole needs can be done using the Morris-Thorne Metric:
I definitely don’t know how to solve this equation, but luckily I don’t have to. The Youtube channel Game Theory already solved for the negative mass required to sustain a wormhole from the videogame Portal. They found that a wormhole the size of a door would require -7x10²² kilograms of mass to hold open, or enough negative mass to cancel out the mass of the Moon. Due to conservation of energy, creating negative mass would also require creating an equal amount of positive mass so that the net change in energy of the universe remains zero. Therefore, creating a Moon’s worth of negative mass means also creating a Moon’s worth of positive mass. For now, let’s just consider how much positive mass is being created when finding the power requirement for these wormholes. We’ll be treating the ends of the wormholes like spheres — the way real wormholes would appear — despite being flat circles in their depictions. The energy density of a wormhole is given by this equation:
b’ is a function of the minimum radius of a wormhole, which I’ll assume to be the same for all wormholes we analyze. r is the radius of the wormhole, and p is the energy density of the wormhole, which I assume means the mass-energy needed to hold it open divided by its 3D volume. For the Portal wormholes, this comes out to about -1x10³⁹ joules per meter³. Since the Bifrost’s entrance is 1.7 times the radius of the portals from Portal, it should have about 34% the energy density. I measured the Bifrost’s height based on its size compared to the character Hela, whose actress you can find the height of online(which is very weird). With this we can deduce that the Bifrost should require -7.5x10³⁹ joules of energy to stay open and produce 7.5x10³⁹ joules as a byproduct. It takes about 27 seconds for the Bifrost to open in Thor, so that means the wormhole would be producing 2.8x10³⁸ watts. This gives the Asgardians a Kardashev number of 3.2. (I should note that I didn’t factor in the distance the wormhole bridges, which could have a dramatic effect on its final energy requirements.)
The Pokémon Trainers (K=3.2)
No, seriously. Pokémon is up here. You see the pokéballs used to catch and carry pokémon are likely just a delayed form of teleportation. All the information necessary to reconstruct a pokémon is downloaded by the pokéball, and as a result of something in quantum mechanics called the No-Cloning Theorem, all the subatomic particles that originally made up the pokémon are scrambled randomly. The pokémon is then released by reconstructing its body using the information contained in the pokeball. The largest pokémon is Wailord, which is 47 feet long. This pokémon seems to have the size and proportions of a Bowhead whale, which has a mass of about 90,700 kilograms. Assuming this whale has a body density roughly that of water, we get that it should have a volume of 90,700 cubic meters. Using the same math we did for Star Trek, we get that capturing a Wailord in a pokéball would take 1.9x10²⁶ joules. Pokémon seem to be able to leave and return to their pokeballs in 4 seconds, so just one pokéball uses 4.7x10²⁵ watts of power. Just one pokéball!
If we assume the number of pokémon trainers is equal to the number of people in real life who play a popular Pokémon video game — like say Pokémon Go at the height of its popularity — then there are 45 million trainers in the world of Pokémon. If each trainer can carry six pokéballs max, then that totals 1.3x10³⁴ watts of pokéball power being used by all the trainers at once.
That’s all without even talking about the pokémon themselves. According to the Youtube channel Game Theory, the most powerful pokémon move is Black Hoke Eclipse, which literally creates a black hole! They calculated the mass of this black hole to be 3.55x10¹³ kilograms, so according to E=mc², a pokémon would need to condense 3.19x10³⁰ joules of energy to perform this move. In the games, the black hole takes about 6 seconds to form, so any pokémon that can do this move would be outputting 5.32x10²⁹ watts. If every trainer had a full roster of pokémon capable of this move, it would total 1.4x10³⁸ watts. Adding this to the power output by pokéballs, we get that humanity in the world of Pokémon has a Kardashev number of 3.2.
It seems fairly irresponsible to let ten-year-olds run around unsupervised with devices outputting almost as much power as the Sun so they can go catch wild animals capable of casually creating black holes, but maybe that’s just how they roll in a Type 3 civilization. Realistically, any civilization actually capable of harnessing this much power would need to be very careful about how they used it under threat of destroying themselves. Let’s hope that if any exist, they take the same precautions to avoid accidentally wiping out other civilizations, like ours.
The Masters of the Mystic Arts (K=3.3)
The sorcerers from Doctor Strange are pretty much on the same level as the Asgardians when it comes to wormholes. The largest portals we see the sorcerers make are the ones from Avengers: Endgame, the largest of which I estimate to be about 15 times the size of the portals in Portal. Based on the same math we used for Thor’s Bifrost, the largest wormhole in Endgame should output 9x10⁴⁰ joules in mass-energy. You can count a total of 17 wormholes appearing on screen in the scene above, the largest of which grows to full size in less than 73 seconds. If we assume that the sorcerers could have increased all the portals to this size in that time if they needed to, we get that they had to output a total of 1x10³⁹ watts. That gives them a Kardashev number of 3.3.
To me, the most significant thing about the socerors being this powerful is that in the Marvel universe they live right under the noses of non-magic people. The idea of a civilization being this technologically advanced compared to humans is one thing. The idea of them living right under our noses is mind-blowing, but it’s also nothing new. One possible explanation as to why we have not yet been able to prove the existence of alien life is that our species is being kept isolated by another intelligent species, like how the sorcerers keep the existence of magic and the multiverse a secret from humanity. This is the so-called Zoo hypothesis and it introduces the idea that beings with more physical power than us may take it upon themselves to assert control over us however they deem appropriate and without our consent.
Hungry Galactus (K=3.36)
In Marvel comics, Galactus is the last remaining survivor of a dead universe. He’s most famous for his appetite. He eats planets. He eats planets! More specifically, he goes around the universe consuming the energy bound in the matter of planets. For this reason, he is feared by civilizations across the universe and sometimes considered impossible to stop. He has a vast array of cosmic powers, but they depend on how much he’s recently consumed. At his absolute weakest, which is to say his absolute hungriest, Galactus is on par with the character Sentry, who is described as having the power output of a million exploding suns. Our sun is a Population I star and will likely die in a Type II supernova explosion. These events have a luminosity one billion times that of the Sun currently. That’s 3.846x10³³ watts. This means that at his weakest, Galactus can match a character who outputs 3.846x10³⁹ watts of power. This earns Galactus a Kardashev number of 3.36.
In this state, Galactus can be fended off with extreme effort from the heroes of various worlds. In a way, Galactus is the embodiment of an idea in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence called a Great Filter. A Great Filter is a barrier to a civilization’s progress that is so difficult to overcome, the vast majority of life in the universe never surpasses it. This could be life rarely emerging in the universe at all, life rarely evolving into complex organisms, life rarely forming civilizations, life rarely developing enough technology to signal other life across the stars and so on. Great Filters may explain why our telescopes don’t show us a universe swarming with noisy alien civilizations. At the moment, we don’t know if Great Filters exist, how many exist or which ones humanity has already overcome. Galactus is a Great Filter. If civilizations in his universe can’t harness the necessary power to forestall him, they’re more likely to die. The lesson here is that civilizations that want to progress indefinitely should invest the necessary resources into learning as much as they can about their universe and what could be waiting to try and restrict them.
A Galaxy Far, Far Away (K=3.6)
If I asked you to give an example of a fictional civilization spanning an entire galaxy, there’s a good chance your mind would go to Star Wars. Its stories are all about life in either a galactic republic or a galactic empire. Yet despite visiting so many different worlds and introducing so many fantastical elements, Star Wars stories have a tendency to really make every moment feel grounded in genuine human experience(not that all the best characters are human). The majority of Star Wars planets seem mostly devoid of dense urban areas. Perhaps the ability to spread out among many worlds meant the galaxy’s inhabitants could take up less space on each individual planet. This idea naturally means that the environment on these planets should be better preserved. The Force itself is created by living things, so the heroes of the stories are the ones fighting to protect life across the galaxy while the villains seek to destroy it. The morality of Star Wars is very human, which perhaps means that the denizens of a Type 3 civilization like theirs should never develop a sense of superiority. Someone living in a Type 3 civilization may live a life as down to Earth and relatable as someone living in a Type 0.
When it comes to assessing the power usage of the Galaxy Far, Far Away, there are several factors that play a major role: 1) the energy used by all the peoples on all the inhabited planets, 2) the energy used by all the ships, and 3) the energy used by Starkiller Base. For a typical inhabited planet in the Star Wars galaxy, we’ll assume they use the same amount of power as humanity currently does, because while they may have more efficient ways of utilizing energy, they also appear to have smaller populations on most planets as we discussed earlier. According to a comprehensive map of the Star Wars galaxy, 323 planets are visited across all canon Star Wars media. Treating all of them as inhabited, we get that the people on the planets have a combined power usage of 6.07x10¹⁵ watts.
Next, we need to know how much power all their ships use. The ships in Star Wars appear to travel faster than light using warp drives, so we can use the same math we used for the warp pads in Steven Universe. In the movies, it takes ships about 1.6 seconds on average to make the jump to hyperspace. This means one hyperdrive has a power output of 4.0x10¹⁹ watts. Since starships are as common in Star Wars as cars, planes and boats on Earth, we’ll assume there are 3.2x10¹¹ starships across the galaxy. We get this number by multiplying the estimated total number of cars, planes and boats on Earth by the 323 planets in Star Wars we found earlier. This gives us a power output of all the hyperdrives in Star Wars of 1.28x10³¹ watts. We should also consider the power used by the Final Order fleet from The Rise of Skywalker. Each of those ships had a canon capable of destroying an Earth-sized planet, which we already found requires 2x10³² joules. In the movie, it takes a Final Order ship 13 seconds to destroy an Earth-sized planet. This means each ship in the fleet can output 1.5x10³¹ watts. The fleet appears to have 400 ships, so that means a total power requirement of 6x10³³ watts.
Finally, we need to consider Starkiller Base. Even though the base was destroyed, the technological knowledge to recreate it probably still exists within the Star Wars galaxy. The base was able to absorb the full mass of a star. Assuming this star was the same mass as our Sun, it would have a gravitational binding energy of 1.91x10¹¹ joules, which Starkiller Base would need to overcome. If we assume Starkiller Base is absorbing all the energy released by fusion reactions of the star’s matter, it would intake 1.3x10⁴⁵ joules of energy. So Starkiller Base’s net energy intake when using up one solar mass star is about 1.3x10⁴⁵ joules. In The Force Awakens, it takes Starkiller Base about 1259 seconds to fully absorb a star. This means its net power input was 1.0x10⁴² watts. Adding together all the power sources we’ve considered, we find that the Star Wars galaxy can utilize a total 10⁴² watts. This gives the galaxy’s inhabitants a Kardashev number of 3.6.
The fact that the power usage of the Star Wars galaxy is primarily from weapons of mass destruction highlights the fact that the Kardashev Scale doesn’t consider mortality when assessing the advancement of civilizations. The power of Starkiller Base could just as easily have been used to supply countless people with warmth and light. To many, it’s how a civilization uses its power that determines if they’re advanced or primitive, not the amount of power they have.
That wraps up our discussion of Type 2 and 3 civilizations. In the next post, we’ll conclude our journey by discussing fictional Type 4 and 5 civilizations. See you there.
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