**Hitting the Books: We'd likely have to liquidate Jupiter to build a Dyson Sphere around the Sun**
The gargantuan artificial construct enveloping your local star is going to be rather difficult to miss, even from a few light years away. And given the literally astronomical costs of resources needed to construct such a device — the still-theoretical-for-humans Dyson Sphere (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.131.3414.1667) — having one in your solar system will also serve as a stark warning of your technological capacity to ETs that comes sniffing around.
Or at least that's how 20th century astronomers like Nikolai Kardashev and Carl Sagan envisioned our potential Sol-spanning distant future going. Turns out, a whole lot of how we predict intelligences from outside our planet will behave is heavily influenced by humanity's own cultural and historical biases. In _The Possibility of Life_ (https://shopping.yahoo.com/rdlw?merchantId=66ea567a-c987-4c2e-a2ff-02904efde6ea&siteId=us-engadget&pageId=1p-autolink&featureId=text-link&merchantName=Amazon&custData=eyJzb3VyY2VOYW1lIjoiV2ViLURlc2t0b3AtVmVyaXpvbiIsInN0b3JlSWQiOiI2NmVhNTY3YS1jOTg3LTRjMmUtYTJmZi0wMjkwNGVmZGU2ZWEiLCJsYW5kaW5nVXJsIjoiaHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuYW1hem9uLmNvbS9Qb3NzaWJpbGl0eS1MaWZlLVNjaWVuY2UtSW1hZ2luYXRpb24tS2luc2hpcC9kcC8xMzM1NDYzNTQyP3RhZz1nZGd0MGMtcC1vLXRvLTIwIiwiY29udGVudFV1aWQiOiIwOThhOWJhZi05NWZmLTQ2YTAtYWM0NS01OWI3YzA2OTkxYzQifQ&signature=AQAAAavNYKkgIgxpr1fBmiGAOBzjdznBFtYQip9XYpBrH1ej&gcReferrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FPossibility-Life-Science-Imagination-Kinship%2Fdp%2F1335463542) _,_ science journalist Jaime Green examines humanity's intriguing history of looking to the stars and finding ourselves reflected in them.
https://s.yimg.com/os/creatr-uploaded-images/2023-04/13a225f0-dd71-11ed-9fff-686b3a867039
Harper Collins Publishing
Excerpted from _The Possibility of Life_ (https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-possibility-of-life-jaime-green) by Jaime Green, Copyright © 2023 by Jaime Green. Published by Hanover Square Press.
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On a Scale of One to Three
The way we imagine human progress — technology, advancement — seems inextricable from human culture. Superiority is marked by fast ships, colonial spread, or the acquisition of knowledge that fuels mastery of the physical world. Even in _Star Trek_, the post-poverty, post-conflict Earth is rarely the setting. Instead we spend our time on a ship speeding faster than light, sometimes solving philosophical quandaries, but often enough defeating foes. The future is bigger, faster, stronger — and in space.
Astronomer Nikolai Kardashev led the USSR’s first SETI initiatives in the early 1960s, and he believed that the galaxy might be home to civilizations billions of years more advanced than ours. Imagining these civilizations was part of the project of searching for them. So in 1964, Kardashev came up with a system for classifying a civilization’s level of technological advancement.
The Kardashev scale, as it’s called, is pretty simple: a Type I civilization makes use of all the energy available on or from its planet. A Type II civilization uses all the energy from its star. A Type III civilization harnesses the energy of its entire galaxy.
What’s less simple is how a civilization gets to any of those milestones. These leaps, in case it’s not clear, are massive. On Earth we’re currently grappling with how dangerous it is to try to use all the energy sources on our planet, especially those that burn. (So we’re not even a Type I civilization, more like a Type Three-quarters.) A careful journey toward Type I would involve taking advantage of all the sunlight falling on a planet from its star, but that’s just one billionth or so of a star’s total energy output. A Type II civilization would be harnessing all of it.
It’s not just that a Type II civilization would have to be massive enough to make use of all that energy, they’d also have to figure out how to capture it. The most common imagining for this is called a Dyson sphere, a massive shell or swarm of satellites surrounding the star to capture and convert all its energy. If you wanted enough material to build such a thing, you’d essentially have to disassemble a planet, and not just a small one — more like Jupiter. And then a Type III civilization would be doing that, too, but for all the stars in its galaxy (and maybe doing some fancy stuff to suck energy off the black hole at the galaxy’s core).
On the one hand, these imaginings are about as close to culturally agnostic as we can get: they require no alien personalities, no sociology, just the consumption of progressively more power, to be put to use however the aliens might like. But the Kardashev scale still rests on assumptions that are baked into so many of our visions of advanced aliens (and Earth’s own future as well). This view conflates advancement not only with technology but with growth, with always needing more p…