Should We Trust the Kardashev Scale?

What Does an Advanced Civilization Really Look Like?

In the last few hundred years, humanity has experienced an explosion in scientific and technological progress unprecedented in the 195,000 to 300,000 years we’ve existed. Given the rapid advancement we’re witnessing in our technology, it’s natural to wonder just how far we’ll be able to progress in the next hundred, thousand or even million years. For all we know, there could already be alien civilizations in our universe whose technology would appear magical to us. With so many different predictions about futuristic civilizations, it’s hard to imagine anyway to measure and compare them to ourselves. But not only are there ways to compare advanced civilizations, we can actually assign numbers to measure their advancement. One of the more popular metrics for doing this is the Kardashev Scale, which divides civilizations into six stages of advancement. But does this ranking actually tell us how advanced a civilization is?

Created by Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev in 1964, the Kardashev Scale measures how technologically advanced a civilization is based on how much power it consumes. Power being a measurement of energy per unit of time. Plugging how much power a civilization uses into a special formula gives us a number that represents the advancement of that civilization’s technology. The formula is simple: