Did you ever wish that you had superpowers? Well, Science can help you! But there is a catch. Unfortunately, it might take 10000-100000 years to do so.
The technology that humans might have in the distant future will most likely leave us awestruck. The things they might be able to do will be comparable to having superpowers. Our current day technological and engineering capicities will be nothing compared to advanced civilizations.
How long would it take for humans to become an advanced civilization with crazy and unimaginable technology?
An astrophysicist, called Nikolai Kardashev can help us answer this question. In 1964, Kardashev created a scale to measure how advanced a civilization is. He named it the “Kardashev scale“. The Kardashev scale measures how technologically advanced a civilization is, based on its energy consumption. It revolves around the idea that the more advanced a civilization is, the more energy it would consume. There are 3 types of civilizations on the Kardashev scale: Type I, Type II and Type III.
A Type I civilization is able to harness all the energy reaching their host planet from their host star and all the energy of their host planet e.g. geo-thermal, hydro etc. Theoretically, that means that the civilization could control the natural forces of their planet e.g. earthquakes, volcanoes and weather.
A Type II civilization would be able to harness all the energy from their host star and also control it. The most famous idea to do that is a hypothetical object called a “Dyson Sphere”. A Dyson Sphere would completely enclose the host star and transfrom all of its energy. At this point, a civilization would be so powerful that nothing known to science today could wipe it out. A moon sized asteriod is in a collision course with Earth, simply just vaporize the asteriod. Or you can move the whole Earth, or just move Jupiter into the way of the asteriod. The amount of things a civilization can accomplish when they have the ability harness energy at this scale is crazy.
A Type III civilization, is able to harness all of the energy available in their whole galaxy. At this point the civilization would have colonized the whole galaxy and harnessing the energy of all the stars. They would be able to control all of the stars, solar systems, asteriods, planets etc. in our whole galaxy. A Type III civilization would have an immense amount of power and is something you would expect from science fiction.
So, you might be wondering, where is human civilization on this scale? Well, it isn’t. Quantitatively, A Type I civilization would consume 10^26 Watts of energy, A Type II civilization would consum 10^36 Watts and A Type III civilization would consum 10^46 Watts of energy. In 2015, we only consumed 17 * 10^12 terwatts of energy which is nothing compared to the energy consumption of a Type I civilization. We are not even on the scale! According to Machio Kaku, a famous theoretical physicist, humans could possibly be a Type I civilization in 150-200 years. Type II status could be reached in the next ten thousand years and a Type III status could take anywhere from a hundred thousand to one million years.
Unfortunately, it’s going to be quite a while before we can vaporize asteriods, control stars, collide planets and do all of that cool stuff. But don’t be upset, we live in an age of constant technological innovation. Technological advancement is happening at an exponential rate.
The things you’re capable of doing with our current technology will make you a superhero in the eyes of humans living thousands of years ago!
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