Nikolai Kardashev believed we could classify civilisations by the eneregy they harness. The Soviet Astrophysicist proposed three “Types” of civilisation - Type I controls the energy budget of its homeward, Type II controls a star, and Type III controls a Galaxy. By Kardashev’s measure, the human race is at roughly 0.73, crawling toward becoming a Type I civilisation. We’ll get there within the next hundred years or so, all things being equal. 

Kardashev’s framework is now the closest thing we have to a default vocabulary for how we think about civilisation itself. It shows up in TED talks and manifestos, in both text books and airport bestsellers, and it’s captured almost every conversation about human potential. The thinking goes like this: energy throughput is the sole factor that separates us from the stars. You get enough of it, you use enough of it and you can spread across the galaxy, colonize the cosmic endowment. Who knows - you might even defeat death itself. 

In short, you’ll become a civilisation worthy of the name. 

But is any of this…true? 

Are energy mastery // civilisational flourishing actually the same thing?

Did Kardashev give us a theory, or a myth?

The single number is a sexy thing

Kardashev’s Scale appeals to us on a psychological level. It gives us a single axis to rank all possible civilisations, all possible variations for who and what we could be; and perhaps more importantly, it places us at the bottom, with nowhere to go but up, and with the assumption of an infinite capacity and appetite to get there. This is comforting. Linear narratives usually are. You know where you are, and where you’re going, and you can find yourself on a map. The goal is legible. 

…but this is, actually, measurement selection bias. 

It’s choosing to measure that which you can already measure, and then treating the measurement as the thing itself. Energy is quantifiable and comparable across every paradigm and every timescale. It has a natural, physically defined ceiling. 

Wellbeing, wisdom, philosophy etc are harder to place on any logarithmic scale. 

The result is a definition and a frame for this idea we call “progress” that would classify a civilisation of trillions of suffering entities who’ve harnessed a Dyson sphere as more advanced, more valuable, more viable than a small, content society that never bothered with stellar engineering or any other science fiction trope, because it had no need to. 

This seems backwards, and it seems untrue. 

The uncomfortable data of history

If energy capture tracks civilisational “flourishing,” we’d expect civilisations who have more energy at their disposal to do better along the dimensions we actually care about. They’d have lower rates of violence, greater freedoms, durable institutions, and a degree - some degree - of humanity. 

History is unkind to this particular expectation. 

The Roman Empire (and yes, I am eternally one of ~those) was an extraordinary energy-capturing system, by any standard of antiquity. It moved grain from Egypt to Rome, timber from the Levant to the Mediterranean coast, minerals from Britain. Its energy throughput dwarfed anything that had come before it. 

What else? Well, it also ran on slavery at a near-but-pre industrial scale, collapsed into civil war as a cycle // ritual of its own existence and eventually decayed and disintegrated under pressures it had created. It was an inhumane, and insanely complex civilisation. 

The 20th Century was not dissimilar.

Between 1900 and 2000, global energy consumption increased 10x. Per-capita energy use went up by 4-5 factors. By Kardashev’s metrics, humanity advanced. And we also produced the two deadliest wars in human history, the Holocaust, the Gulag, the famines of Mao and Stalin that killed tens of millions, and the weaponry capable of ending every one of us a hundred times over. 

I’m not making the point that energy is bad. 

Neither am I making the point that progress or technology are bad. 

I make no moral judgement against them either way. 

But I’d like to make the point that there is no reliable relationship between the measured technological progress of a civilisation and how well it treats its human components, or how well it understands its humanity at all, or how long it lasts, or whether it produces anything worth exposing to the ages. 

What the Fermi Paradox might be telling us

Why, given the age and size of the universe, haven’t we detected any other civilisations? 

This is the Fermi Paradox, and it’s generated dozens of proposed solutions: the Great Filter, rare earth, the dark forest, various forms of self-destruction. 

Kardashev’s followers and futurist-adherents tend to assume that any civilisation advanced enough to become detectable would be Type II or III, building Dyson spheres, manipulating stellar physics, ~mastering their universe.

But I think there’s a case that the civilisations that have survived, somewhere out there in the stars, are the ones who found a natural stopping point to their own scale. They found a stable equilibrium and they stayed there, rather than pushing past some critical // abstract threshold. They’re invisible to us precisely because they’re not doing anything that produces an observable signature. 

Perhaps the most advanced civilisation possible is the civilisation that looked at “Type II” and decided not to bother in the first place. 

There’s no way of knowing whether or not this is right; that’s the nature of the Fermi Paradox, all solutions are speculative. But I think the willingness to take it seriously depends on the ability to imagine that more, that scale, that expanse and excess may not always be better. 

Scaling pathologies

We have accepted the assumption that our current values // institutions // social structures are already directionally optimal, and we just need more enrgy running through them to produce good outcomes. This is the modern conceit. 

Well, I’m not a decellerationist. But I think this is almost certainly wrong. 

If you scale our energy budget by a factor of a thousand without changing the underlying values and institutions we already have, flawed as they already are, you don't fix any of them. You get factory farming at Type II scale, authoritarian surveillance at Type II scale, and social decay at Type II scale. The Kardashev trajectory, pursued by a civilisation that hasn't figured out its values, produces bigger versions of everything we already have, including everything we'd prefer to leave behind.

Carl Sagan, who popularized the framework in the West, was aware of some version of this concern. He wrote that a civilization capable of interstellar travel would need to be mature enough to survive having that power, and that most civilizations might not make it. But this is usually read as a comment on the probability of reaching Type II, not as a challenge to the idea that reaching Type II is a worthy goal. The question it points at is harder: what would a civilization need to become, in terms of values and institutions, to make more energy a net good? And if becoming that thing is the hard part, isn't that the real progress metric?\

What a better framework might look like

Nobody's found a clean alternative to the Kardashev Scale, partly because the alternatives resist quantification and partly because any proposed metric immediately runs into the problem of whose values get to define flourishing.

That said, there are some candidate axes worth taking seriously.

Stability over time is one. A civilization that lasts ten thousand years at Type 0.5 has done something more impressive, and probably more difficult, than one that briefly reaches Type I before collapsing. Nikolai Kardashev's own civilisation, the Soviet Union, captured and processed enormous amounts of energy for seventy years and then ceased to exist. 

The ratio of suffering to population is another candidate. How much pain can a civilisation afford to produce and absorb per capita? This is hard to measure - but it’s plausibly the thing we should give a shit about most at scale. A civilisation of a billion people living well is better than a civilisation of a trillion people who live in misery, regardless of what either has accomplished in the realm of stellar radiation. 

The scope of moral consideration is the third option. Does a civilisation’s ethics extend to members of its own species? Is it limited to its own species, in its own moment? Does it encompass future generations, or the natural systems on which it depends? The expansion of a moral circle is the most consequential thing any civilisation can achieve and it has zero relationship to energy capability. 

These aren’t clean metrics, and they don’t fit on a scale. They’re harder to model, and harder to apply. But they have the welcome distinction of being something more than a progress myth. 

The stories we tell ourselves about where history is going, and what the end-point looks like are not theories, not in any falsifiable sense. They’re load-bearing assumptions, and they shape the questions that get asked, the research that gets funded, and the futures that get taken seriously enough to be built. 

The Kardashev Scale encodes a specific progress myth: that the arc of civilisation points toward more energy, more physical control, more expansion into the cosmos, more conquest of existence itself. It’s a familiar story; we’ve been telling it in various forms for centuries. 

But it’s worth asking what the myth rules out. If energy capture is the master variable, then any community, at any point in the journey towards becoming a civilisation, choosing not to maximise its scale, is a failed experiment. Any stable, small, low-energy society looks like a civilisation that got stuck before it could reach Type I. 

I think this is a poor man’s idea of humanity. 

What if the hard part isn’t reaching Type II, but deciding, clearly and collectively what you want, what you value, and what defines your shared happiness? 

It might well be expansion.

It might be warp drives.

And it might be scale, and good luck with that. 

But it might be a civilisation of thinkers who find an answer to the questions the rest of us are trying to build starships to escape. 

And the default assumption that it ~must be something more is itself a limitation.