Kardashev scale: information, energy and civilization

This illustration of a future Dyson Swarm in #space connects many of our past photos to Carl Sagan. 🙂 Suppose we could do one of the endless “I’m just Sagan” meme photos here, but we are trying to be original. 🙂  In our last photo blog post, we talked about information theorist Claude Shannon and the links between data science (or information) and energy gradients (or entropy or thermodynamics). In 1964 Soviet (Russian) astronomer Nikolai Kardashev proposed the Kardashev scale. A Type I civilization could harness terrestrial power equivalent to 1960s Earth, Type II civilization an entire star, and a Type III civilization the energy output of an entire galaxy. Kardashev was expanding on earlier work by Leslie White who attempted to use a similar system to classify ancient human civilizations (thus connecting this photo with our very first photo on the Singularity and math models of ancient human societies).

Carl Sagan modified this scale to interpolate between the different values and created a decimal system. In his scale, 1970s Earth was defined as a 0.700 (not quite capable of harnessing all of the energy radiating towards the planet.) 2011 Earth might be a 0.724 (so some progress). The Dyson swarm in our photo shows how a futuristic society might be able to harness much of the energy of an entire star through this swarm of energy-collecting satellites orbiting it, thus coming closer to a 2.0 civilization on the Kardashev/Sagan scale.

But Sagan added another important dimension to this system: information processing. 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 it is more likely that we create as much information in 7 days today as we did in a single back in 2003, a much less impressive figure. The original source might be an IDC report.) Nevertheless, it is clear our information processing ability is growing orders of magnitude, clearly enough for an additional letter or two on the Sagan civilization scale, just in the last few years.

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 is easier to measure than progress in energy technology, however. (Also fascinating is how these ideas relate to the Singularity and math models on civilization collapse proposed by Tainter.)

Photo credit: WikiMedia/Vedexent/CC-BY-2.5. A version of this article first ran as a photo post on our Instagram feed.

Related posts:

Spanish conquistadors, armies, aliens, history, war, and data science? Type 3 civilization (Hoag object ring galaxy photo) Steam Locomotives, Entropy, Information and Data Science Mandelbrot set: cellular automatons & fractal islands