A brief explanation of the Kardashev Scale can be consider as: How Far Can Humanity Advance?
A better scale would be: Is there a limit to growth? Capitalist societies depend on growth and continued expansion of the market to survive but at the same time, generate problems to life on planet Earth: environmental destruction, floods, disease, poverty, and war. At the same time, we also have technological achievements: The Mars rover missions, the Alcubierre Warp Drive, invisibility cloaks, the discovery of the Higgs particle and son.
So, how do we weigh all the scientific innovations against all the destruction and chaos to the planet? Our march towards technological accomplishment and human progress, how can we measure our standing as mankind?
Following our scientific tradition a way to answer this question is to design a scale that will allow us to measure our technological abilities against all technological possibilities. In other words, we need a scale that will allow us to measure our current development status against the total possible statuses.
One of these methods is “The Kardashev Scale.”
The Kardashev scale focuses on the amount of energy that a civilization is able to utilize. In essence, the amount of power available to a civilization is linked to how widespread the civilization is in comparison to a planet, galaxy, or an entire universe.
In 1964 a Russian astrophysicist known as Nicolai Kardashev, came up with the idea that “the status of a culture, as a whole, depends on two primary things: Energy and technology. He theorized that a civilization’s technical advancement runs parallel to the amount of energy that the civilization is able to harness and manipulate. “
In other words, according to this theory, a civilized society is a product of energy and of technology: “Through technology, energy is harnessed, and as social systems are expressions of this technology, the status of a culture rests upon —and is determined by— the amount of energy that is harnessed.”
Carl Sagan suggested adding another dimension to pure energy usage: “the information available to the civilization. He assigned the letter A to represent 106 unique bits of information (less than any recorded human culture) and each successive letter to represent an order of magnitude increase, so that a level Z civilization would have 1031 bits.” In this classification, 1973 Earth is a 0.7 H civilization, with access to 1013 bits of information.
“Sagan believed that no civilization has yet reached level Z, conjecturing that so much unique information would exceed that of all the intelligent species in a galactic supercluster and observing that the universe is not old enough to exchange information effectively over larger distances.”
I personally believe that a better measure is one that includes assessing damage to the environment by measuring how efficiently a society uses available energy from all sources. Americans constitute 5% of the world's population but consume 24% of the world's energy according to British Petroleum (BP) "Statistical Review of World Energy. In my opinion, a scale based on energy- use- efficiency measured against per capita consumption would be a better indicator if one considers the environment and damage to sustainable planetary life as a result of energy use.
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