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]]>In my posting about what our world and humanity will experience in the year 2100, I speculated on how advances in science and technology will impact our species and the planet. Futurology is an interdisciplinary field that looks at environmental, social, scientific and technological trends to develop future scenarios. As a self-described futurist, I have wondered if one can take a course on the subject. To my surprise, I found a 2017 web listing with 48 institutions and organizations offering foresight and future studies that even offer Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in futurology (although not necessarily given that name). These are programs that include philosophical and ethical methodology studies, trend scanning, scenario and strategy building, systems complexity theory, strategic planning, imagination and creative thinking. If I were to go back to school, I would happily have enrolled in these types of programs.
Michio Kaku, the theoretical physicist who wrote “The Future of Humanity,” describes our current civilization as mid-level Type 0. What does that mean?
A Russian astrophysicist, Nikolai Kardashev, in 1964, described civilization types, giving them designations going from 1 to 5. He didn’t describe a Type 0. That was added by Carl Sagan, another noted astrophysicist, who measured our current state within a Type 0 parameter. Sagan described human existence now, from the tribal societies in the Amazon to our energy-guzzling present cities and countries, as somewhere between Type 0.5 and 0.6. At 0.5, we mastered flight. At 0.6, we reached the Moon. Today, we are at 0.7 as we prepare to build a permanent presence on our nearest celestial neighbour. Once we master fusion energy and have quantum computing go mainstream, we will move to 0.8, which should happen before 2100.
Kardashev’s scale aligns with the amount of energy civilizations consume. Today, we are at 17.5 Terrawatt-hours, still far away from Kardashev’s starting point of Type 1, which will redouble and redouble the energy we use until it is 100,000 times greater than what we use in the present.
Kaku believes that milestone will be met and surpassed in the next 100 to 200 years. It means we will harvest all of the energy reaching Earth from the Sun, an estimated 100 Quadrillion Watt-hours. Our Type 1 civilization will have the means to manipulate the weather and even control earthquakes and volcanoes.
Could we do this in 100 or 200 years? I’m not convinced. But certainly, by 2500 CE, it sounds possible. So what else can we do between that year and the subsequent 500 that follows? Can we aspire to each Kardashev’s Type 2 and harness all of the energy of the Sun, not just the sunlight falling on our planet? Can our Type 2 technologies make us capable of moving Earth and the other planets of the Solar System? If we reach Type 2, can the extinction-level event associated with the demise of the dinosaurs no longer be seen as a threat to human civilization?
All of this happening by 3000 CE seems impossible. When you consider how far we have come from 2500 BCE, the time when the Great Pyramids were built, to where we are today, however, then leaps of futuristic insight like this seem possible. Put in the context of our progress in the past. Back in 2500 BCE, we harnessed energy from fire, water and wind to support our pre-industrial civilizations. In the present, we have added electricity and the energy of the atom.
Before 0 CE, human knowledge doubled every 1,500 years. By 1900 CE, it had doubled every century. By 1945, every 25 years. Today it happens every twelve months, and soon it will happen every twelve hours. Nine hundred and seventy-seven years from now, in the year 3000 CE, our civilization and Earth will be almost unrecognizable to us in the present. We will be re-engineered as well as our planet.
From there, we will master the Solar System and beyond, making the leaps to Type 3, 4, 5 and beyond. Try to imagine how our human civilization will appear then, as we progress through each of these stages.
What will constrain us? Einstein posed a speed limit based on how fast light travels. In Star Trek, starships travel faster than the speed of light using warp drive technology. Today, some NASA scientists are trying to make that happen. If we master quantum entanglement, can we invent the transporter featured in Star Trek and teleport ourselves across the galaxy? And then the hypothetical wormholes that appear in science fiction in movies like Contact could be the equivalent of urban subways to help us traverse from one star system to another, encountering other species going through the stages of civilization like ourselves.
When I finish my morning swims and reach the 80th lap, in equivalent years, I have transported myself to 8080 CE. I have yet to imagine the state of civilization and humanity by then. I am, at some point, going to try. There appears to be lots of time for my mind to wander as I swim and speculate on what might be. That’s the fun of being a futurist.
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]]>Based on Kardashev’s speculations where does our civilization sit today? We are Type 0, somewhere between 0.7 and 0.72 producing 15 Terawatts of energy, a mere fraction of the energy a Type 1 would harvest from the physical world. The renowned theoretical physicist, Michio Kaku, has speculated on Kardashev’s scale and believes humanity will attain Type 1 status within a century or two.
How? Through harnessing of fusion, and antimatter.
To get to Type 2 we will maximize the use of antimatter as an energy source. We will harvest star matter and use it as we see fit. We will no longer be confined to living in proximity to a single star, but to many. We may even build Dyson spheres to encase stars, (see image below), to capture all the energy for the civilization residing within them.
To get to Type 3 we will tap into the energy of black holes and even find the other side, the white holes, that propel matter outwards. By then we will have harnessed the energy of our entire galaxy and spread throughout.
A Type 4 civilization will harness dark and extra-galactic energy. Such a civilization would be unrecognizable to us as such because it would be indistinguishable from the Universe itself. Would we evolve into pure energy? Would a Type 4 civilization be immortal and omnipotent.
So if Kaku is right then here are speculations on human civilization’s evolution.
By 2100 A.D. as Kaku predicts we will approach a Type 1. We will capture all the solar energy that reaches Earth increasing our energy supply by a factor of 100-billion. We will have harnessed nanotechnology and warp drive propulsion and will be a civilization of this world and off this world.
By 2200 A.D., a mere century later we will approach Type 2, harnessing all the energy of our Sun, another 100-billion-fold increase. We will be extra-solar inhabiting planets on many nearby stars.
By 3000 A.D. we will have harnessed the energy of every star in the Milky Way, another 100-billion-fold energy increase. As a Type 3 we will traverse the galaxy and will, along the way, meet many other technologically advanced civilizations.
And then to attain Type 4 we will reach much further into the future, to 12000 A.D. At that point we will have transcended the physical reality of our Universe and may even have poked through to parallel universes in the multiverse.
Sounds delusional? Remember where human civilization’s technological achievements were in 1000 A.D. What would a person living in that time think of the world in which we live today? Magical? Incomprehensible? One thing we know for sure, technological breakthroughs that at one time took a century to achieve, now can happen in a year. It remains true that some technologies are harder to crack, like developing fusion energy. But today we are much closer to achieving that fusion breakthrough that alone will move us faster to becoming a Type 1 civilization. And after that will the rest unfold?
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