Today's selection -- from Disturbing the Universe by Freeman Dyson. Some of us think days or weeks into the future. Some of the most thoughtful among us reflect on what might happen years into the future. The Soviet astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev (b. 1932) thinks thousands of years into the future. He has developed a theory of measuring a civilization's technological progress -- the Kardashev scale -- by measuring the amount of energy that civilization is able to harness. This theory has three distinct types:...MORE
"The Russian astronomer Kardashev has suggested that civilizations in the universe should fall into three distinct types. A type 1 civilization controls the resources of a planet. A type 2 civilization controls the resources of a star. A type 3 civilization controls the resources of a galaxy. We have not yet achieved type 1 status, but we shall probably do so within a few hundred years. The difference in size and power between types 1 and 2, or between types 2 and 3, is a factor of the order of ten billion, unimaginably large by human standards. But the process of exponential economic growth allows this immense gulf to be bridged remarkably rapidly. To grow by a factor of ten billion takes thirty-three doubling times. A society growing at the modest rate of one percent per year will make the transition from type 1 to type 2 in less than 2500 years. The transition from type 2 to type 3 will take longer than this, since it requires interstellar voyages. But the periods of transition are likely to be comparatively brief episodes in the history of any long-lived society. Hence Kardashev concludes that if we ever discover an extraterrestrial civilization, it will probably belong clearly to type 1, 2 or 3 rather than to one of the brief transitional phases....
Previously from Freeman Dyson:
"The Brain Is Full of Maps A Talk By Freeman Dyson"
"The Key to Everything" Freeman Dyson on Geoffrey West's "Scale..."
To Hell With Human Cooperation and Trust: There are Indeed Ultimatum Strategies to Win an Iterated Prisoners Dilemma
