Speaker 1: I want you to close your eyes for a second. Well,
not if you're driving or operating heavy machinery off it's.
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, please keep your eyes on the road exactly.
Speaker 1: But you know what I mean. I want you to
just imagine waking up on what feels like a perfectly
peaceful morning. But the moment you open your eyes, you
realize you are uh, You're not in your current.
Speaker 2: Bed, You're somewhere else entirely. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The first thing you notice is this tranquil, almost imperceptible
hum vibrating through the air. You're resting on an anti
gravity field, just softly floating a few inches above the sleek,
seamless floor.
Speaker 2: That sounds incredible, honestly, right.
Speaker 1: And you stretch and you look out your expansive wall
to wall window, and instead of your usual neighborhood or
you know, your driveway or your local coffee shop, you
see a bustling city scape, towering impossibly high, piercing straight
through the cloud.
Speaker 2: Layer, a true megacity exactly.
Speaker 1: The sky itself is just thick, with flying vehicles darting
to and fro in perfectly synchronized lanes, moving like metallic
bees around an impossibly high tech hive.
Speaker 2: It is quite the visual to start the day, and
the morning routine in this hypothetical scenario only gets more
extraordinary from there, because the fundamental mechanics of how you live,
how you consume energy, and how you interact with the
physical world have been completely rewritten.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you step out of your room and your robotic
butler is already there, greeting you with a warm smile
and a cup of hot tea brewed perfectly to your
exact molecular preferences.
Speaker 2: Which is the dream really.
Speaker 1: Hah Yeah, And as you take that first sip, an
augmented reality display doesn't just turn on. It seamlessly shimmers
into existence directly within your field of vision, interfacing directly
with your optic nerve.
Speaker 2: No screens required, none at all.
Speaker 1: You're reading the morning news, but the headlines aren't about
local elections or fluctuating interest rates or traffic jams on
the interstate. The breaking news flashing across your vision is
that humanity has just achieved a staggering new milestone.
Speaker 2: Now what's the milestone?
Speaker 1: We are now a civilization capable of harnessing the total
energy output of not just one, but multiple stars across
our local galactic neighborhood. You finish your tea, you step
into a transport pod, and in a blur of pure
harnessed light, you are whisked away to your.
Speaker 2: Office, an office that is probably not on Earth.
Speaker 1: Nope, your office just so happens to be a massive
skick station orbiting a nearby gas giant.
Speaker 2: Which completely redefines the concept of a morning commute.
Speaker 1: It really does.
Speaker 2: I mean, you aren't just crossing a city, you are
crossing the gravitational boundaries of planetary bodies before your morning
coffee is even fully kicked in, and your evening plans
in this scenario are just as limitless, oh absolutely Hopping
on a sleep faster than light vessel traveling a few
short hours to a distant star system just to sample
exotic interstellar cuisine prepared by entities that didn't even evolve
on Earth. It sounds like pure, unfiltered fantasy.
Speaker 1: It sounds like the ultimate sci fi movie, the kind
of world building you only see in big budget space operas.
But welcome to the thrilling threads everyone. Today we are
exploring the ultimate road map of technological evolution.
Speaker 2: We are diving deep into the math and the physics
of the future.
Speaker 1: We are looking at an incredible body of theoretical physics,
astronomical anomalies, and deep historical mysteries that forces us to
question our ancient past, map out our cosmic future, and
use the legendary Kardashev scale as our ultimate guide.
Speaker 2: It's going to be quite the ride.
Speaker 1: Our mission today is to take you on a journey
from our current highly fragile human existence all the way
to godlike immortal beings that command the very fabric of
the multiverse.
Speaker 2: And we should clarify right at the start for those
of you listening who are highly familiar with astrophysics and cosmology,
that while this sounds completely indistinguishable from science fiction, the
foundations of this discussion are rooted in very serious theoretical frameworks.
Speaker 1: Yes, this isn't just us making up cool sci fi
concepts exactly.
Speaker 2: We're talking about the hard limits of thermodynamics, the bizarre
realities of quantum mechanics, and profile found philosophical questions about
energy bottlenecks and technological progression.
Speaker 1: I know you listening to this right now are probably
incredibly curious about where humanity is actually heading. We all
see the news about AI advancements and new rockets and
fusion breakthroughs. We wonder what it all adds up to.
Speaker 2: What is the end goal of all this progress?
Speaker 1: Right? And I can promise you that by the end
of this journey, your perspective on human history and what
our cosmic future might actually look like will be permanently altered.
I'm just marveling at the sheer, unfathomable scale of what
we're about to unpack.
Speaker 2: It absolutely forces us to stretch our comprehension to its
absolute limits, because to understand where we might be going
as a species, we first have to rigorously define exactly
where we are.
Speaker 1: And it's not where most people think we are.
Speaker 2: No, it is not. To figure out our baseline, we
have to travel back to nineteen sixty four, to the
work of Sylviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev.
Speaker 1: The father of the scale itself. And I want to
pause here because it's so easy to look at our
mom in a world and feel incredibly advanced. We have
supercomputers in our pockets, we're landing reusable rockets on drone
ships in the middle of the ocean. We're editing the
human genome. It feels like we are at the apex
of technology.
Speaker 2: We certainly suffer from a profound recency bias.
Speaker 1: Oh, for sure.
Speaker 2: We confuse our rapid progress in information technology with fundamental
mastery over the physical universe. Kardashef realized that measuring a
civilization's advancement by its culture, or its political systems, or
even its information processing was fundamentally flawed because.
Speaker 1: Those things change, right, They're subjective.
Speaker 2: Exactly, They're subjective and often temporary. So we developed a
classification system that grouped civilizations based on the most objective,
unyielding metric in the universe, energy consumption.
Speaker 1: Right, because energy is the ultimate currency. You can have
all the brilliant ideas in the world, but if you
don't have the jewels, the watts, the raw power to
execute them, you remain grounded.
Speaker 2: You're stuck.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Originally he proposed three levels of civilization. It's a
scale that measures progress purely by the sheer volume of
energy a species can capture, store, and utilize precisely.
Speaker 2: And what's fascinating here is the underlying principle, the self
reinforcing cycle of energy and technology. It's a fundamental law
of societal progress.
Speaker 1: Walk us through that cycle.
Speaker 2: Well, as a society gains access to more robust and
abundant energy sources, it can develop new, more complex, energy
intensive technologies, think of particle accelerators or massive orbital foundries.
Those new technologies in turn enable the civilization to reach
further out and harness even more energy.
Speaker 1: Like using fossil fuels to build solar panels to eventually
build nuclear fusion reactors.
Speaker 2: Exactly. It is a perpetual, accelerating feedback loop of advancement.
Speaker 1: But here's where we get an incredibly humbling reality check.
We just painted this beautiful utopian picture of anti gravity
beds and intercellar tee times. But according to the Kardashov
scale humanity right now, with all of our artificial intelligence,
our mars rovers, our nuclear submarines, we don't even rank
as a Type one civilization.
Speaker 2: Not even close. We are a Type zero, a type
zero civilization. It is a highly sobering classification. What it
fundamentally means is that we have not yet achieved the
ability to harness all the energy available on our own planet,
nor have we established a truly sustainable global energy infrastructure.
Speaker 1: We're basically scavenging.
Speaker 2: That's one way to put it we are essentially living
off the Earth's savings account rather than it's income.
Speaker 1: Let's actually dig into the math of that, because it's
not just a subjective insult to call us a type zero.
Carl Sagan actually took Kardashchev's formula and interpolated it to
give us a specific decimal score.
Speaker 2: He wanted to see exactly where we sat on that spectrum.
Speaker 1: Right, and based on data from back in twenty eighteen,
where our average global power consumption was roughly eighteen point
four terawatts, humans currently sit at a score of zero
point seventy three one.
Speaker 2: And that zero point seventy three is heavily reliant on
burning fossilized organic matter.
Speaker 1: Dead dinosaurs in ancient ferns.
Speaker 2: Exactly, we are extracting stored solar energy that took millions
of years to accumulate in the form of oil, coal,
and natural gas, and we are expending it in a
few short centuries.
Speaker 1: I've always thought about our current state like a toddler
learning to walk. Right now, our global energy grid, our
heavy reliance on dead dinosaurs to power our incredibly advanced
quantum computers. It's a massive contradiction.
Speaker 2: It is a juxtaposition of the primitive and the advanced.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like a toddler stumbling around a living room
knocking over lamps. We are barely crawling in the cosmic sense.
We haven't even mastered the playground of our own planet,
let alone the neighborhood of our solar system.
Speaker 2: That is a highly apt analogy, particularly regarding the clumsiness.
We are still deeply vulnerable because our energy sources are finite,
polluting and incredibly inefficiently.
Speaker 1: Distributed, which causes all sorts of problems, most of.
Speaker 2: Them geopolitical friction on our planet right now is almost
entirely dictated by who controls those localized pockets of stored energy.
Speaker 1: Wars are fought over it constantly, constantly.
Speaker 2: But there's a mathematical trajectory we can look at. The
renowned American theoretical physicist mitchi Okaku calculated something quite intriguing
regarding this transition phase right.
Speaker 1: In his work on the Physics of the Future. Kaku
lays out a timeline that is simultaneously thrilling and completely terrifying,
because we are in what he calls the danger zone exactly.
Speaker 2: Kaku calculated that if humanity manages to maintain an increase
in our global power consumption by just three percent.
Speaker 1: Each year, which is roughly what we've been doing historically.
Speaker 2: Right, Yes, it aligns roughly with our historical growth. If
we keep that up, we will officially cross the threshold
to reach Type one civilization status in about one hundred
to two hundred years.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this one hundred to two hundred years
on a cosmic timescale, comparing that to the thirteen point
eight billion year age of the universe, that is less
than the blink of an eye. That is practically tomorrow.
Speaker 2: Is geologically instantaneous.
Speaker 1: That means my great grandchildren could potentially be living in
a Type one world. But on a human level, it
feels agonizingly just out of reach. And more importantly, getting
through these next two centuries seems like threading a microscopic needle.
Speaker 2: Because the transition from Type zero to Type one is
widely considered to be the most dangerous period in any
civilization's history. Why is that this is the bottleneck? You
have a species that has discovered the immense power of
nuclear technology, genetic engineering, and artificial intelligence, but they still
possess the tribalistic territorial instincts of their evolutionary past.
Speaker 1: So we have the weapons of gods, but the emotional
maturity of teenagers.
Speaker 2: Precisely, the risk of self annihilation, whether through nuclear conflict,
engineered pandemics, or catastrophic climate degradation, is at its absolute
peak right before a civilization achieves planetary mastery.
Speaker 1: It's the alt time tests.
Speaker 2: Yes, this is heavily tied to the concept of the
Great Filter, the idea that there is some evolutionary wall
that most civilizations simply cannot climb over. They destroy themselves
before they reach type one.
Speaker 1: So, assuming we don't trip over our own shoelaces and
wipe ourselves out in the next century, what does that
world actually look like? What happens when we graduate from
the toddler stage, survive the Great Filter, and become a
true Type one civilization.
Speaker 2: A Type one civilization is rigorously defined as a species
that has mastered all the energy available to its home planet,
as well as the total amount of stellar energy that
strikes that planet from its parent.
Speaker 1: Star, meaning we capture literally all the sunlight hitting Earth.
And just to put numbers to that, we're talking about
roughly ten to the sixteenth watts.
Speaker 2: Of power every usable fraction of it. Yes, but it
goes far beyond just covering the deserts in highly efficient
solar panels. A type one civilization extracts its energy, its information,
and its raw materials from vastly superior, fully optimized methods
like what we are talking about, widespread, perfectly safe nuclear fission,
perfected and commercialized nuclear fusion, and fully integrated renewable resources.
They aren't just surviving on their planet. They are the
absolute masters of the planetary domain.
Speaker 1: And this is where the theoretical capabilities start sounding indistinguishable
from magic. We are talking about harnessing the kinetic and
thermal power of volcanoes, manipulating the global weather systems, controlling earthquakes,
building entire megalopolises floating on or submerged deep within the oceans.
Speaker 2: The engineering scale is breathtaking.
Speaker 1: Just imagine what a Tuesday would look like if the
local government could just turn off a hurricane.
Speaker 2: What's fascinating here is the mechanics of that. It is
a fascinating engineering problem. How do you stop a hurricane.
You don't blow it up with a nuke, as some
have jokingly suggested.
Speaker 1: Right, that would just make a radioactive hurricane.
Speaker 2: Exactly, you manipulate the thermodynamics. A type one civilization could
theoretically deploy orbital solar shades to coolest specific patch of
the Atlantic Ocean, instantly cutting off the thermal engine that
powers the.
Speaker 1: Cyclones, starving it of its fuel.
Speaker 2: Or they could seed the storm clouds with endothermic materials
to sap its kinetic energy.
Speaker 1: So, oh, there's a Category five storm brewing. No problem,
We'll just dissipate the thermal energy and route the captured
kinetic power to the Eastern Seaboard grid for a week, turning.
Speaker 2: A natural disaster into a battery right.
Speaker 1: Or imagine tapping directly into an active fault line, lubricating
tectonic plates to prevent massive sudden ruptures, and bleeding off
the seismic friction to generate limitless geothermal power.
Speaker 2: It represents a complete subjugation of the natural world, the chaotic,
destructive forces of nature that currently threaten our existence, like hurricanes, tsunamis,
seismic faults, droughts. They cease to be natural disasters. They
become managed utilities.
Speaker 1: That is just wild to think about, whether as a
public utility.
Speaker 2: And because of this absolute mastery over planetary energy, the
societal shifts required to maintain it are equally profound. A
Type one civilization inevitably forms a highly integrated, unified planetary government.
Speaker 1: No wait, hold on, let me push back on that
a bit, because when you say unified planetary government, my
mind instantly goes to a dystopian authoritarian regime. Do you
really need a single world government or just a highly
cooperative framework, because human history suggests that the bigger the empire,
the harder it fractures.
Speaker 2: That is a very valid critique based on our type
zero history. But consider the scale of the technology involved.
If you have the technology to manipulate tectonic plates and
control global weather patterns, you cannot have fractured warring nation
states possessing that.
Speaker 1: Technology because it becomes a weapon.
Speaker 2: Exactly, if Nation A decides they want more rain for
their crops, they might inadvertently cause it devastating drought for
Nation B. The administration of a Type one world's infrastructure
requires absolute, real time global coordination.
Speaker 1: So it's more about logistics and politics.
Speaker 2: Yes, it might not look like a tradition. In the
twentieth century, government could be a decentralized, highly advanced AI
managed logistical framework, but the fragmented competitive geopolitical map we
have today simply cannot survive the transition. The stakes the
technology are too high.
Speaker 1: That makes a lot of sense. The autrastructure it self
demands unity. You can't have two different engineers fighting over
the steering wheel of the Earth's climate.
Speaker 2: It would be catastrophic.
Speaker 1: And this era also brings about routine interplanetary spaceflight. They
aren't just limited to Earth. They have an established permanent
presence on multiple planets and moons within their solar system.
Speaker 2: Yes, they engage in regular interplanetary trade, research and resource extraction.
Mining the asteroid belt becomes as routine as offshore drilling
is today.
Speaker 1: And on an individual level, the biology changes too. If
you have this much energy to dedicate to computation and
biological research, you see massive medical breakthroughs. We are talking
about the complete elimination of genetic disease, the integration of
nanotech into the bloodstream, and draft slowing down if not halting,
the cellular aging process.
Speaker 2: The species becomes technologically augmented.
Speaker 1: However, and I know you want to bring this up.
Despite all this incredible power, a type one civilization is
still highly vulnerable to extinction.
Speaker 2: That is a crucial caveat that often gets overlooked in
the optimism of Type one.
Speaker 1: They are not invincible, really, even with weather control, limitless fusion,
and bases on Mars and Europa, what could possibly wipe
them out?
Speaker 2: The ultimate danger, the existential bottleneck for a Type one
civilization is the Malthusian trap on a planetary scale.
Speaker 1: Meaning overpopulation and resource drain.
Speaker 2: Yes, the sheer depletion of their home planet's deep resources,
and the problem of waste heat, because as they harness
more and more energy, their appetite for it grows exponentially, right.
Speaker 1: The Jevins paradox, the more efficiently we use a resource,
the more of it we consume.
Speaker 2: Exactly, if they do not manage that transition carefully, they
run the very real risk of exhausting their planetary reserve
or literally cooking their own biosphere with the waste heat
of their own immense energy consumption.
Speaker 1: The waste heat is something nobody thinks about.
Speaker 2: It's thermodynamics. You use that much energy, heat is byproduct.
They have to deal with it before they figure out
how to capture energy directly from outside their immediate domain.
Speaker 1: So they could basically eat themselves out of house and home,
or boil their own oceans with their server farms before
they unlock the next level. That is a terrifying thought.
You finally unite the planet, cure all diseases, and then
realize the planet itself can no longer sustain your energy appetite.
Speaker 2: It is the ultimate test of foresight.
Speaker 1: But if they survive that, if they manage their resources
perfectly and look up at the blinding light of their
local star, they make the leap to type two. And
this is where we transition from planetary masters to literal
stiller engineers.
Speaker 2: Bridging the gap from type one to the type two
is a monumental, almost incomprehensible leap in engineering and ambition,
because mastering the energy of a single tiny rock orbiting
a star is frankly mathematically insignificant compared to capturing the
total unfettered energy output of the star itself.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about the type two civilization. They are defined
by their ability to harness the entirety of a star's energy.
We are jumping from ten to the sixteenth watts up
to ten to the twenty sixth watts.
Speaker 2: A ten billion fold increase.
Speaker 1: And They achieve this using the crown jewel of theoretical astrophysics,
the Dyson sphere.
Speaker 2: Named after the brilliant theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson, who formally
proposed the concept and in nineteen sixty pat Re published
in the journal Science. A Dyson sphere is a hypothetical megastructure.
To put it simply, imagine building a massive spherical shell
completely enclosing a star, designed to capture every single photon
of energy that star emits.
Speaker 1: Now, I want to star right here, because whenever the
Dyson sphere is depicted in sci fi, it's usually shown
as a solid, hollow metal ball with a star in
the middle. But astrophysically speaking, a solid shell is impossible, right.
Speaker 2: Is structurally unviable?
Speaker 1: Yes, the tensile strength required to build a solid sphere
around a star would shatter under the star's immense gravity.
The stress on the equator of that structure would tear
it apart instantly.
Speaker 2: You are absolutely correct. A rigid solid shell is dynamically unstable.
If it drifted even a fraction of an inch off center,
the gravitational pull of the star would drag it inward,
resulting in a catastrophic collision. What Freeman Dyson originally envisioned
and what a Type two civilization would actually build is
a dice and swarm. A swarmp yes, millions, perhaps billions
of independent orbiting solar collectors, habitats and statites.
Speaker 1: Statites being satellites that stay stationary.
Speaker 2: Correct satellites that use solar sales to hover in a
static position against the star's gravity. They would orbit in
a dense, highly coordinated formation, essentially creating a shell made
of millions of moving parts, intercepting nearly all of the
stars radiation.
Speaker 1: But just try to visualize the sheer scale of raw
materials needed to build billillions of solar collectors on a
scale large enough to enclose a star like our Sun.
You can't just mine the Earth for that.
Speaker 2: The Earth wouldn't even provide a fraction of a percent
of the required material.
Speaker 1: You would literally have to dismantle entire planets. You'd have
to crack open mercury Venus, maybe even strip mine a
gas giant like Jupiter down to its rocky core, just
to get enough raw material to build the swarm.
Speaker 2: And that highlights the staggering logistical nightmare of becoming a
Type two. How do you disassemble a planet?
Speaker 1: I can't even fathom it.
Speaker 2: You would likely need self replicating vondomen probes. You send
a machine to Mercury. It uses the solar energy in
local iron to build two copies of itself. Those two
build four, and so on until an exponentially growing army
of machines devours the planet and turns it into solar collectors.
Speaker 1: But wait, hold on, If we dismantle Jupiter, we completely
destabilize the orbital resonance of the entire Solar System. Jupiter's
gravity protects Earth from asteroids, it balances the inner planets.
How does a type two civilization prevent rogue at ds
from just pummeling their home world while they are busy
tearing the Solar System apart?
Speaker 2: That is exactly why reaching type two requires a mastery
of orbito mechanics that borders on the miraculous. You wouldn't
just be dismantling a planet. You'd be artificially maintaining the
gravitational balance of the system using active mass.
Speaker 1: Manipulation, so they become the gravity.
Speaker 2: You are essentially taking the steering wheel of the Solar
System's gravity well, and the capabilities they get in return
for that unimaginable effort. They are staggering.
Speaker 1: With ten to the twenty six thoughts of power, the
rules of physics become suggestions. They could create localized artificial
gravity fields. They could manufacture microscopic black holes to use
as hyper efficient energy drives. They could actively terraform and
colonize entirely new star systems by focusing the star's energy
into a massive system spanning laser.
Speaker 2: Kardashev himself described this level of civilization as practically godlike.
Speaker 1: With the total energy outpoint of a star at their disposal, manipulated,
the orbits of planets and moons becomes entirely feasible. They
could quite literally play billiards with celestial bodies, arranging their
solar system to their exact preferences, moving planets into the
habitable Goldilock zone, or stripping the atmospheres off inhospitable worlds
to start fresh.
Speaker 2: It is the ultimate landscaping project.
Speaker 1: Now here's where it's really interesting. I want to pivot
to something that takes this out of the realm of
pure chalk board math and into observational astronomy. Because while
this all sounds purely theoretical, there is a real world
mystery that had astronomers completely baffled, and it directly ties
to what we are talking about. Have you heard of Tabby's.
Speaker 2: Star ki C eight four six two eight five two Yes,
Boyogyen star. It caused an absolute uproar in the astronomical
community a few years.
Speaker 1: Ago, exactly discovered by the Kepler Space Telescope in twenty fifteen.
Tabby Star is located about one four hundred and seventy
light years away from Earth in constellations sickness. What made
it instantly famous was its completely erratic, wildly unpredictable light curve.
Speaker 2: The dimming events.
Speaker 1: Right. We detect exoplanets by watching stars dim slightly as
a planet crosses in front of them, But Tabby's star
didn't just dim a little bit. It appeared to dim
by up to twenty percent at highly irregular intervals.
Speaker 2: And just to contextualize that twenty percent dimming for our
listeners who track exoplanet data, when a massive gas giant
like Jupiter crosses in front of our Sun, it only
blocks about one percent of the Sun's light. So for
a start at dim by twenty percent, whatever is passing
in front of it must be unimaginably massive. It cannot
be a spherical planet. It defies the standard models of
planetary formation.
Speaker 1: Which naturally sparked the most incredible fever pitch speculations. You
had some conservative astronomers suggesting it could be a massive,
chaotic swarm of disintegrating exo commets, But the comet theory
had holes because you would need hundreds of thousands of
giant comets all perfectly aligned to block that much light.
Speaker 2: It was statistically highly improbable.
Speaker 1: So others through throughout the wild thrilling idea what if
we are looking at an alien megastructure? What if we
are literally looking at a dice and swarm in the
middle of being constructed by a type to civilization.
Speaker 2: The hypothesis of an alien megastructure was indeed discussed seriously.
It was published in major journals purely because the data
was so profoundly anomalous. The irregular dips in light perfectly
matched what you might expect to see if massive asymmetrical
artificial panels or vast orbital habitats were circling the star.
Speaker 1: It was a very exciting time.
Speaker 2: It was now Later observations, particularly looking at infrared data,
have suggested that the dimming is more likely caused by massive,
uneven clouds of microscopic dust rather than solid alien architecture.
Speaker 1: Right because dust blocks different wavelengths of light differently, whereas
a solid metal panel would block all light equally, and
the data showed blue light dimming more than red light precisely.
Speaker 2: However, the very fact that serious, peer reviewed scientists had
to legitimately consider the dice sphere hypothesis shows just how
grounded Kardashef's theory has become. In modern astrophysics. We are
actively scanning the galaxy for the thermal signatures of type
two civilizations.
Speaker 1: It makes you look up at the night sky entirely differently.
Every star could be a power plant. But even these
godlikes stellar engineers face an existential threat. Right, you build
your dice and swarm, you're living like a king on
the energy of the sun. But stars aren't interternal.
Speaker 2: They are not the danger. For a Type two civilization
evolves from the planetary level to the stellar level. Their
primary existential threat is the eventual death, natural depletion, or
violent fluctuation of their parent star.
Speaker 1: Because stars die.
Speaker 2: Stars have strict life spans dictated by their mass, they
run out of hydrogen as they harness the power of
an entire star. A type two society must constantly plan
for the deep future.
Speaker 1: Because if your star starts expanding into a red giant,
it's going to swallow your entire dice and swarm.
Speaker 2: Exactly, they must continuously search for new stars and new
sources of energy before their current host star goes supernova,
sheds its outer layers, or collapses into a dense white dwarf.
Speaker 1: So they basically have to pack up their civilization, load
up their generationships, and move to a younger neighborhood. It's
fascinating that, no matter how advanced you get, nature still
puts a dicking clock on your survival.
Speaker 2: Entropy comes for everyone, unless, of.
Speaker 1: Course, you graduate to the next Here, the point where
you don't just harvest one star, but you begin harvesting
the galaxy. Welcome to the realm of the Type three civilization,
the galactic overlords.
Speaker 2: This is where we scale up exponentially, moving from a
single solar system to an entire galactic structure. A Type
three civilization has reached a level of technological supremacy where
they are routinely dismantling entire solar systems to enclose every
single star in a galaxy within a dice in.
Speaker 1: Network, every single star. Let's really sit with that for
a second. The Milky Way galaxy has something like one
hundred to four hundred billion stars. Imagine a civilization that
systematically methodically builds megastructures around billions of stars.
Speaker 2: The level of automation required is terrifying.
Speaker 1: We are talking about energy consumption on the scale of
ten to the thirty six watts, and to manage an
empire that vast. They possess faster than light or FTL.
Speaker 2: Travel, which requires manipulating the geometry of space time itself.
To cross a galaxy that is one hundred thousand light
years across, you cannot rely on conventional trust. You need
something akin to an ALQBR warp.
Speaker 1: Drive, contracting space in front of the vessel and expanding.
Speaker 2: It behind exactly allowing them to cross the entire galaxy
in a matter of hours or days without violating local relativity.
They aren't moving through space faster than light space itself
is moving around them.
Speaker 1: They use propulsion technologies we can barely outline on chalkboards.
They control gravity, electromagnetic fields, and they can safely extract
energy from the most violent cataclysmic phenomena in the known universe.
I'm talking about harvesting the raw power of supernovae or
dropping mass into supermassivelas black holes to capture the resulting
radiation using the Penrose process.
Speaker 2: The Penrose process is a perfect example of type three engineering.
Speaker 1: How does that work exactly?
Speaker 2: You send a mass into the ergosphere of a rotating
black hole. The ergosphere is the region just outside the
event horizon where space time itself is being dragged along
by the black hole's rotation. You split the mass in
two years, allow one half to fall past the event horizon,
and the other half escapes.
Speaker 1: But it escapes with more energy.
Speaker 2: Yes, it escapes with more energy than it entered with,
effectively stealing the angular momentum of the black hole itself.
It is the ultimate cosmic power plant.
Speaker 1: I mean to a type three civilization, galaxies are just
simple homes. Entire planets are nothing but stones in their path.
You need a new highway. Just vaporize that rocky planet
over there. The mass suggests it would take humanity roughly
a million years to reach this level. If we don't
wipe ourselves out and if we can figure out FTL travel, this.
Speaker 2: Raises an important question, one deeply tied to the famous
Fermi paradox. If a type three civilization can expand across
a galaxy, multiplying their dice and swarms, manipulating stars in
black holes, and if the universe is thirteen point eight
billion years old, which is plenty of time from millions
of civilizations to have reached this point, why don't we
see any evidence of them? Where is everybody?
Speaker 1: The great cosmic silence? It haunts every astronomer, and when
we look at this scale. There are two deeply profound
explanations for this. The first is the simplest, but honestly
the most depressing. They just don't.
Speaker 2: Exist, the rare Earth hypothesis combined with the great filter.
Speaker 1: Right, Maybe the filters of evolution, like surviving the nuclear
age of type zero, the resource depletion of type one,
or the stellar death of type two are just too
mathematically brutal to overcome. Maybe we are truly alone in
the dark, or at least the very first in our
local galactic group to make it this far.
Speaker 2: The second explanation is equally profound and significantly more unsettling.
It posits that these advanced beings exist, but they have
developed so rapidly and possess technology so infinitely beyond our
primitive comprehension that they seamlessly cover their.
Speaker 1: Tracks, or we just can't see the tracks right.
Speaker 2: They remain entirely undetected because we simply do not have
the sensory or technological apparatus to observe them.
Speaker 1: It's the ant farm analogy, but let's push it further.
Imagine you have a colony of ants living next to
a ten lane super highway. The ants don't know what
a toyota is. They don't understand internal combustion engines or
supply chain logistics. They might feel the vibration of the road,
but they lack the cognitive framework to identify it as
a product of engineering.
Speaker 2: We are the ants.
Speaker 1: We are completely unaware of the galactic engineering occurring just
above our heads.
Speaker 2: Or consider dark matter. We know that eighty five percent
of the matter in the universe is invisible to us.
It doesn't interact with light, but we can see its
gravitational effects. What if dark matter isn't a natural particle,
but the heavily engineered infrastructure of a type three civilization.
Oh man, we are looking right at their highway system,
but our primitive telescopes only register it as anomalist gravity.
Speaker 1: Oh that idea hits hard, the idea that the universe
is already completely colonized and we are just sitting in
a designated nature preserve. But even for these galactic overlords,
the type three civilizations still has a boss level to bait.
Their ultimate threat isn't a rival civilization, it's the physics
of the universe itself, the slow marching decay of entropy,
the death of the galaxy, which.
Speaker 2: Brings us to the very edge of Nikolai Kardashev's original vision.
Kardashev deliberately stopped his scale at type three. As a
practical astronomer, he believed that the energy of an entire
galaxy would be more than enough to satisfy the needs
of any conceivable life form. To look beyond that was
to him purely metaphysical speculation.
Speaker 1: But human imagination and modern theoretical physics doesn't like to
stop at boundaries, So other theoretical physicists, cosmologists, and futurists
took Kardashchev's scale and expanded it far beyond Type three.
They pushed it into a realm that the human brain
is honestly not wired to easily comprehend. We were talking
about the theoretical extensions types four, five, and six.
Speaker 2: Let us attempt to map out these theoretical extensions. Relying
heavily on modern cosmology, A Type four civilization scales up
from a single galaxy to the entire observable universe. They
harness the energy of billions of galaxies, tapping into the
cosmic web itself.
Speaker 1: They aren't just building structures, they are manipulating the fundamental
expansion of the universe. They could rearrange the cosmos like
a child's construction set. They could create entirely new planetary
systems out of thin air, or just erase a galaxy
from the universe if it was no longer needed, or
if it was in the way of a cosmic highway,
just hit the universal delete butt.
Speaker 2: To achieve this, a type for civilization would have to
discover and perfectly master completely new laws of physics that
are currently totally beyond human comprehension. They would need absolute
control over dark matter.
Speaker 1: And dark energy, which is mind boggling. I mean, how
do you even engineer dark.
Speaker 2: Energy, you would have to manipulate the vacuum energy of
space itself. Dark energy is the force driving the accelerated
expansion of the universe. A type four civilization might be
able to localize that force, using it to push galaxies
together to prevent the universe from expanding into a cold,
dead void, or using it as an infinite, pervasive power source.
Speaker 1: And then, as if mastering the universe wasn't enough, there
is type five. This is where we step out of
our universe entirely and enter the multiverse. A type five
civilization harnesses the energy of infinite universes. They operate outside
the bounds of a single big bang.
Speaker 2: The transition to type five reflects humanity's growing theoretical engagement
with string theory, brain cosmology, and the many world's interpretation
of quantum mechanics. It supposes a civilization that views the
physical boundaries of a single universe as merely a geographic border,
something to be easily crossed when the local resources run dry.
Speaker 1: They control hidden dimensions. The extra spatial dimensions predicted by
string theory aren't mathematical quirks to them. They are travelings,
teleportation and traveling through time would just be routine everyday
occurrences for them, like take in the subway, you missed
your stop, Just foll through the eleventh dimension and pop
out yesterday.
Speaker 2: Why would a civilization leave their universe the ultimate threat,
the heat death or the big crunch? If our universe
is destined to expand until all stars burn out and
entropy reaches maximum, a type five civilization simply opens a
wormhole to a younger, hotter universe and migrates their entire
cosmic infrastructure.
Speaker 1: And if you thought that was wild, we reach type six.
Type six exists entirely outside of space and time. They
are not bound by causality.
Speaker 2: They are what theoretical physicists might refer to as bulk beings.
If you imagine our universe as a two dimensional sheet
of paper, exist in the three dimensional room that the
paper sits in, Time is not a flowing river to them,
it is just another physical dimension. They can walk back
and forth along.
Speaker 1: They are capable of instantly creating and destroying universes at will.
They can spark a big bang in a Petri dish
just to see what kind of physics emerge. At this stage,
they are indistinguishable from gods. It is completely mind bending
to imagine a civilization that might view our entire thirteen
point eight billion year old, infinitely complex universe as a
high school science fear project or an AA battery or
an ant farm sitting on some fifth dimensional desk.
Speaker 2: Is the ultimate absolute abstraction of power. But there is
one final step proposed by the most ambitious futurists, the
ultimate endpoint of technological evolution, the terminus of the scale,
the Type seven civilization, also commonly referred to as the
Omega civilization.
Speaker 1: The Omega civilization, the absolute pinnacle. I mean, what does
a civilization that has outgrown space, time and the multiverse
actually do with their days? What is the purpose of
existence when you are omnipotent? Well, according to the theoretical models,
they focus entirely inward. They have unlocked true immortality, not
just biological but informational, and they use highly advanced localized
physics to retreat into what we call pocket dimensions.
Speaker 2: The methodology described here involves a profound surgical manipulation of
general relativity and quantum field theory. They are theorized to
curve spacetime to such an extreme acute degree that they
pinch off a section of the universe, creating an isolated,
false vacuum or a completely distinct pocket of.
Speaker 1: Reality, basically making their own private universe.
Speaker 2: Exactly they can. They relocate objects, entire star systems, or
their digitized consciousnesses from the existing multiverse into this bespoke,
impenetrable home.
Speaker 1: And because they literally created this pocket dimension from scratch,
they get to write the source code. The laws of
physics can be custom altered to whatever they want. They
want gravity to push instead of pull. Done, they want
the speed of light to be infinite. Done. They can
program every single atom, every quark of an individual in
that dimension.
Speaker 2: This is how they achieve infinite survival, effectively conquering the
concept of endings. When the overarching multiverse they inhabit faces decay,
they simply retreat into their closed loop pocket universe, completely
insulated from the thermodynamic decay outside.
Speaker 1: And when that pocket universe eventually starts fading away or
running low on perfectly ordered energy, they just compress space
time again and move into a new pocket universe inside
the old one, Like infinite cosmic Russian nesting dolls, retreating
deeper and deeper inward, they become beings of pure energy
or pure data, masters of their own destiny, completely and
utterly free from the constraints of space, time and entropy.
Speaker 2: They continue to push the limits of what is possible,
experiencing vibrant, mathematically perfect realities, exotic forms of interaction, and
new intellectual challenges entirely of their own design. It is
the absolute zenith of the energy technology feedback loop we
discussed an hour ago.
Speaker 1: So what does this all mean for us? We've traveled
billions of years into a speculative, dizzying future, exploring dice
and swarms Alqbierre drives, dark matter engineering and infinite nesting
pocket dimensions. But here's where we do something really fascinating.
We pivot from the unfathomable future and we are forced
to look back at the distant, muddy path right here
on Earth.
Speaker 2: Yes, we transition from theoretical cosmology to a highly controversial
yet enduringly popular hypothesis regarding anomalous archaeological sites and the
true depth of ancient human history.
Speaker 1: Exactly, and I want to be incredibly clear to you
listening right now, we are reporting on alternative historical hypotheses
that challenge the mainstream academic consensus. We are looking at
the anomalies that don't quite fit the neat linear narrative
of human progress, and we start by looking back at
the Great Pyramid of Giza. We are looking at a
mathematical logistical anomaly that scientists, structural engineers, and architects have
debated fiercely for a very long time.
Speaker 2: The conventional historical consensus, the one tiught in textbooks, is
that the Great Pyramid of Giza was built around four thousand,
five hundred years ago by a dedicated human workforce of
roughly twenty to thirty thousand people over a period of
about twenty years, utilizing rudimentary bronze age tools, copper tissels,
wooden sleds, ropes, and earthen ramps.
Speaker 1: But when you actually break down the hard mathematics of
that logistical time timeline, it borders on the impossible. There
are an estimated two point three million stone blocks in
the Great Pyramid. Some of the granite beams in the
King's chamber way up to eighty tons, and they were
quarried from Aswan, which is over five hundred miles away. Now,
if you divide two point three million blocks by twenty
years working twenty four hours a day three hundred and
sixty five days a year. That means a massive stone
block had to be perfectly quarried, transported, dragged up a ramp,
and precisely set into place every five minutes, day and night,
without pause for two decades with copper chisels and hemproups.
Speaker 2: And it is not merely the speed of construction that
presents a profound anomaly. It is the staggering precision. The
base of the pyramid is leveled to within a fraction
of an inch over an area of thirteen acres. The
casing stones, which are mostly gone now, were fitted together
so perfectly that you couldn't slide a piece of paper
between them. Structural engineers have repeatedly pointed out that even
with modern day technology, motorized cranes, diamond tipped saws, and
laser guided precision, we would struggle immensely to recreate the
pyramids on a smaller scale with the exact same structural
integrity and alignment to true north.
Speaker 1: And it isn't just the pyramids. The deeper you look
into ancient history, the more these megalithic anomalies pop up.
You look at the polygonal masonry of Machu Picchu in Peru,
where are massive, irregularly shaped stones are fitted together with
earthquake proof precision without any mortar. You look at the
massive trilithons of Stonehenge, the colossal foundation stones at Balbeck
and Lebanon, which way up to one thousand tons each.
You look at the Nasca lines in Peru, or the
submerged structures off the coast of Japan.
Speaker 2: These scattered, incredibly dense megalithic sites present a puzzle. From
these anomalies, an alternative framework emerges, culminating in a highly thrilling,
profoundly disruptive hypothesis known broadly as the Silurian hypothesis, popularized
recently by astrophysicists Adam Frank and Gavin Schmidt. It asks
a terrifyingly simple question, what if we aren't the first?
What if an immensely advanced, industrialized civilis ation existed right
here on Earth millions of years ago.
Speaker 1: What if fifty million years ago, a species native to
Earth had already climbed the Kardashov scale. What if they
reached type one, unifying the planet, mastering the weather, and
manipulating genetics. Maybe they even reached Type two, harnessing stellar energy,
terraforming local planets, and traveling at incredible speeds. But as
we discussed heavily with the Great Filter and the dangers
facing Type one civilizations, this ancient race faced an apocalyptic
existential crisis.
Speaker 2: The Earth's geological record is violently punctuated by mass expincion events.
If a deeply ancient civilization triggered a runaway greenhouse effect,
or engaged in a devastating global conflict, or perhaps faced
a sudden shift in the Solar system's gravitational dynamics, they
would be forced to make a terrible choice.
Speaker 1: Faced with extinction, they left their dying world behind. They
boarded their gen relationships, or opened a wormhole and fled
into the stars, searching for a new home. And they
left behind only the most durable, massive monolithic stone structures,
structures too heavy to be destroyed by glaciers or time,
as silent testaments to their existence. The pyramids, the megaliths.
They aren't tombs. They are the breadcrumbs of a Type
one or Type two civilization that evacuated the premises.
Speaker 2: If we connect this to the bigger picture, if we
entertain this hypothesis, it radically alters our philosophical framework. It
introduces a deeply cyclical view of history, challenging the comforting
linear narrative that humanity has only ever progressed upward from
the Stone Age to the Space Age in one uninterrupted line.
It asks us to consider a reality where civilizations rise
to staggering heights of technological supremacy, face insurmountable existential bottlenecks,
and either perish entirely or transcend the physical planet, leaving
the Earth to reset heel and birth a new intelligent
species millions of years later.
Speaker 1: It's an incredible, haunting philosophical debate. Are we just the
latest iteration in the long tragic line of civilizations rising
and falling on this blue marble? Are we literally walking
in the footsteps of ancient beings who learned how to
build dice and swarms millions of years ago? Are we
just slowly painfully relearning their lost quantum physics from the
geometric clues buried in the ruins they left behind.
Speaker 2: From a purely analytical standpoint, exploring these deep time mysteries,
whether you view them as literal historical truth or merely
as compelling philosophical allegories serves a vital grounding purpose. It
forces us to confront the extreme fragility of our own
current civilization. It reminds us that technological progress is not
a guaranteed, permanent straight line. It is fraught with immense danger,
and regression is always a possibility.
Speaker 1: We have covered so much of ground today. We started
with our humble, incredibly fragile reality as a Type zero
point seven to three civilization, stumbling around in the dark,
barely managing our own planet's weather and fighting over finite resources.
We dreamed about the unified planetary mastery of type one,
the mind bending dice and swarms and black hole engineering
of type two, all the way up to the multiverse
hopping immortal pocket dimensions of the type seven omega civilization.
And finally, we question if those godlike beings out there
in the dark were actually our intin ancestors. Leaving behind
the pyramids as a warning or a map is.
Speaker 2: A staggering journey of the mind, and I think the
final grounding thought we must take away from this exploration
is that the road ahead for humanity is incredibly long,
mathematically perilous, and highly uncertain. Every single level of civilization,
no matter how advanced, faces its own unique, evolving exidential dangers,
from planetary resource depletion and climate chaos in the near term,
to the death of parent stars in the midterm to
the relentless heat death of entire galaxies in the deep future.
Speaker 1: We aren't guaranteed to make it to Type one. We
are in the most dangerous bottleneck right now.
Speaker 2: No, we are not guaranteed anything. Our only hope to
ascend this scale, to survive our current Type zero growing pains,
and avoid becoming just another layer of fossilized, anomalous ruins
for the next intelligent species to puzzle over is a
combination of radical courage, unyielding scientific determination, and a steadfast,
unified commitment to the greater good of our higher species.
Speaker 1: We have to grow up. And that leads me to
a completely new final thought that ties all of this together,
something that bridges the Type seven omega civilization and our
current reality. What if we didn't just inherit the ruins
of a past civilization, What if we are currently living
inside the pocket dimension of a Type seven civilization right now?
Ah the simulation hypothesis exactly if a Type seven civilization
can create bespoke universes with custom physics and program every
single atom. What are the mathematical odds that we are
the original base reality? What if all of human history,
all of our struggles as a Type zero civilization, are
just a historical simulation running on a fifth dimensional hard
drive created by beings who wanted to study their own
ancient past. We might just be a digital.
Speaker 2: Ant far It's mathematically plausible that simulating universes vastly outnumber
the single base reality, meaning probabilistically, we're almost certainly inside
a simulation. It is the ultimate twist. Our future gods
might actually be our current architects.
Speaker 1: And that is exact exactly where I want to turn
this over to you. We've laid out the entire map
of the cosmos according to the Kardashev scale, we've debated
the engineering of dis and swarms, and we've looked at
the ancient mysteries right in our own backyard. So where
do you stand on this? Do you think humanity has
what it takes to survive our Type zero bottleneck, manage
our resources, and one day build a dice and swarm?
Or do you believe we are just living in a
simulation designed by a Type seven civilization that already beat
the game.
Speaker 2: It is the ultimate question of whether our reality is
an uncharted front tier and echo of a forgotten past,
or merely a complex line of code.
Speaker 1: Let us know, leave a comment and share your theory.
We absolutely love reading your perspectives and debating these ideas
with you. Thank you so much for joining us on
this mind expanding journey today on Thrilling Threads. Stay curious,
keep questioning reality, and we will catch you on the
next exploration into the unknown.