The December 2004 issue of Discover Magazine has an intriguing article: â€How to Survive the End of the Universe (In 7 Steps)â€. Although the 7 Steps to Leaving the Cosmos were amazing, it was this paragraph that kept me ruminating after I finished reading the article:
A Type I civilization is planetary: it is able to exploit all the energy falling on its planet from the sun (1016 watts). This civilization could derive limitless hydrogen from its oceans, perhaps harness the power of volcanoes, and maybe even control the weather. A Type II civilization could control the energy output of the sun itself: (1028 watts), or 10 billion times the power of a Type I civilization. Deriving energy from solar flares and antimatter, Type IIs would be effectively immune from ice ages, meteors, even supernovas. A Type III civilization would be 10 billion times more powerful still, capable of controlling and consuming the energy of an entire galaxy (1036 watts). Type IIIs would derive energy by extracting it from billions of stars and black holes. A Type III civilization would be able to manipulate the Plank energy (1019 billion electron volts), the energy at which space-time becomes foamy and unstable, frothing with tiny wormholes and bubble-sized universes. The aliens in Independence Day would qualify as a Type III civilization.
By contrast, ours would qualify as a Type 0 civilization, deriving its energy from dead plants—oil and coal.
What would it take for us to evolve from 0 to III? The article proposes this: growing at 1 or 2 percent per year, we could become Type I in a hundred years, Type II in a few thousand years, and Type III in a hundred thousand to a million years.
The Speculists disagree on at least two counts. Stephen Gordon points out that the aliens Independence Day were interested in strip-mining the Earth for its resources – a Type I interest. Had they even been a type II civilization they might have started building a Dyson Sphere around our Sun – a disconcerting thought.
And Phil suggests that the time frame posed for us to become a Type II civilization—an incremental arithmetic progression—doesn’t take into account the exponential changes we’re experiencing as we approach the Singularity.
Even Future Hi, who understands the Singularity, seems to have missed class on the day they taught exponents:
Once we’ve passed the singularity point (Type I), then the rapid rise in intelligence combined with advanced molecular nanotechnology, would be all that is necessary to engage in Stellar lifting or Dyson sphere construction.
.. “the time frame from a type 1 to a type II is small enough that from a cosmic perspective it’s a blink in the eye. The time to go from a type II to a type III isn’t much longer, perhaps 500,000 years, assuming light speed remains a barrier.
As we rapidly enter this ever-decreasing bottleneck, we should soon find out if we’re going to make it to Type I. Utopia or Oblivion, there is no third way. If we can figure out how to survive the coming technological singularity, then all the problems that have plagued our planet up to this point will have been solved. Idealistic dogma, hatred, greed, poverty, war, selfishness will have all been solved, otherwise how would we make it? Once we passed this level I bottleneck, then it will be relatively smooth sailing from there… onward to Type II and III, or at least that’s the assumption.”
Which begs the issue—can the Singularity come at all if we’re still mired in our Type I issues? Might we abort it or turn it into a catastrophe?
We can’t depend on exponential advances in technology to solve our problems. Do we need to approach a spiritual Singularity before the technological one can arrive? Or is it a holistic event, for which it is impossible to separate the physical, technological and spiritual dimensions?