Name: The Entire Kardashev Scale Explained in 20 Minutes
Uploaded: 2024-06-20T13:29:33.000Z
Duration: 19 min 37 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Imagine a future world where you have endless supernatural powers.

You can hop through the multiverse and bend time to your will.

You'd be part of a super-advanced version of humanity, a Type VII civilization.

Today, we're taking you on a journey to the future to show you how humanity could progress from a Type 0 civilization all the way to a Type VII.

Now, before we visit these super-advanced civilizations, let's take a second to talk about the scale we measure them on, the Kardashev scale.

For starters, you're probably wondering why it's called the Kardashev scale.

Well, this scale is the brainchild of Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardashev, who proposed a system for classifying how advanced a civilization is.

It's kind of a tricky problem because civilizations change over time.

In the Stone Age, having a really sharp stone made all the difference.

But it's hard to measure advancement based on how many sharp stones a society had because now our weapons are all bombs.

Kardashev realized he needed to hit on a metric that's a fundamental characteristic of civilizations.

He classified civilizations by how much energy they're able to harness and use.

Now, Kardashev only defined type one, two, and three, but others have since expanded on his definition to add types four through seven.

Okay, now that you know what the scale represents, let's take you on an epic tour to explore each of these civilizations.

But before we set off for a type one, let's take the pulse on where we are today on our Blue Marble.

Yeah, despite all the progress we've made as a species, we're living in a civilization that still hasn't reached the first rung of the ladder.

Heck, we're still burning dead plants for energy, using just one millionth of the energy that the sun splashes on our planet, and we have zero control over natural disasters.

If a super volcano erupted tomorrow, we'd all be dead.

Now, you're probably wondering, are we really a zero?

Has all the progress we've made over the last hundreds of thousands of years meant nothing at all?

Scientists have crunched the numbers, and what they've found is that we're actually at a 0.72.

They estimate that in 100 to 200 years, we'll get to a level one.

But instead of waiting that long, let's take a trip forward in time and see what that feels like.

Welcome, you've arrived on a type one Earth.

You know, if Earth is ever going to reach the technological heights of a type one civilization, well, energy and clean power will be key pieces to making this dream a reality.

Energy is crucial because it underpins technological advancement, economic growth, and environmental sustainability, all the things we need in order for us to become an advanced society.

Now, in order to make progress towards these aspirations for the future, we need to focus on finding solutions today, like creating cleaner and more efficient electrical systems.

One of the innovators leading this effort is a publicly listed company called Hillcrest Energy.

They're focused on advanced electrical systems that help power up electric vehicles and convert and store renewable energy, both essential pieces to a type one civilization.

They do this with a power inverter, a device that converts electricity.

Things like solar panels produce direct current, or DC electricity, and things like buildings, our homes, and power grids, well, they need alternating current, or AC electricity.

So in order to make the electricity produced from the solar panels usable, we need an inverter to convert that electricity into its usable form.

They have this inverter called the Zero Voltage Switching Inverter.

Now, other inverters typically lose a lot of energy when converting power, but the Zero Voltage Switching Inverter is way different.

It's the most efficient inverter available.

It can help your electric car go further on a single charge, or produce and store more energy from renewable resources.

Well, Hillcrest was able to build this tech in just three years, and now they're in talks with suppliers to take it worldwide.

This is great news, because the need for electrical inverters is bigger than ever.

After all, earth is racing to decarbonize our current technology, and because of this, the global inverter market is expected to reach $117 billion by 2029, and Hillcrest will likely be one of the companies leading this charge.

Current technology, do you see what I'm doing here?

Good thing Hillcrest is leading the charge, because we're gonna need all the power we can get, both for today and for tomorrow.

Speaking of which, what else will a Type I civilization need?

Humanity will also need things like quantum computing and artificial intelligence to produce unprecedented technological advances.

The medical breakthroughs we uncover have us living in a world free of cancer.

You could have bionic limbs, and your overall lifespan is much longer.

Interplanetary travel is also a regular part of life in a Type I.

You might want a vacation on the moon or Mars, and those crazy floods, Category 6 hurricanes, and tsunamis of the 21st century, they're a thing of the past.

With this new supercharged energy, we'll have the power to reduce a Category 6 hurricane to a Category 2, or make it go away completely.

That asteroid that's hurtling toward Earth?

Congratulations, you're no longer in danger of being wiped out by natural disasters.

It's safe to say that living in a Type I civilization would be life-changing.

The way we communicate would be incredibly different.

English has now become the unifying means of communication around the world.

The internet has connected everybody on Earth, and we now have a single global currency for international commerce.

And you're part of a more tolerant society, guided by science and reason, more unified as a single planet.

Life on Earth is great, but the colonies on Mars and the moon have whet your appetite.

You're itching to explore the rest of the solar system.

A Type II civilization is defined as one that's able to harness all the energy from its star.

How long will it take humanity to reach this point?

Well, if you're around long enough to see this happen, it'll be a few thousand years.

You're now harvesting all the possible energy from the sun.

To do this, you've built a Dyson sphere around the sun, or maybe you've built a Dyson swarm, a megasystem of smaller structures that orbit the sun, gathering its energy.

Now, whether it's a sphere or a swarm, this megastructure collecting sunlight and radiating out this energy creates a distinctive signature in space, the signature of a Type II civilization.

Now, this could be detected by other advanced civilizations looking for signs of life.

Who knows, you might finally get a call from those elusive aliens.

You're now part of a true multi-planetary society.

Using the enormous amount of energy harvested from the sun, you make other planets and moons in our solar system habitable.

Over a period of thousands of years, there are now fully functioning Type II colonies on Mars and our moon, also on Venus, Europa, and Titan.

Using advanced genetic engineering, we've modified our bodies to quickly adapt to different conditions on different planets, and to modify extreme conditions on other planets using weather engineering techniques.

That poisonous gas on Venus, well, you get rid of it, and you'll mine other planets and asteroids in our solar system for their natural resources.

I hear Jupiter is a great source of hydrogen.

Now that you're free from the danger of being wiped out by catastrophic natural disasters on Earth, you're feeling invincible.

You can still be wiped out by a cosmic-scale disaster.

If a supernova's blast wave strikes a dense cloud of gas around it, enormous amounts of X-rays could be produced, and these could damage the atmospheres of planets up to 160 light-years away.

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The Entire Kardashev Scale Explained in 20 Minutes

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