The Kardashev Scale: The 5 Types of Civilizations

Our spacecraft and space telescopes have revealed a wealth of information about worlds beyond our own. Right now, our rovers are roaming around Mars, studying and characterizing the Red Planet. Here on Earth, we’re working toward a theory of everything known as the Standard Model.

However, if we were to try to evaluate how we’ve been faring in the grander scheme of things, we run into a number of challenges. The biggest one being that we've had no other civilization to compare ourselves to. 

We have yet to meet an extraterrestrial or visit an exoplanet. Given our vast technological limitations, contacting them alone is next to impossible. While our radio signals may reach as far as 200 light-years, that’s only 0.2 percent of our own Milky Way galaxy. And even if — by some miracle — aliens send and receive radio transmissions like we do, our signals decay into noise in a few light-years. 

Fortunately, scientists have developed a way to measure our progress by evaluating our technological abilities against our technological possibilities. It’s called the Kardashev scale. 

Without further ado, let’s take an honest look at ourselves and see where we rank according to the five types of civilizations in the cosmos.

Formulating the Kardashev Scale

When scientists started to scan the sky for radio emissions in an attempt to find extraterrestrial intelligence, Nikolai Kardashev got to thinking. He wondered about alien civilizations millions of years ahead of us and imagined what their radio signatures might look like.

Kardashev proposed that progress depends on two primary things: energy and technology. He theorized that a civilization’s technical advancement can be measured precisely by how much energy they’re able to harness and manipulate. Essentially, this means that the more energy a society can produce, the more technologically advanced it is.

Along these lines, Kardashev thought civilizations would exhibit varying levels of power in their radio transmissions, according to the power available to them. And so, in a 1964 paper called "Transmission of Information by Extraterrestrial Civilizations," he devised a numbering system to rank civilizations based on their energy use. Ultimately, Kardashev hoped to enable radio scientists to characterize three different categories of alien civilizations based on the detected “loudness” of their transmission. Think of it like alien caller ID.

Type 1 Civilizations. Type 1 civvilizations can use all of the available energy of their home planet. They can build cities on oceans and control both weather and natural disasters, such as earthquakes and volcanoes. To reach this status, the civilization needs to capture all solar energy that reaches the planet in addition to all the thermal power, hydropower, and wind power it generates. All in all, that should correspond to 10¹⁶ W.

Type 2 Civilizations. Type 2 civilizations can use all the available energy of their home star and planetary system. To do this, they would have to build a — you guessed it — Dyson Sphere and use that to harness the energy of our Sun to power even bigger endeavors. We’d need to harness a staggering 10²⁶ W of energy.

Type 3 Civilizations. A Type 3 civilization can use the total energy of its galaxy. That’s about 10 billion times more energy than Type 2 civilizations, and rightfully so. Every part of the galaxy would be colonized, and every piece of matter would be utilized as an energy source. Garnering such an incredible amount of energy would take a civilization between 100,000 and a million years, turning a galaxy into one massive supercomputer.  

A work in progress

Over the decades, members of the scientific community have refined and expanded the scale, taking it to a whole new level. Today’s Kardashev Scale includes more than just the energy for communications technology. The scale now describes the amount of energy a civilization could use for whatever they’d like, and the scale encompasses about five levels.

Carl Sagan

Scientists such as Carl Sagan argued that Kardashev’s levels varied pretty vastly in energy use. Instead of jumping by a factor of many billions, he suggested a formula that would allow us to divide the levels up into smaller subcategories to make the scale more useful and comprehensive. His scale features a Type 0 civilization, as well as a Type 1.1, Type 1.2, Type 1.3, and so on and so forth all the way up. 

To include the information available to the civilization, Sagan proposed a lettered scale from A to Z. A represents 10⁶ unique bits of information, and each following letter corresponds to one magnitude increase in the volume of information stored. However, if you consider that we’re already somewhere around the letter “R” and moving rather quickly down the alphabet, it’s pretty clear that Sagan may have underestimated our ability to create and store new data. 

Will we have to revise that sometime soon? Probably. But that’s not the only thing we’ve had to revise.

The values corresponding to each type of civilization have also gone through a number of revisions. Sagan first revised them based on his handy-dandy formula. He re-defined Type 1 as 10¹⁶ W (roughly the Sun’s power falling on the Earth) and rounded off Type 2 and 3 levels to 10²⁶ W and 10³⁶ W, so planetary, stellar, and galactic levels increase in increments of 10¹⁰ or ten billion. 

John David Barrow

Cosmologist and theoretical physicist John David Barrow suggested we stretch the levels to larger and larger scales to encompass galaxy clusters, galaxy superclusters, the universe, and perhaps even the multiverse. On the other end of the spectrum, Barrow also extended the Kardashev Scale to feature smaller and smaller levels, in what he called microdimensional mastery. Barrow argued that civilizations have found it more cost-effective to manipulate their environment at increasingly smaller dimensions than larger ones.

Essentially, Barrow took what Kardashev did and turned it upside down — keeping in mind all the things other scientists had learned along the way. To get a taste of it, let’s run through some of the microdimensional categories. 

Type 1-minus civilizations can manipulate objects at their scales. They can build structures, mine, and put together or break apart solids. Type 2-minus civilizations can read and engineer genetic code, transplant parts of themselves, and alter the development of life. Type 3-minus civilizations can manipulate matter at a molecular level and even create new materials. Type 4-minus civilizations can manipulate individual atoms and create complex artificial life forms. The list continues at, you guessed it, to even smaller dimensions than this – that is, until it reaches Type Omega-minus, which can manipulate the very fabric of space and time.

Robert Gray

In 2020, astronomer Robert Gray proposed extending the scale in both directions, suggesting a value for Type 0 and Type 4. Type 0 is based on biology rather than astronomy, measuring at 10⁶ W or the equivalent of the muscle power of, say, several thousand people. Type 4 is 10⁴⁶ W, or the power of all the stars in the observable universe. Additionally, Gray built his case for an information scale much like the energy scale, where 10⁶ bits is the zero point. That’s about the information content of one book. 

However, Gray failed to take it one step further by elaborating on what it would take to be a Type 5 civilization. Perhaps he thought that such a civilization should be able to harness an infinite amount of energy. After all, Type 5 civilizations could theoretically travel between the various universes in the so-called multiverse, tap into their entire energy content, and manipulate them as they please. They’d effectively become gods, living outside the bounds of space and time.

How we (honestly) score on the scale

Now, for the moment of truth. At the microdimensional and information levels, we’ve done pretty well for ourselves. Humanity has passed the stage of Type 3-minus (thank you, physicists and chemical engineers) and is also a J civilization (thank you, computer and materials engineers). However, on the Kardashev Scale as a whole, humanity ranks at a lowly 0.72.

Why, you ask? 

The truth is that while we are pretty intelligent, we are groundlings. We haven't left Earth yet.

So far, we’ve managed to alter our planet by building huge structures, mining the Earth, draining swamps, creating rivers and lakes, and changing the composition and temperature of our atmosphere. But haven’t learned how to use all, and I mean all, of the energy sources the Earth provides — whether it’s the solar energy that reaches us or the geothermal, wind, and tide energy that the planet generates.

Sadly, we’ve got a long way to go. To see why, let's look at solar energy. Earth receives about one-billionth of the Sun’s energy, but we can only harness about one-millionth of that. Essentially, we consume about one-million-billionth of the Sun’s total energy. 

However, if we harness three percent more energy each year, we’re set to become a full Type 1 civilization in the next, ahem, century or two. So, buckle up. It’s going to be a long ride.

Once we’ve overcome the learning curve and become a Type 1 civilization, it might be easier to work toward becoming a Type 2 civilization. We might start building outposts in space, building infrastructure first on the Moon. Then, we might move on to building colonies on Mars and terraform other planets, as we slowly make our way to our most loyal ally and most formidable foe: our Sun. This journey will take us several thousand years once we pass the Type 1 mark.

Scientists have predicted that we may reach Type 3 within the next million years. Still, anything at that point is so far away that it’s hard to imagine its corresponding challenges and what kind of ingenuity and resources it would require to solve them. It could take us billions of years to get to Type 3 or beyond Type 3, or we may never even get to Type 3. The future, for now, is unknowable.

Just how powerful are civilizations beyond Type 3? Physicist Michio Kaku says any civilization beyond Type 3 could theoretically have the energy needed to escape our dying universe and travel to another via holes in space. This would be a particularly useful skill, considering we have an ever-expanding Sun that threatens to make our oceans boil over and mountains melt.

It’s hard to know if our civilization will ever go that far beyond our current scale. After all, we already have our fair share of problems right here on planet Earth, such as war and environmental catastrophes.

Let’s be honest. We are literally in a race against time, and the odds of us emerging victorious are stacked against us. If only we could call up other civilizations to get some insight.