Continuing our earlier Carl Sagan civilization post, today’s photo is Hoag’s object, a non-typical ring galaxy. A type III civilization would, be definition, be able to harness the entire energy of a reference galaxy.
We left off earlier on the important wrinkle that Sagan added to the Kardashev scale on civilization advancement (and, by extension, the Leslie White scale on historical civilizations). Both of these scales focus on technology (with Kardashev focused on technology to harness energy), but Sagan also added information processing (data science!) to the scale. He defined a scale from A-Z to represent the amount of information available to a civilization, each letter representing a 10-fold increase, with A representing 10^6 and Z representing access to 10^31 bits of information. Sagan believed no civilization could yet have achieved a Z status, as not enough time had passed in the history of the universe to allow this much exchange of information.
According to Google chairperson Eric Schmidt, we now create as much information every two days as in all of human history through 2003. His quote is controversial. It’s been suggested we might only create as much information every 7 days as we did in a single year back in 2003, a much less impressive figure. Nevertheless, our information processing ability is growing by orders of magnitude, clearly enough for us to have moved up a letter or two on the Sagan civilization scale. The link between information and entropy (or energy gradients) wasn’t as well understood back in the 1970s when Sagan made his proposals, although Claude Shannon’s theories already existed.
Thermodynamics makes clear that information processing requires energy gradients, so it makes perfect sense that the two dimensions are correlated: they are almost measuring the same thing. Progress in information (data science!) is easier to measure than progress in energy or other technologies, however. More on this in future posts here an on our blog.
A version of this article originally appeared as a photo post on our Instagram feed.