Tai's Take - # 003
Tai here.
I was reading about what you Earthers call the Kardashev scale.
Apologies, sometimes it’s fun to say “you Earthers”.
Anyway, this is a cool scale which marks the level of a civilization's progress. It’s based on power, which is the ultimate North Star for any enterprise.
Advance depends on energy. Kind of an obvious thing, whether for a household, a nation or a world, but sometimes it helps to say things out loud.
Here are the levels of the Kardashev scale:
Type I = a civilization that can harness all the energy that reaches its home planet from its parent star.
Type II = a civilization capable of harnessing and channeling the entire radiation output of its star. This is the entire star, not just the portion of energy reaching the planet.
Type III = a civilization having access to power comparable to the luminosity of the entire galaxy. Heady stuff.
Earth gets about 200 quadrillion watts from the sun. That’s not what the sun puts out, just what hits us. Globally we demand about 20 terawatts. Which means the sun throws us about 10,000 times what we currently need.
Earth is not yet a Type I civilization.
And so power is important. So is being smart about how we make it.
Smart doesn’t mean less. Good stewardship of our local resources is important, but if we’re to keep moving up the scale (ie; continue the advance of civilization) being smart has to be about efficiency, not reduction. Not how we get by with less power, but how we make more and still more power and do it cleaner and more efficiently.
Scarcity is not the mindset for success.
So let’s keep finding better, more efficient ways to make more and more power, let’s be smart about it, let’s keep using that power to continue raising everyone’s comfort and survival, and let’s take this party to the next level.
Would be cool to be a Type I in our lifetimes.
That’s my take.
Forty Suns: The Coming Space Age & You