hypercivilizace, kardashev scale, planetarita
Backcasting Kardashev One — Strelka Maghttps://strelkamag.com/en/article/backcasting-kardashev-oneNarratives of “degrowth” or “sustainability” suggest that human civilization will need to use less energy in the future. But what if instead, the trend is heading in exactly the opposite direction, on a trajectory of ever-increasing energy use?
At some point, we would enter the near-fantastical levels of energy usage envisaged by the Kardashev scale—a theoretical means of classifying civilizations proposed by the Soviet astrophysicist in 1964 as part of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
Given that we have not found any evidence of such extraterrestrials, we propose repurposing the Kardashev scale to assess what planetary civilization means here on Earth.
In that context, we ask: Where are we on the scale, and what does that say about our level of advancement? What might be the thermodynamic and civilizational consequences of advancement on the Kardashev scale? What is the scope of our agency as we head towards many possible futures, and what might those futures look like? And finally, working backwards from them, what might we learn about inhabitation of Earth during our current anthropogenic crisis of energy metabolism?