One of the most frustrating and comical aspects of humanity’s reluctance to ditch fossil fuels like coal, gas and oil for renewable energy sources is that it reveals just how small our horizons as a species is. Whether you consider expansionist wars like in Ukraine, brutal oppression as in Gaza or the nihilist frog-in-a-well politics of Donald Trump’s US, it would seem that human beings are incapable of looking at the bigger picture. Do we want to mature as a planetary civilization and look to the stars while preserving the wellbeing of the people and ecosystems on Earth? Or do we fight and die in the same old ways, while just looking more ‘modern’ with our suits and supercomputers?
I recently came across some very interesting discussion about an obscure—but highly influential—study published way back in 1964 by Russian physicist Nikolai Kardashev, in a YouTube video from the Public Broadcasting Service’s (PBS) Space Time channel. The paper, titled Transmission Of Information By Extraterrestrial Civilizations, had a simple and elegant answer for why humanity hasn’t yet discovered alien life. Kardashev was looking to understand the amount of energy required to boost a signal through space. He surmised that if we were to try and communicate with intelligent life out in the cosmos or vice versa, communication signals would have to be propelled by an immense amount of energy. Human civilization, both back in 1964 and in 2024, simply do not control that level of energy.
In that same paper, Kardashev also proposed three levels of technological civilizations, based on the amount of energy sources at their command. There’s Type 1, that has complete control over planetary energy resources; Type 2, which can harness the full energy of a star and solar system; and then there’s Type 3, which can harness the energy of an entire galaxy. While the latter two are impossible to visualize outside of science fiction, Kardashev believed that being a Type 1 civilization is within human reach. We’re more like Type Zero now, and marching firmly towards a short shelf life on Earth. But we could change that, by making smart energy decisions.
So, what kind of civilization is Type 1? It would be a spacefaring one, with its reach extending throughout the solar system. It would have the technological prowess to terraform other planets, and it would have resolved geopolitical tensions on its home planet, while also eliminating any want and safeguarding its ecosystems. Now, this simply cannot happen with us if we rely on fossil fuels. Apart from the fact that even our current levels of fossil fuel use is destabilizing the planet, there simply isn’t enough of it (or fissionable materials for that matter) on Earth to sustain even two days in the life of a Type 1 civilization.
The easiest energy source that we could harness for our Type 1 needs is that of the sun. On average, every day the Earth receives solar radiation of 1,361watts per square metre of the earth’s surface, which, if we could harness it, would yield us a maximum daily energy of 1017 watts. By some estimates, the amount of daily energy we consume worldwide is 1013 watts. That’s less than 10,000 times the amount of power we could be using without burning fossil fuels. Of course, there are the technical problems of harnessing and storing the solar power while ensuring the minimum amount of energy wastage, but the rate at which solar technologies are developing (and becoming cheaper), this should be our goal, and not drilling for more oil.
But far from heading in this direction, we are about to breach a crucial global heat barrier. According to a recent analysis of data from the world’s five main temperature monitoring services, 2024 will be the first year to breach 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming. This is the amount by with global temperatures have risen since the pre-industrial era (1850-1900) and the threshold beyond which every fraction of temperature rise imperils our life on the planet. If we can get to zero fresh global greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, then there’s a chance that, by 2100, global warming stabilizes at 1.5 degree Celsius.
The only way to do so is to adopt the energy pathway of a Type 1 civilization: focusing on harnessing renewable energy, from wind, water and the sun’s radiation. However, climate scientists are increasingly of the view that humans have dragged their feet on ditching oil, gas and coal for too long, and that the hopes of stabilizing global warming to under 1.5 degrees Celsius are looking increasingly unlikely. The best we can aim for now is the 2 degrees barrier, which comes with a much bigger risk. But the rate at which we are adding fresh CO2 emissions to the atmosphere each year suggests a temperature rise of about 2.7 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. And that would be catastrophic.
The particle physicist Brian Cox, in an interview on the Big Think YouTube channel, said that while life evolved about 3.8 billion years ago, for about 3 billion years after that, it only existed in the form of single cell organisms. If the Earth is a typical example, then it would take about 4 billion years of relative stability for life to evolve from single cell to intelligence. That might be quite a rare occurrence in the universe. “I think there’s one civilization in the Milky Way Galaxy, and there only ever has been one, and there might only ever be one, and that’s us. It means that we have a tremendous responsibility not to mess this up. That means the Earth is the only island of meaning in a sea of 400 billion suns, and if we destroy this, we might destroy meaning in a galaxy forever.”
