How powerful could a civilization get?

Daniel and Jorge discuss the Kardashev Scale, Kardashians, Cryptocurrencies and crpytozoology.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Daniel, how's our podcast doing these days? Are you number
one in any territories right now? Unfortunately we are only
number three in natural science in the US, behind some
like paranormal and bigfoot podcasts. Maybe we should do those
topics then we can be number one. Daniel and Jorge
explained Bigfoot. How are those considered natural science? Doesn't seem
very natural to me. I don't know, but the folks

(00:30):
in the UK actually have us as number one in
natural science, ahead of the big Foot podcast. So shout
out to the UK science listeners. Maybe they don't have
sasquatch in the UK, or maybe they call it something
different like lockness or be for a guy. I don't know,
but it makes me hopeful that will be number one
in natural science in other places. Are you thinking globally

(00:52):
or are you thinking like solar system? Why? Yeah, let's
go into planetary I want to become the top podcast
of Martian colonists. Why stop there? Why not go all
the way to Jupiter or Uranus? I mean Uranus? Sure?
I want to also be number one podcast among aliens
eavesdropping on human technology? Do you think we have alien fans?

(01:14):
I just wonder if that's going to change who buys
ads for the show? What kind of products do you
think they would be trying to sell to humans? I
don't know, but thanks to cryptocurrency and Venmo, they can
actually send their funds interplanetary lee to us on Earth.
You think they have Venmo and other galaxies or other planets? Also,
how do they do the exchange tree? Don't you need

(01:34):
like a central bank or something. We'll figure that out
when we build our Daniel and Jorge Galactic Empire, which
will include cryptocurrency. I don't know, Man, sounds kind of risky. Well,
if we're not going to do crypto zoology, we gotta
do crypto something, crypto economics, exo crypto economics, exo crypto
podcast comics. I'll be the first person with a PhD
in that field. Hi am Jorhammer, cartoonists and the creator

(02:12):
of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle of
physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I own
zero cryptocurrency. Oh how do you know? I mean, isn't
it all virtual? Couldn't you virtually own it too? I
mean I checked my pockets and I didn't find any.
So that's what I mean you wouldn't find it in
your pockets, I mean my digital pockets. Man. No, I'm

(02:34):
not invested in cryptocurrency, have not bought any cryptocurrency. I
don't think that anything I own owns any cryptocurrency. To
the best of my knowledge, as my lawyer's advised me
to say, I am not in the crypto universe. It
might be hard to tell the these days. I wonder
like if some mutual fund you buy, buy some other
fund that buys another fund that maybe has a little
bit of crypto in it. We probably all have a
little bit of crypto in us. Humans are pretty cryptic,

(02:56):
I guess. But welcome their podcast. Daniel and Jorge explained,
do you know a production of our heart Radio in
which we attempt to do our best to decrypt the
universe and explain all of its mysteries to you. We
want to unscramble the craziness that is our cosmos and
explain to you how it can be understood in terms
of a set of basic physical laws. It seems like

(03:19):
so far everything out there can be made sense of.
It's possible to assemble simple mathematical stories that describe how
balls bounce against each other. How galaxies form, and maybe
even what's inside black holes or the fundamental underpinnings of
alien economics. It's right because it is a pretty rich
universe full of amazing and incredible treasures that you can

(03:42):
invest in in order to grow your mind, I guess,
And so that's what we do here. We like to
talk about it so we can have a pretty good
exchange with all of you about it. All we ask
for is your time and a slice of your brain
to sit with us and enjoy the crazy mysteries of
the universe as we try to unravel them. While we
are here on this tiny rock, we are able to
cast our minds across the cosmos and wonder what's going

(04:05):
on out there in other solar systems. Are there aliens
looking up at their night skies wondering what we are
thinking about and whether we would be interested in buying
their n f T s. Yeah, because it's a pretty
big universe, and as they said in the movie Contact,
it would be kind of a shame if we were
the only living Sentien beings in it. It would be
a pretty amazing thing to be the only ones in

(04:26):
this vast universe that we have some kind of intelligence
or podcasts. It would be pretty amazing to be alone,
and it would be pretty amazing to not be alone. Either.
Answer to this famous question is mind blowing. Does it
depend you think on whether you're an extrovert species or
an introvert species. I think it's nice to know that
they're out there. If you're an introvert species, you might

(04:46):
not want to give them a call, but you still
want to know that they exist. You know, I think
everybody is probably curious about the universe, but there's an
insumption there. Right we're extrapolating our experience to the experience
of aliens. We're hoping that the is other intelligence out
there in the universe because we know that we are
capable of joy and love and beauty, and we hope
that aliens out there are also having a good time.

(05:09):
We hope that they aren't floating in their slime pits
and just totally suffering. Would that makes you, I guess,
more of an ex overt because you like exceplanetary life.
I am more of an ex overt than an extrovert,
that's true. I'm more interested in talking to aliens than
humans sometimes and learning from them. I guess because if
there are aliens out there, there's a lot that we
can learn from them, right, there's a lot that we

(05:29):
can learn about how to travel through stars, or even
just how to make it past our point intilisation to
greater things, or just how to be alive in this universe.
When you travel, even just here on Earth and experience
different human cultures, you learn so much about the basic
questions they ask about life, the approach they take. It
makes you realize how much of your life and the

(05:50):
way you think is kind of arbitrary and cultural. It
opens your minds, it shows you the box that you
have been thinking in, and so talking to aliens would
be the ultimate version of that. Experience could help us
understand our context in ways we can't even imagine today,
and of course, perhaps help us crack some of the
long standing physics problems we're being in our heads against.

(06:12):
I feel like maybe we could do that on our own, Daniel,
what do humans need help? Can we figure it all
out eventually on our own? It's certainly possible that we
could figure it all out eventually, But we might not
be the smartest species out there, right, I think humans
are pretty clever, But it's possible we have a limitation
to our fundamental neural capacity that makes it impossible for
us to grasp the mathematics that underlie the universe. Is

(06:33):
also the possibility of false starts. You know, human science
is fairly diverse, but it also has collapsed along a
few pathways, choices we made early on, being influenced by
geniuses who came along. It's just interesting to think about
other paths and intelligent species might have taken that might
be more or less fruitful in terms of understanding the universe.
I wonder how we would react if one of your

(06:55):
students said that to you, like, Hey, Dr Whiteson, I
don't think I'm the smartest person in the class. I
just don't have the neural processes for it. Can I
copy that person next to me for our test? You
would have to say yes, Daniel. I think the ultimate
exam for an intelligent species is working together to figure
out the mystery of the universe. So we're all getting
graded on a group project. That's how I see it. Well,

(07:16):
it is an interesting topic to think about whether aliens
exist out there, And just to be clear, Daniel, nobody
has seen or talked to any aliens as far as
physicists know. Right, as far as this physicists, no, we
have no confirmed communications with aliens. Absolutely, that's a different
podcast in the natural sciences. Maybe the Luckness Monster is
actually an alien come to Earth to talk to its

(07:36):
long lost brother Bigfoot. I think you just found our
new gold mine here, fun fan fiction about human fiction cryptozoology.
But instead of thinking about what other weird kinds of
life might exist in the lakes of Scotland or the
deep forests of Alaska, we like to think about what

(07:57):
kind of life might exists on other planets and whether
it would be possible to communicate with them. If we're
going to hear messages from distant civilizations on the other
side of the galaxy, will of course need to receive
those messages. They'll need to be capable of sending us
those messages, so we have to think a little bit
about what their civilizations might be capable of. Yeah, and

(08:18):
all those this might seem like baseless extrapolation or speculation,
it is something that physicists have been engaging for a while,
have polished papers on these ideas about aliens and what
aliens could look like, and even Carl saying I was
sort of famous for chiming in a lot about aliens.
You say baseless extrapolation like it's a bad thing. I
don't get it usually when maybe in physics the bar

(08:40):
is lower. Is that what you're saying? Well, you know,
in physics were often tackling problems that are basically impossible.
We don't know how to get started, and so what
we usually do is we begin with the simplest, dumbest thing,
which often involves baseless extrapolation, Like we don't know how
to tackle this, Let's just assume a spherical cow and
start from there. And we're going to talk about alien civilizations.

(09:02):
The only example we have is our own, and so
we have to begin at least by making some assumptions
about alien civilizations and their similarity to civilization on Earth,
knowing all the time, keeping in the back of our
heads that we are making these assumptions and that maybe
one day we'll figure out how to relax them or
break them or get out of that box. And then

(09:22):
I guess the point would be that once we meet aliens,
you can be like, Hi, I told you so, or WHOA,
I was totally wrong? Is that the whole point of it? Yeah,
if you think this through and you come to some conclusions,
and then you meet aliens and discover they're totally different
from what you expected. It helps you think through what
you might have misunderstood, which aspect of your assumptions, which
step in your line of thinking might have gone wrong.

(09:44):
How much of your time did you waste? Well, it's
that or just don't think about it. You know that's right.
It's do physics or just don't think about it. Those
are the two only two options. Do physics or do nothing? Right,
I mean, is there anything else on the menu that's right? Well,
what else would there be in life to do? No?

(10:05):
But when you are tackling really big, hard questions about
the nature of the universe and alien civilizations, you don't
often have first principles to start from, so you just
sort of explore the space using some assumptions to get
yourself oriented. Yeah, so this is something physicists have been
thinking about, and in fact, there's an interesting framework to
think about it. And the question here is what would
an alien civilization look like? Can we extrapolate from human civilization?

(10:31):
So to be on the podcast, we'll be tackling how
powerful can a civilization get? Now? Daniel is as powerful
as in like awesome, or powerful as in like will
come and kill us? Powerful as in what is there
in number one podcast? In the natural sciences in certain

(10:53):
countries clearly a leading indicator of cultural value and progress, right,
and handsomeness as well. Don't forget there's a clear correlation
if you look at a certain data set. There's lots
of ways to think about the power of a civilization.
But in a very practical sense, if we are going
to discover an alien civilization without going there, they need
to be pretty powerful because we have to receive their signals,

(11:16):
right if they are far far away around another star
for us to hear their messages, their messages have to
arrive on Earth, which means they need a certain power
in their broadcast. And so we can think about, like, fundamentally,
what is the energy available to those civilizations? Would they
even have enough energy to beam us a message from
the other side of the galaxy? You mean sort of

(11:37):
like what's their footprint, Like what's their energy footprint? I
physicist tends to think about things as like simple black boxes, right,
like energy in, energy out. But if physicist things about nutrition,
for example, it's just like calories in calories burned, right,
physicists model humans as like simple bomb calorimeters, and so
here we're modeling like the entire complexity of an alien
civilization in terms of like how much energy to have

(12:00):
access to and how much energy can they afford to
put it to their signal? I see. So today we're
serve asking like how much energy and alien civilization might
be able to consume I guess so spend or hardness
or channel into one signal exactly. It's a way of
thinking through our possible future for our civilization. What does
that hold? What technology might we develop in the future

(12:21):
that gives us access to stars or many stars or
many universes. And so physicists have come up with or
at least some physicists have come up with a scale
to measure how much energy and alien civilization might be
able to tap into around them in where they live.
It's called the kar dash Off scale. It's not related
to the Kardashian Yeah. The scale is how many Kardashians

(12:44):
do you have on your social media? And so we've
currently maxed that out. We're leading the galaxy. Yeah, you know,
I think one is maybe too many on that scale.
But it's a kardas chef kardash If how do you
pronounce it? I've heard it pronounced kardas chef. And it's
a popular trope inside it's fiction also because it's a
fun way of thinking about very powerful alien civilizations, and

(13:06):
so it crops up everywhere. And a bunch of listeners
wrote in and asked us to talk about the Cardassip scale.
And are you sure they weren't asking us to talk
to a Kardashian on the podcast because that would probably
put put us in the number one spot. I reached
out to all of them. None of them have responded,
all right, So then let's talk about this Cardaship scale
here on today's episode. And so, as usual, we were

(13:26):
wondering how many people out there had heard of this
scale and how it measures an alien civilizations possible energy use.
So thank you very much to everybody out there who
participates in these questions and answers. It's really fun for
us to hear what people are thinking. If you'd like
to participate for future episodes of the podcast, please don't
be shy right to us two questions at Daniel and

(13:47):
Jorge dot com. So think about it for a second,
what do you think a Cardiship scale is. Here's what
people have to say. I'm pretty sure I've heard of
the Cardassi of scale, but I am blanking on what
it is. Something in the back of my mind is
saying it's something about the size of stars or something
like that. I have no idea. I don't know, no
have any idea Kardashi of scale. No, I don't know

(14:12):
what the kardashi of scale is. But if I had
to take a kiss, I would say it is some
sort of high energy scale at which quantum effects become important,
like in a black hole or something because of the
or the very high energy density and also quantum property
has become important. All right, maybe we need a we

(14:35):
have no idea scale here, because everyone seemed to max
it out on the idol no scale. There really was
no recognition. I'm sort of amazed. It's given the number
of listeners who asked us to talk about this. The
listeners a happy example here had never heard of it. Well,
that's what we're here for, to talk about the Kardashians
and obscue or alien scales that measure their energy. I

(14:56):
wonder what the alien Kardashians are like, Oh my gosh,
I kind of hope they don't have Kardashians. Maybe the
Kardashian scale is how much your civilization has jumped the shark. Well,
we have jumped the shark and the Bigfoot and the
Lockness monsters. So I think we're in big trouble. We're
due for cancelation any moment, the galactic Netflix is going

(15:18):
to pull our budget. Huh right, yeah, no, I want
to see what happens in season five thousand of Humanity.
Which season are we on? Now? I haven't been binging Humans.
I'm not cut up. Everyone's talking about it. Everyone's like, oh,
you gotta watch this, you gotta see these kids. But
who has the time? You know? Spoiler alert, a lot
of people die. Sounds like a depressing show. Well, let's

(15:40):
jump into Daniel. What is the Cardaship scale? So the
Cardassia scale was suggested by a physicist Cardassian, of course,
that tries to imagine how civilizations will grow, specifically in
their energy use, in order to understand how much energy
they might have available to pump into signals to beam
to Earth so that we can discus robbed them. The

(16:00):
original Cardaship scale has a few stages. But in the
meantime people have built on this and expanded on it
and taken in all sorts of new directions. So sort
of fun framework for understanding how a civilization might grow
to tap into the natural energy available to us in
the universe. I see. Is it more like a scale
that measures how much energy a civilization uses or just

(16:21):
kind of keeps tab of where they would get this energy.
It's both. It's an accounting of how much energy is
available to a civilization, but of course there aren't infinite
arbitrary energy sources in the universe, and so it imagines
how they might find those sources of energy. And it's
broken into three categories. One where you think about all
the energy available on a planet, another way you think

(16:43):
about all the energy available in the solar system, and
then a third where you think about all of the
energy available in the galaxy. I see, So like a
stage one civilization is one that only has the energy
of a planet available to them, or alternatively, you assume
that they have access to all the energy that a
planet they can have. Yes, precisely, All right, well, let's
get into each of these stages and see where humans

(17:05):
are and where aliens might be at But first let's
take a quick break. All right, welcome back to our
podcast Baseless Speculation with Daniel and Jorge about Aliens The

(17:27):
first steps in understanding the universe with Daniel and Jorge.
I thought the first step was always observation. Daniel insights, well,
we've been trying to observe aliens, but we have zero data,
and so that's one thing we haven't tried to understand.
I see, step one is observed. Step two a is

(17:47):
if you don't observe anything, start making stuff up. Is
that what you're saying? Yeah, well, also if you don't
observe anything, try to understand why you didn't see something.
One thing that motivated Cardasi's paper was the famous Fermi paradox,
the idea that the galaxy is quite old, certainly old
enough for alien civilizations to have developed and beamed US signals,
and yet we haven't heard from any of them. So
Cardassian was motivated to think about, like, well, how would

(18:09):
they send us messages, would they actually have enough energy,
and how would they do it? So it's a way
of thinking about also why we haven't heard from aliens.
Nice see, it's kind of like we they haven't come visited.
Why would that be? And we can't see them why
would that be? And if you think about different scenarios,
maybe you can come up with a way that you
could see them exactly. And it might make the problem

(18:29):
harder because maybe you discover, oh, it's quite trivial for
aliens to have enough energy to beamas messages, and or
maybe you discover that in order for aliens to send
us messages from across the galaxy, they would have to
harness all the power of the entire galaxy. And that
might explain why we can't see Kardashians from other worlds,
which is a bad thing. No value judgements here, man,

(18:50):
this is just science. Well apparently this idea of how
much energy and alien species might be consuming or have
avail to them is all measured on something called the
Kardashi of scale, which, as you said, has three stages.
So let's step through these stages. What's stage number one?
And is that something we're at or are we pass
stage one? Where are we in this stage system? So?

(19:10):
Stage number one is a civilization that uses all of
the energy available on its planet, meaning all of the
solar energy for example, that hits the surface of the Earth.
We are not even at stage one. I mean we
are capturing some fraction of the solar energy, for example,
and digging up fossil fuels that have effectively stored solar
energy from the past. But on the Earth, what's available

(19:34):
to us is something like ten to the seventeen watts.
Watts is a unit of power, so it's energy per second.
Is that the kind of watt? It's like, if you
had a solar panel the size of the Earth, that's
how much energy we would be getting from the sun.
If yes, if you can cover the entire Earth with
solar panels, so you built like a solar panel that
completely made the Earth in shadow, that's how much energy

(19:56):
you could theoretically capture, or that's how much energy is
falling onto those solar pan Solar panels, of course not efficient,
but that's sort of like how much energy you have
access to m M And that's interesting how you said that. Basically,
like fossil fuels, even what we have here, maybe even
wind energy, it all comes from the Sun eventually, right,
All that energy originally does come from the sun. Yeah,

(20:18):
wind also comes from the sun because it involves heating
of pockets of air by the Sun, so all of
that originally does come from the Sun. There are, of course,
other sources of energy we could tap into on Earth
that are not directly from our Sun. Like when you
do fission, you're breaking apart uranium. That uranium was formed
in some other process, maybe the supernova or collisions of
neutron stars, well before our solar system was even birth.

(20:42):
So you're tapping into energy sources that have been stored
there for a long time. But you're saying all energy
solar energy. So when I'm at the gas station actually
pouring solar energy into my car, yeah, well, gas is
sort of like a solar battery. The idea of the
Cardaschef scale is not to argue that the maximum energy
you could get on Earth is just to cover it

(21:03):
with solar panels. It's just a way to sort of
set a level to fix the standard. There's actually more
energy available than that. If you could like take the
components of the Earth and you fission and fusion, you
could release even more energy than the sort of stage
one cardassief standard. But it's just sort of like how
to define a threshold, all right, So then is the
threshold defined by the solar energy we get from the Sun,

(21:24):
or like all the energy in all of the uranium
and heavy atoms, and maybe even the water, because if
you can figure out fusion, you could also fuse water
to make energy. Is that how you define how much
energy is available on planet Earth? No, it's just the
amount of solar energy that falls on planet Earth defines
the Cardassie of scale, so you can im principle exceed
it without leaving your planet. Right. For example, you could

(21:46):
achieve this by doing matter antimatter annihilation, right, Like two
kilograms of matter antimatter annihilation every second would achieve kardashef
Stage one energy levels even without doing any solar power.
But I wonder if maybe in his scale he was
more thinking about like long term sustainable energy sources, right, Like,

(22:07):
maybe we can figure out fission and fusion, but eventually
we're going to run out of these fuel elements in
on a single planet. But the Sun is going to
be burning for billions of years. That's true, although a
lot of these sources would last a really long time.
If for example, we could do fusion, you know, we'd
need like three ms of hydrogen fused per second to
reach Kardashiev stage one. That sounds like a lot, but

(22:30):
there's a lot of hydrogen out there on the planet.
You know, like a cubic kilometer of water has like
a hundred billion kilograms of hydrogen. So a cubic kilometer
of water is like hundreds of years of energy at
the kardashi of stage one. And there's a lot of
cubic kilometers of water out there, So even if you
were ignoring solar power, you could achieve this level and

(22:51):
do it for a long long time even without solar power.
I feel like you're trying to convince me that this
Cardashians scale is not really valid, are so I guess
what are you saying like or what is the scale
supposed to be measuring? Then the scale is just to
set a standard to say what could you achieve using
the energy of a planet. Obviously, how much energy you
could actually extract from a planet over billions of years
depends on what's in that planet, for example, how big

(23:13):
is that planet, how much mass is there. But this
is just like to set a standard in the end.
Of course it's arbitrary, but it's also a useful measure.
It's an approximate value just to sort of guide your thinking.
And you know, one thing to realize is that we
are far from that threshold here on Earth. If the
standard is two times ten of the seventeen watts, we're
about a factor of ten thousand below that. Human civilization

(23:34):
uses like ten to the thirteen watts, so we're well
below a stage one civilization. Okay, So these stages are
defined by wattage. So a stage one civilization is one
that uses approximately ten to the seventeen watts of energy.
Is that kind of how the scale works. It's like,
if you're a sialization and you're using about ten to
the seventeen wats of energy, then we'll categorize you as

(23:55):
a stage one and usually that made that will probably
mean you're an a range of like still stuck in
your planet exactly, that's what you're capable of, even if
you're stuck on your planet, right, your cable is something
of that order. Maybe you figured out matter and to
matter annihilation, maybe you figured out fusion. Maybe you've covered
your planet and solar panels. Maybe you've build space based

(24:16):
solar panels that then beam the energy down to Earth.
But if you're a very advancedabilization, but you're still on
your planet. That's sort of the order of magnitude of
energy that you have available to you. All right, So
then where are we You said we're below that maximum usage. Yeah,
we're about a factor of ten thousand below officially being
stage one crowned by the Galactic Empire as a baby civilization,

(24:38):
age one, Carl Stagan estimated they were like a type
zero point seven civilization on the carda chef scale, you like,
try to make it continuous instead of just having like
one to three. And the estimates that were around zero
point seven. And it's kind of like a logarithmic scale, right,
like difference between point seven and point it is. It's
partly like an order of magnitude or something. Yeah, he

(25:00):
was using a logarithmic extrapolation. And the reason is that
we tend to increase the consumption of energy bio civilization
fairly exponentially. Like in the last decade, energy use has
gone up by two point three percent every year. Every year,
that's a larger increase because it's two of a bigger number,
And so people estimate that if we increase our energy

(25:20):
use every year by three percent, then in a hundred
and fifty or two hundred years, we would be at
type one civilization. I wonder if this scale also depends
on how many people there are, or how many individuals
of a certain species there are. Like you know, if
one person was using ten to the seventeen, watch must
be a super duper advanced civilization, right with you know,

(25:42):
one person being a control all this energy. But as
you know, there's like a trillion or trillion trillion people
then and each person is using a little bit of energy,
then maybe it's not that impressive a thing. Maybe alien
Kardashians are dominating the alien energy market. It's a good
question how they use is their energy? And I think
for a Kardashiv, the goal was to think about what

(26:03):
fraction of their energy they might devote to sending a
signal to outer space. If they have access to tend
to the seventeen watts of energy, maybe they would devote
one percent of it to pumping messages to the stars
or point oh one percent of it. But it just
sort of gives you a scale for what they have
access to. M all right, let's talk about what they
might use all this energy for. But I guess let's

(26:25):
step through the the rest of these stages. So if
we're like almost up stage one civilization, what would be
a stage to a civilization. Stage two would be too
unshackle yourself from your planet and then take advantage of
all the energy put out by your star. Now here
we are on Earth. Even if we gobbled up all
of the photons that come to the Earth from the Sun,
that's a tiny fraction of the Sun's energy. The Sun

(26:47):
is also shooting out photons that don't hit the Earth,
of course, and all sorts of directions, and so the
idea is capture all of the energy of your star,
not just the fraction that falls on your planet. So
stage two is like we've left the Earth and we're
living in space. Basically, you don't even have to leave
the Earth, and you don't have to live in space necessarily,
but you have to have somehow have the technology to

(27:09):
harness the energy of that star, which probably means building
some mega structure, like a bunch of solar panels that
envelope your star to gather all of that energy. Right,
But that would be a pretty big construction project. I mean,
you would need people living out there just to build
something so big or at least have the ability to like,
you know, move around space pretty easily, which is a

(27:31):
lot more than what we can do now. We definitely
are nowhere close to doing that, and you probably would
need people out there, but you also might be able
to automate a lot of it. You could have robots,
for example, that build more robots and then build this
massive structure. It's hard to get your mind around the
sort of the size of this thing. This would be
the biggest thing anybody ever built. If you make it
really close to the Sun, it can be smaller, but

(27:51):
then it's subject to a lot of solar radiation. If
you make it further away from the Sun, then it's
got to be like ridiculously massive. Like for example, if
you build this thing at one a U, so you
have like now a sphere whose radius is the radius
of the Earth's orbit, then the inside of this thing
is going to be five hundred and fifty million times

(28:13):
the surface area of the Earth. So imagine a construction
project that rebuilds the service that area of the Earth
five hundred and fifty million times. That's definitely not going
to be on budget or on schedule, right, Although the
positive thing is that it will always be sunny inside
of that sphere, right, just like here in southern California, yeah,

(28:33):
or Philadelphia. But I mean this is sort of like
one way that you could harness the power of the Sun,
which is to build a giant solar panel that basically
like envelops the Sun so you can capture all of
its energy. And what does that take us up to
in terms of watta? So Stage one, remember was ten
to the seventeen watts. Stage two using all the energy

(28:54):
available from the Sun is like four times ten to
the twenty six watts. So that's like a billion times
or two billion times more energy than Stage one. Really
only a billion times to go from the Earth to
the Sun. Only a billion times more energy. Wow, you
don't seem impressed. Well, as in the Earth super tiny
compared to the Sun. The Earth is certainly super tiny

(29:16):
compared to the Sun. But the sort of cross sectional
area of the Earth, which is the fraction of the
Sun's energy that it captures, is approximately one billion of
the surface area of a sphere whose radius is the
orbit of the Earth. That's why if you built the
Dicen sphere, it had to be like many hundreds of
millions of times the surface area of the Earth to

(29:37):
cover the inside of that sphere. So a fact of
a billion is about right. But again, this is just
solar energy. Like, we could probably maybe get to that
level of wattage if we figure a fusion or fission
more efficiently right here on Earth. It's conceptionally possible to
achieve a stage to civilization to get that same level
of energy without building the dicensphere, developing some other way

(29:59):
to extract energy from within the Earth, you know, antimatter
or fusion or something else. Crazy. Again, this is just
sort of like a scale. The Sun is the cheapest,
most abundant, easiest to identify source of energy in the
solar system, So what could you do if you could
capture all of the energy that it produces? Right? All right, Well,
let's step through quickly. What are some of these other stages?

(30:22):
If you use all the energy in the Sun, where
do you go from there? All the energy in the galaxy? Yes,
exactly where else could you go except from our star
to all the other stars? So Kardashian's stage three says,
use all the energy in the galaxy, which basically is
like all the energy in each individual star, and that
takes you up another eleven orders of magnitude. Another factor

(30:45):
of a hundred billion to four times tend to the
thirty seven watts. Member Stage one, which we're not even
at is tend to the seventeen watts. So now we're
talking about twenty orders of magnitude more energy than the
Stage one. Like somehow, if you have solar panels around
every star in the galaxy, then you could harness all

(31:07):
of the light that is coming out of a particular galaxy.
Right in principle, if you didn't think building a dicen
sphere was a big enough construction project, you could build
one around every single star in the galaxy. I can't
even say it without laughing at such a ridiculous idea.
But in principle, if you develop the machines to build
more machines to complete your dicensphere project, they could just

(31:29):
go off to the rest of the galaxy and keep working.
Maybe your robots are like a virus. Once they start
building dicen spheres, they just don't stop. That sounds like
a negative thing to snuff out the whole galaxy basically, right, Yeah,
it depends on what you do with that, you know,
if the robots developed these dicen spears and then channel

(31:49):
the energy to you for you to use for good
for building your civilization and feeding your people, etcetera. Awesome.
If they just harness the energy the galaxy and snuff
it out, then yeah, the galaxy is going to go dark, right,
All the stars would be burning inside these dice in spheres.
There'll be no more light being released for like astronomy
and star gazing and romantic dinners. Well, you can imagine

(32:09):
maybe an alien civilization doing this, and we haven't meagined
then apparently, and we I think we've talked about this
also in our podcast about this possibility, but maybe let's
talk a little bit about why this is kind of
relevant right to our question of aliens and do they
exist and could we see them out there? Because the
ideas and not just that there's an alien realization using
all this energy, but maybe they're using it in a

(32:31):
way that would allow us to communicate with them or
at least see them, right exactly, having aliens out there
in the universe is not enough for us to discover them.
We need to get signals from them and at least
up till now we've relied on messages from electromagnetic radiation.
That's what we're looking for. You know, the search for
extraterrestrial intelligence is scanning the sky for messages essentially in

(32:55):
the radio waves, and to produce those radio waves takes energy.
When you're a radio station is pumping out music that
you like over the airwaves, they're doing so by running
an antenna, by sending electricity up and down that antenna,
by wiggling those electrons so that they radiate the photons
that you pick up. You know how some radio stations
are very powerful and other radio stations you can't really

(33:15):
pick up in some areas. That's because some have more
powerful broadcast antennas because they spend more money to build
more antennas and use more energy. So in order to
be heard a further distance, you need more energy. Well,
I guess maybe I don't understand the scenario that you're
imagining here. Are you imagining like there's an alien civilization
using all this energy, maybe all the energy in a

(33:36):
galaxy and somehow we can pick up on that, or
is this scenario more specific where you're imagining like, all right,
if there are aliens broadcasting out like hey we're here, signal.
How much energy would they have available to put into
that so that we could hope to see it? I
think Cardiship is imagining the second one, that if aliens

(33:56):
are intentionally sending out messages in the cosmos, how powerful
could they make those messages? And what kind of civilizations
could support ridiculously powerful messages that we could even hear
from across the galaxy or from other galaxies. I mean,
a civilization that harnessed the entire energy of their galaxy
could do incredible things, probably including sending very powerful messages

(34:20):
across the millions of light years between galaxies. But also,
you know, like galactic engineering projects, and you have that
much energy available, you can almost do anything, right. I
guess that's a whole separate question is like, would they
use some of that energy to send out a signal
to other people saying, hey, come check out our awesome engineering. Yeah,
I mean, would we write we're currently using a very

(34:41):
very tiny fraction of our energy budget to even listen
to messages from outer space. We're not even really sending
very many, at least not intentionally. You know, as you
said before, our use of energy makes us visible from
other planets, but not from very far away, because those
messages are not broadcast in like a tight beam that
sort of generally diffused, and so you have to be

(35:02):
pretty close to Earth or have very very sensitive antennas
to even pick up our messages. And I guess you're
also imagining, or Cardachip was imagining the scenario where you're
broadcasting blindly, right, Like, if you're broadcasting blindly in all
possible directions and your hope that somebody listens to it,
how much energy would you need for that? But if
you want a more focused communication, then you wouldn't need that, right,

(35:23):
that's exactly right. If you don't know where people are,
you need to broadcast in every direction, and so the
power of your message falls very quickly. It goes like
one over distance squared, just like the brightness of the
sun falls as you get further and further away from it,
because the sun is not like focused like a laser
beam on your eyeball. And a good thing too, So
if you're broadcasting your message indiscriminately in every direction, then

(35:46):
it has to be super powerful for anybody to pick
it up. And it's a concrete example. The signals that
we sent from a recibo could only be received by
an Arecibo like telescope if it was less than one
light year away. And we know that there aren't any
other solar systems less than a light year away, so
aliens with our level of technology could not pick up

(36:07):
our signals even if they were around the closest star.
M interesting. All right, Well, let's get into what this
could mean for our search for extraterrestrial life and whether
or not there are chartsians in other galaxies. That's a
very important question. But first let's take another quick break.

(36:36):
All right, we're talking about the Cardashian scale, which is
a scale that physicists have invented as a way to
think about how much energy alien civilizations might be consuming
or have available to them to send out, Hey, we're
here a signal which we might be able to pick up,
which I guess is important, right because if we have
a whole project called set to explore or to look
for alien signals, it would be good to know if

(36:58):
we even have a chance of seeing signals from other
alien civilizations, right exactly. And it's a kind of thought
experiment that physicists like to think about. Let's make some
simple assumptions about the trajectory of civilizations and think about
who we're looking for. Are we looking for a fairly
young civilization like our own. Are we more likely to
only be able to spot very advanced civilizations. So let's

(37:19):
try to spend a minute or so thinking about what
they might look like, how they might communicate, and what
technology they might have available to them. Right, And like
you said, like if we were to send a signal
out to another story, we would need a ton of
energy because the nearest star system is more than a
light year way, which means we would need a lot
of energy. So I guess to see an alien civilization

(37:41):
in another galaxy, or to hope to see an Asian
civilization in another galaxy sending out a signal that they're there,
we would need to imagine an alien civilization pretty advanced, right,
with an access to an enormous amount of energy. That's right,
unless we were extraordinarily lucky and we happen to resolve
a single star in their galaxy and see them do

(38:02):
some crazy construction project on it, or they were manipulating
the star itself to pulse with messages that we could resolve.
That would require crazy advanced technology and access to energy
that we can't even imagine. Yeah, some fraction of all
the energy of a galaxy. And so that's where the
Kardaship scale would say. It's like that's another stage in
that scale, which is like, if you can harness all

(38:23):
of the energy in the galaxy, then maybe you might
put some of that energy to putting out a signal
which would make you visible to aliens or to humans
in other galaxies. Right, Yeah, maybe you have a prison
planet where you put all of your Kardashians and you
just want big flash and warning signs like do not
go here, young civilizations. I feel like you just took
it to another level against the Cardashians there. Now you're

(38:45):
talking about jailing them in planets. Remember we want them
on the podcast on Yeah, sorry, I'm talking about a
luxurious island just for alien Kardashians, private planet. Yes, and
you get to hang out with the Lockness Monster and
pick Foot also future guests on our podcast. Yeah, that's right,

(39:09):
stay tuned, keep listening. But this kind of thinking lets
you imagine the kinds of things that aliens might be
able to do if you have access to all the
energy of your solar system or at your galaxy, you
could like move stars around, you could like obliterate planets.
You can build new kinds of stars nobody had ever
seen before. You could have a whole new branch of engineering,

(39:30):
you know, galaxy engineering. Yeah, and so that takes us
to about stage three in the Cardaship scale. Right, that's
where you may be built toller panels around every star
in your galaxy. Is there a stage four? Can you
go bigger than that? Let's keep basically speculating. You want
to extrapolate our extrapolation, Sure, let's do it well. Cardasship
have ended his extrapolation at stage three, imagining only use

(39:54):
of the entire galaxy. But that was the nineteen sixty
and it's been a popular topic for people to think about,
and so there have been extensions to the Kardaship scale.
Stage four says, what if you could use all the
energy in the universe? What is in the universe potentially infinite?
It is potentially infinite, absolutely, And this stage imagines not

(40:15):
just capturing all of the energy from all the stars
in each galaxy, but also somehow tapping into that mysterious
form of energy, dark energy, which is accelerating the expansion
of the universe and has a much bigger slice of
the universe's energy budget than just the paltry matter in stars,

(40:35):
which you might remember accounts for less than five percent
of the energy in the universe. Right, All the matter
in our universe only counts for five percent. Right, And
there's also dark matter and dark energy. Are you saying, like,
even if we harness all the energy coming out of
the stars of a galaxy, and even if you take
all of the energy in the matter of that galaxy,

(40:56):
that's still only five percent of all the energy available
to you someone, Right, Yeah, And so if you want
to think big, right, then let's attack the biggest slice
of the pie. And most of the energy of the
universe is in dark energy. Sevent of all the energy
in the universe is now devoted to accelerating the expansion
of the universe. If you want to build a really

(41:16):
big engineering project, you might as well start with the
biggest slice. I wonder if maybe dark energy isn't engineering project, Daniel,
I mean, if a Slies were basically speculating, I'm gonna
speculated dark energy is just aliens making the universe bigger. Well,
that's a really clear idea, but you're not actually the
first one to have it. One physicist Zoltan Gallantaie argued

(41:37):
that if there are civilizations that can do that, they
could not be detected because their activities would be indistinguishable
from the workings of the universe. We have no baseline
to compare them. To write, we are assuming that the
universe is driven mostly by natural processes. But if there
are civilizations out there that are type four and they've
been playing games with the universe, then that's what we've

(41:58):
been observing this entire your time. Are you saying that
the laws of physics are indistinguishable from the workings of
a mysterious being. You're making the case for God basically, well,
these civilizations would have almost godlike powers. We think they
would still be constrained by the laws of physics. But remember,
we don't know what those laws are. We have no

(42:20):
understanding of dark energy. Really, we see that this is happening,
but we do not understand the mechanism for it or
what is controlling it. So it is potentially possible that
there's an alien civilization out there with some knob and
they are driving the expansion of the universe. I mean
This is speculation on speculation, absolutely, but yes, we don't
understand the mechanism of it, so it could be down

(42:42):
to some alien civilization. This is a reduction of speculations
that what you're saying, we're going deep. Yeah, and there
are more levels. What what could be more powerful than
all the energy in the universe? Well, Stage five says,
use all the energy in the multiverse? Right, Why be
limited to a single universe when apparently there's an infinite

(43:03):
number of possible universes out there for you to harness
and manipulate. Yeah, why not, let's go there. So this
is a saving that the multiverse exists and that somehow
some alien cilvercision has access to all of these different
universes and also have the ability to harness their energy.

(43:27):
You sound incredulous, and that's for a good reason, because
it's a pretty ridiculous idea. You're right, we don't even
know if the multiverse exists, Like, are there other universes
out there? If the multiverse does exist, is it the
flavor of multiverse that would allow us to communicate with
other universes? There are some in which these universes are
forever separate and can never communicate with each other, and

(43:48):
so that would prevent any alien civilization from harness and them.
For example, the quantum multiverse from the Many Worlds interpretation
of quantum mechanics says that the universe splits every time
a quantum object has to make a decision. But you
can't ever access those other universes. But in principle there
are versions of the multiverse, or the other universes could
interact with ours, and so in principle, some aliens might

(44:10):
figure out how to manipulate those portals and somehow have
a cross universe civilization. I guess, though, well two things.
First of all, I guess if you're using all the
energy that in the universe, wouldn't you be taking away
that energy? Like if you're somehow using the dark energy
in our universe, wouldn't that stop the expansion of the

(44:31):
universe potentially? Or maybe the dark energy is just like
a waste product of something else they're doing. Maybe this
is just like the crumbs on their table. I mean,
let's think really big. I said, you're saying the expansion
of the universe is a byproduct of whatever nefarious or
maybe or I guess we can't judge pre judge, but whatever,
you know, thing it is they're doing with the inherent

(44:52):
energy of the universe. Is that what you're saying, like,
maybe there's something deeper than dark energy, and dark energy
is just like the smog of whatever process they're using
to to steal the use the energy of the universe.
M I'm just trying to anticipate what's going to happen
in season sixty million when we're only on season five thousand,
so obviously there's a lot of dot dot dot happening.

(45:15):
But yeah, potentially, are you equating us to like online
forums where people are posting fan theories. Is that all
physics is fan theories? I think I saw that in
a comic strip somewhere. Yeah, exactly, that's x ca CD.
All theories are just fan fiction about the universe, And
in some sense, yes, that's what's happening here. We're trying
to imagine what an alien statilization might be, like, what

(45:37):
are the limits on it? Essentially, we're not suggesting that
there are aliens out there manipulating the universe and controlling
it and that dark energy is just their pollution, but
we're just trying to push up against the boundaries of
our thinking and wondering what is possible in the end,
Do we have arguments that suggest that that would be impossible?
Because if not, let's keep an open mind to what
might be happening out there. The second thing I want

(45:59):
to say was that I feel like that would have
been a fun sequel to the matrix to find out
that actually our universe is just like a battery for
somebody else's universe. Oh, the meta matrix. Yeah, the multi matrix,
the multi meta matrix. I like it. It's that one,
all right. Well, this cardiship scale is a pretty interesting
way to think about aliens, what they might be doing,

(46:22):
how big they can get, or I guess, you know,
just pushing the idea of what can a sentient species
do in the universe, like what's possible for a sentient
entity or entities? Yeah, and it leaves completely aside the
very important question of what a sentient entity should do
with the universe. If you are capable of building Dyson

(46:43):
spheres that completely blot out every star in the sky,
should you is that the right use for your technology?
Should you be measuring your civilization by how much energy
of the universe you can capture for your own purposes.
Maybe alien civilizations have taken another route, trying to live
harmoniously with the universe rather than trying to manipulate it
for their own ends. Wait, are you calling God an alien? Technically? Um,

(47:09):
God would be an alien right unless they were born
on Earth. I don't know how you can have the
word technically god an alien in the same sentence. I
just don't get into I don't get it either. But
this is a natural sciences podcast, so I think that's allowed. Technically,
Bigfoot is a lockness monster. That's right. Technically it's all
natural science because it's being talked about naturally by scientists,

(47:32):
so therefore it is natural science. Yeah, and this is
sort of the way that physicists think about civilizations. How
much energy do we have? How much energy is available
to us? It's of course not the only way to
think about civilizations. And one thing we're trying to do
in our civilization is actually tamped down our energy use. Right, Well,
we talked earlier about how every year we increase our

(47:53):
energy used by three percent, and that might take us
to stage one civilization. Don't think about that like a goal.
It's not like a bad We're gonna put on our civilization. Hey, look,
we increased our energy used by ten thousand. Yeah. Right,
that would probably be a bad thing for life on
Earth if we were using so much energy. Yeah, or
be bad if we were using all the energy in

(48:13):
the universe and then stopping expansion and then accidentally, oops,
we caused the universe to contract and crunch down. Was
that us who made the whole universe collapse into the
black hole? Our apologies. Please take this voucher and try
civilization in another one of our multiverses. We should have
gone green much sooner. All right. Well, it's definitely fun

(48:35):
and interesting to think about these wild and crazy scenarios.
But as you said, it is a little bit part
of science to imagine what could be possible, because you
might come up with something that you didn't think about
before that maybe shapes the future experiment or how you
look for answers in the universe. Yeah. And while we
sometimes think about natural science as very rigorous and found
it in experiments and high precision, an important part of

(48:58):
it which is just creative and exploratory and wondering about
what is possible. Sometimes the most fun parts of science
are when you're tackling a really big question that nobody
has tackled before, and so you have to begin with
a few crazy, fairly simple ideas. Many things just fun
to talk about Indians, which I think, let's be honest, Dan,
is really the main point of your choosing your topic. Yes,

(49:19):
I always do enjoy talking about aliens, and I hope
that the aliens listening to this podcast enjoy our baselist
speculation about their lives and motives. That's right, And if
the Kardashians are aliens, they're also welcome to come on
the podcast. Open invitation to any Kardashian or Alien and
or alien. All right, well, we hope you enjoyed that.

(49:40):
Thanks for joining us, See you next time. Thanks for listening,
and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is
a production of I Heart Radio. Or more podcast from
my Heart Radio. Visit the I Heart Radio, Apple Apple Podcasts,

(50:01):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H