Yesterday, we have discussed Kardashev Scale – Type 1 Civilization. Today, we are going to learn and discuss Type 2 Civilization. Type 1 Civilization can harness all the energy available on the home planet. Now, for Type 2 Civilization, they can harness all the energy available in the solar system including the sun, meteors, asteroids, comets, planets, moons, etc.
Let us try to understand this with an example. For us, human beings to be a Type 2 Civilization, we need to utilize the sun’s energy and extract resources from other planets. Once we have harness energy from the sun, it is easy to extract resources from other planets. To harness all the energy of a star is no easy feat. It is an enormous nuclear fusion reactor. So, we will have to carefully plan how to harness that energy. There have been proposals and the most famous of them is the Dyson sphere.
A Dyson sphere is a hypothetical megastructure that completely encompasses a star and captures a large percentage of its power output. A Dyson sphere is a futuristic concept, so we can assume humanity already has solar cells with the maximum theoretical efficiency = 86.8%. (100% is impossible because of thermodynamics laws). The sun gives off 3.85 x 10^26 watts (385 trillion terawatts) per second, so we would likely be able to harness 334.18 trillion TW/sec. What we doing is building a mega solar panel. We will harness about 86.8% of the energy that the sun produces, which is a lot of energy. With this energy, we can fuel our civilization and there is no need to produce energy locally on Earth. I mean, what is the point of building expensive dams, power plants and covering hundreds of thousands of miles with solar panels? Even if we do this, the energy output is very low compared to what we are getting from the sun.
The most effective way we learn and can practically be done is nuclear fusion. And the sun is a hyper mega nuclear fusion reactor. So, we can just harness its energy and that is more efficient. With the energy harnessed from the sun, we can colonize other planets, and maybe energy will be free to use in those times. I mean, the energy we are getting from harnessing the sun is a trillion times more than we currently use in a full year. So, there will be lots of energy surplus and energy might be free. You may get money for using energy who knows.
After we extract the resources from other planets and build other megastructures like space elevators, spacecraft, a space station capable of sustaining life like a planet for millions of years, etc. These space structures consume lots of energy but don’t worry we have the Dyson sphere and it will supply us with this energy. Wait, there is more to this, a Type 2 Civilization can not only harness all the energy of the star. It can also change the planet’s orbits or even move the entire solar system to its desired location. Suppose, a black hole is coming straight for us. Then, we can move the solar system and avoid the black hole.
After fully colonizing the solar system, we can travel to other solar systems, build another Dyson sphere, and colonize there. Like this, we will travel all over the galaxy and become a Type 3 Civilization. There are more powers, technology, and knowledge available to a Type 3 Civilization than just building Dyson spheres all over the galaxy. But, that’s tomorrow’s topic.
Knowledge Glutton 