3 Types of Extraterrestrial Civilizations

vladglenin

Hi all, I'm new to this forum so not entirely sure whether this has been put up before.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hW7vBRrvew

Hope you enjoy!

baalthor

Are these the three levels as proposed by Nikolai Kardashev and popularised by Carl Sagan?

(I can't watch the video due to my Type 1 Internet connection:()

deadpoet

This is in fact the general concensus on this matter. A theory often promoted by Michio Kaku, who writes fantastic books such as Physics of the Impossible.

silverharp

what is faster then light travel is not possible? is it a given that this type of problem can be cracked?

deadpoet

That rule is relative to Einsteins Theory of Relativity. Advances in scientific knowledge since his death; especially over the last two decades alone; have given birth to more modern schools of thought that claim travelling faster than the speed of light may well be very possible after all.

I'll edit this with some links when the mood occurs to browse my bookmarks. The Stumbleupon toolbar for Firefox is an absolute diamond mine for these areas of study.

Wibbs

It's a system too predicated on just one direction of progress. For a start its looking at energy. Thats a good thing to look at, but it so depends on the system you're attempting to energise. We're very wasteful as a system. We need a lot of energy to do our thing. Lets go down the road of a thought experiment.

Step outside the human. Imagine a culture that has passed the exclusively biological and instead has gone the "machine" route. Now I say machine, but Im not talking a hyped up Dell with a fancy video card. I'm talking about a society that has evolved its own descendants at the molecular level and got rid of all the extraneous energy wasteful stuff that makes up the intelligent life here. They might neither sow nor reap, they cut out the middle man and extract fuel directly from matter/energy. They may also be more efficient in the first place so the energy they need is minimal anyway. They're on standby with the red light on until a good programme comes on the telly.

They probably won't need to suck the juice from a star in the first place. They'll run on a very low level(to us) basis. Maybe switching on once a year or century or millennia. Time may have no practical meaning for them. The cut and thrust and landmarks of our lives that are all too brief will mean nothing. They may gauge experience by entropy and if they can maintain the main system that won't really bother them on timescales we would think of. They'll not need to terraform, or colonise the stars in the expected way. They will have such a small footprint of space and energy. A 1000 angels on the head of a pin, or a billion billion aliens on what looks like a dead moon orbiting a dwarf star. Living like hyper intelligent practically immortal bacterial slime living off rock. Hey maybe they're the alien mode,not the bipedal apel?

They may send out probes or have sent out probes for millions of years. Each one a compact holographic shard of them as a culture. Small and energy cheap that sees the vast distance as nothing. Without the Damoclesian sword of biological life and the time constraints upon it, distance will be next to nothing. Consider the mayfly. An adult for less than a day. It can never survive a trip to Australia, yet as we speak a multitude at this very moment may be flying over our heads on that very journey. Even if they send out those probes the chances of falling on another civilisation are pretty slim. If they passed us only 100,000 years ago they would have seen nada from orbit. 2000 years ago, not much more. In 2000 yrs time they may not see anything either.

That's if they are curious at all of course. They may not be. They may turn in on themselves. They will know how to create "heaven" in the internal mind. The ultimate trip. So why travel? Why be bored? Why seek pleasure and novel experience when all of that is wired in on tap? They may sit in their low energy state in a state of eternal ecstasy. Sound unlikely? We went and stood on the moon 40 years ago. We havent been back, yet switch on the telly and we can watch Cpt Kirk do it for us in more exciting ways that satisfy that need. Send robots instead. Until that stops too.

We may be surrounded by aliens, but unless we get them at the point just before they turn inward, we may never know they're there. We're here now, but in 10,000 years we may not be, as far as the universe is concerned.

IMHO type 1 aliens may exist, but I hold out feck all hope or belief in type two or three. Because before or when they get to type 1, the direction shifts. I'd call them type 1.5.