"What Does It Mean for a Civilization to be a Million Years Old?"

 

          

 

With the release this weekend of Ridley Scott's new epic film, Prometheus, which explores the origins of the human species, we thought it would be interesting to revisit Carl Sagan's great question: "What does it mean for a civilization to be a million years old? We have had radio telescopes and spaceships for a few decades; our technical civilization is a few hundred years old ... an advanced civilization millions of years old is as much beyond us as we are beyond a bushbaby or a macaque." 

Michio Kaku, professor of theoretical physics at City University of New York believes that Sagan's question is no longer just a matter of idle speculation. Kaku writes that that "one day, many of us could gaze at the encyclopadia that contains the coordinates of perhaps hundreds of Earth-like planets in our sector of the galaxy. Then we will ponder with wonder, as Sagan did, what an intelligent civilization a millions years ahead of ours will look like."

Soon, humanity may face an existential shock as we discover Earth-sized twins of our planet orbiting nearby solar systems. This may usher in a new era in our relationship with the universe, so that we will never see the night sky in the same way. Realizing that scientists may eventually compile an encyclopedia identifying the precise coordinates of perhaps hundreds of Earth-like planets, gazing at the night sky, we will forever after wonder if someone is gazing back at us.

Kaku takes up where some/one of the world's pioneer astronomers left off with a definition of civilizations in the universe that mimics the work of Russian astrophysicist Kardashev. Inspired at the age of five by a Moscow Planetariumshow about Giordano Bruno, Kardashev definined three levels of advanced civilizations based on how they harness energy to fuel their societies.

All three categories of civilizations, even the most advanced Type 111, would still be bound by the laws of physics thatallow us to predict the behavior of the universe from the subatomic world to the large-scale structure of the universe, through a staggering 43 orders of magnitude (a factor of 10 million billion billion billion billion).

Type 1 civilizations would have a technological level similar to ours at present, as measured by total energy consumption. Carl Sagan estimated that Earth qualifies as a Type 0.7 civilisation. Type 11 civilizations would be capable of harnessing the energy of their own star -constructing, for example, a Dyson Sphere. And Type 111 civilizations would be able to utilize energy on the scale of their own galaxies. Kardeschev and Kaku believe there is an extremely low probability of detecting Type 1 civilizations and suggests that type 11 or 111 civilizations would make better targets.

Kardeschev calculated that the energy consumption of these three types of civilizations would be separated by a factor of about 10 billion. In 1963 Kardeschev searched for traces of the more advanced type 11 and 111 at the 920 MHz wavelength creating an uproar of excitement thinking he had discover signals from a Type 11 civilization that later proved to be an ordinary quasar with a large redshift.

A similar uproar occurred in 1967 when regular signals were detected by radio telescopes at Cambridge, England, which turned out to be the first discovery of neutron stars. The Kepler telescope, launched in 2008, is able to identify terrestrial planets – rocky worlds rather than gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn. By the end of this year, it will scan as many as 100,000 Sun-like stars up to 2,000 light years away, and perhaps identify hundreds of Earth-like worlds by detecting the slight loss of light they cause as they pass in front of their mother star.

Kepler will hopefully identify 185 such planets with less than 1.3 times the radius of Earth, and as many as 640 terrestrial planets less than 2.2 times.

" All this, Kaku predicts "will stimulate an active effort to discover if any of them harbor life, perhaps some with civilizations more advanced than ours. According to the laws of planetary evolution, any advanced civilization must grow in energy consumption faster than the frequency of life-threatening catastrophes, such as meteor impacts, ice ages, or supernova explosions. If their growth rate stays any slower, they are doomed to extinction. Thus, this places mathematical lower limits on the growth rates of these civilizations.

Kaku believes along Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson, that although human civilization has only recently begun to master planetary energies -fossil fuels, passive solar, wind, geothermal and nuclear fission, and may one day soon crack nuclear fusion-hat, within a century or two, we should attain Type I status. In fact, growing at a modest rate of 1 per cent per year, Kardashev estimated that it would take only 3,200 years to reach Type II status, and 5,800 years to reach Type III status.

By definition, Kaku proposes that an advanced civilization must grow faster than the frequency of life-threatening catastrophes. Since large meteor and comet impacts take place once every few thousand to million years, a Type I civilization must master space travel to deflect space debris within that time, which should not be much of a problem. Ice ages may take place on a time scale of tens of thousands of years, and so a Type I civilization must learn to modify the weather within that period.

Artificial and internal catastrophes must also be negotiated. Global pollution is a mortal threat for a Type 0 civilization, but not a Type I civilization, which has lived for several millennia as a global force and necessarily achieved ecological balance with its home planet. Internal problems such as wars do present a serious recurring threat, but emerging civilizations have thousands of years in which to solve their racial, national, and sectarian conflicts.

Since it would take centuries or even millennia for a Type I civilization to terraform nearby planets, its peoples will have plenty of time to work out their internal differences on the same planet before they finally leave the mother planet in any significant numbers. The only serious threat to a Type II civilization would be a nearby supernova explosion, whose sudden eruption could scorch their planet in a withering blast of life-destroying gamma-rays.

The most potentially interesting civilization is a Type III civilization, "for it is truly immortal. It has exhausted the power of a single star, and has reached out to other star systems. No natural catastrophe known to science has the capacity to destroy a Type III civilization."

Faced with an exploding supernova, a Type 111 would have several alternatives, for example altering the evolution of a dying red giant star which is about to explode, or leaving this particular star system and terraforming a nearby planetary system. Kaka continues: However, there are roadblocks to an emerging Type III civilization. Eventually, it bumps into Einstein's theory of relativity. Nothing can travel faster than light, which is about 300,000km a second (for a possible loophole, see the end of this article). Since the universe is so vast and space is so empty, this absolute speed limit tends to hold back a civilization's successful expansion.

Dyson estimates that this roadblock may delay the transition from a Type II to a Type III civilization by perhaps a million years or more. So what is the most efficient way of exploring the hundreds of billions of stars in the galaxy? Kaku writes that the solution is to to send fleets of 'von Neumann probes' throughout the galaxy (named after John von Neumann, the Hungarian-born mathematician who defined the mathematical laws of self-replicating systems).

A von Neumann probe is a robot designed to reach distant star systems and create factories that will reproduce copies of themselves by the thousands. For von Neumann probes, a planet is a less ideal destination than a dead moon; these have no atmosphere and no erosion, which means the probes can easily land and take off and can 'live off the land', using naturally occurring deposits of iron, nickel and other minerals to build replicants for dispersal in search for other star systems.

Arizona State University physicist Paul Davies, has even raised the possibility that a von Neumann probe could be resting on our own Moon, left over from a previous visitation in our system aeons ago -the plot foundation of the film, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Originally, apparently, Stanley Kubrick began the film with a series of scientists explaining how von Neumann-like probes would be the most efficient method of exploring space. Unfortunately, at the last minute, Kubrick cut the opening segment from his film, and the famous monoliths – von Neumann probes – became mystical entities that triggered human evolution.

The irony of a search for a Type III civilization is that they probably wouldn't resemble anything we'd be able to recognize immediately.

The image at the top of the page shows the temperature of gas in and around the two merging galaxy clusters, based directly on X-ray data. 

Read Kaku's brilliant essay in its entirety at Cosmos Magazine.

Ridley Scott's 'Prometheus' --Explores Origins of Human Existence and the Eternal Question: "Are We Alone in the Universe?"

The Daily Galaxy via Cosmosmag.com and "The Eerie Silence" by Paul Davies

Click Here to View Today's Hot Tech News Video from IDG --Publishers of PC World, MacWorld, and Computerworld

Comments

[kristi276]

If we are a 0.7 type civilization, with all of the deep divisions of race, religion, ethnicity, gender, class/cast, and development, it does show that we have come a long way since the time of the last Ice Age when we were just mere hunters and gathers. Carl Sagan states that civilization began just recently with the development of "modern technology". Civilization began when we were able to read, write, math, sciences and complex social organizations. Our ability to create structures that led to the development of cities, is a testament to human kind. We look to a type 11 civilization in the hopes of seeing our future-selves. Before we go looking for our next door neighbors we should concern ourselves with the development of our own house(s). How developed can we be if we have homeless and starving children? We stand as a species or die as houses divided. We have a whole star system to grow in, just as we created the first towns on Earth, when will we do so in the rest of our solar system? By the time we get to the dwarf planets, we will be number II; or higher. It has taken us 6 million years to get here, what will the next 6 million years bring us.

[kickstand]

Overpopulation, poisoning the food supply process, racial prejudice, and lack of far sightedness, (like the horizon is the end of the known universe). Remember, Galileo was put down because he said 'the world turns' and is not the center of the universe, a universe created by a perfect god for his perfect creature. That was not so long ago. Religious Domination and Greed is the human legacy. Controlling the Sun! Terra-forming! Ha! Don't hold your breath. Wait, maybe we should...

[Mark D]

This is a repeat article... nothing new being espoused.

But I do find your comments a bit fuzzy Kristi. We have much to learn from [still existing] hunter-gatherer societies who attained extraordinary skills and levels of creativity.

Further, we should aspire to become alert to the presence of alien civilizations because we will need all the preparation we can get to merely survive them if human history is any guide.

With regard to populating the solar-system and beyond... it is conceivable that we might master the near at hand, Mars, our Moon and the variously scattered moons of Jupiter etc but even the unlikeliest exo-planets are light years away and required therefor, are space-craft capable of travelling at least a million miles an hour or more. Even then it might take a year merely to exit the solar system and many more to reach an identifiable target. The problem at that point will be slowing down, much less finding a survivable orbit.

[tamil]

Earth is too old already......... Million years ? Woah

[tamil]

Earth is too old already......... Million years ? Woah

[Bob Greenwade]

Despite a couple of typos ("Type 11" in place of "Type II" for most of the first part of the article, for example, and an instance of Dr. Kaku being referred to as "Kaka"), and Mark's point that this is a repeat article (which, in TDG's defense, is what the "Weekend Feature" is all about), this is a mostly good article.

Personally, while I strongly doubt that there's another sapient species elsewhere in the Milky Way, that doubt begins to evaporate at our galaxy's edge. We may indeed find civilizations in the Andromeda and Triangulum galaxies, and elsewhere in the Local Supercluster, and those may be as advanced as what's described here.

As for getting to the stars, despite relativity we may be able to reach them in a reasonable time frame if the Alcubierre drive or some other means of circumventing space-time, turns out to be a possible (and practical) thing. We could even be less than a century from it becoming a reality.

[Gareth]

The milky way contains so many stars - the odds for life are very high. I suggest nigh on every planet , even moon harbours some form of life.
I would not class human brains as being intelligent to be honest. Our slot on the scale is very far down.
Though we may detach the animal every now and again and come up with decent inventions - valve technology one of them - this invention is only transported by a prior discovery - electricity. Now human brain concieved energy transfer mechanisms are so poor in the first place. Still to this day we apply a conductor to a magnetic field as farady did. The whole of our progress can be summed to this dicovery.
We sit on bombs to get us into space - brute force progress to give us transport - petrol engines - terrible invention but masd produced - this is human limit - brute force - atom bashing nonsense - nothing more. We are stuck here for millions of years until we loose the animal and brute force approach. Now out there, they have been there done that. They do not need to eat as we do, move as we do, think as we do.

[Gareth]

All this talk of type II blah blah. Based on conventional DNA knowledge.

Most science today is based on convention.
I trash convention - for instance - stars are full of water. Non-conventional to say the least. But more real than the clap trap of the limited brain scientific majority. Credit is achieved via fact revelation.
Not speculation. My facts are holding true. Recently observered jets of water from a nearby star - no never.
Suns are nowhere near convention. Configurations of stars behave as do configurations of atoms - we have star molecules - now these units perform functions as do atomic molecules - specific properties. Pay no attention to convention.

[Matt Rhodes]

A million years is nothing but a blip on the cosmic radar.

I think the Fermi Paradox has it's answer - that is all this buzz around ETs and such is bull to the raw material science of things.

There is most definitely a creationist movement out there interdicting science with pseudo-science - that is, bull****.

There is no testable or verifiable evidence of life existing anywhere but here on Earth, which makes Earth a fluke, probably the only one of it's kind within (this) galaxy. Conditions are so hostile to life that intelligent, (sentient) life probably only evolves with the right set of planetary, solar, biological, galactic, chemical and evolutionary mechanisms - all which Earth is lucky enough to have:

Plate-tectonics, a moon tidal locked in orbit, 98 million miles from a G-class star, Nitrogen based atmosphere, Water in abundance, Carbon based life, far enough away from the galactic center to avoid drama of other systems...the list goes on.

If there are other intelligent civilizations, they aren't here in the Milky Way, they are in other galaxies millions perhaps billions of light years beyond. The electromagnetic spectrum/radio silence confirms it - if they're out there - they are so incredibly far away they may as well not exist, since we cannot hear any of them!

[resonanz]

I have two commentaries. One, from our recent human experience, a civilization will, if it survives cosmic trauma or self-destruction, advance non-linearly, e.g., exponentially, so that in much less than a million years it will reach an asymptotic technical threshold beyond which it will no longer be detectable or care to be. This might take no longer than 25,000 years after evolving to “sapiens” status and under undisturbed conditions. By publicly available evidence we are about 10,000 years from a neolithic stage (and perhaps the great flood) but it is not difficult to imagine that in just another, undisturbed 200 (two-hundred)-500 years humans will have colonized and mined the solar system and be on our way to other stars. In another 1000 (thousand) years we are likely to be traveling throughout the galaxy.

Two, the article and “experts” cited seem to support a paradigm (outmoded, imho) that defines a civilization’s advancement according to it’s capability to build bigger energy collection machines, ala Kardeshev concepts and Dyson devices. This picture strongly resembles the “steam punk” sci-fi genre which charms some of us by its picture of a static, industrial age, technology paradigm that is imaginatively tweaked as a substitute for real technical advancement. The Kardeshev and Dyson solutions, imho again, posit no new technology, simply grander engineering capability. But, just in recent months we have seen the prototype, via a college age thinker, of a Casimir Effect (quantum) propulsion system that might be in use in several years or less. Of a sudden, smaller has become better and we are onto a new technological paradigm - quantum-level, controllable energy densities that might enable humans to reach Dyson-level energies and near-light-speed velocity…but without the physical immensities envisioned by Kardeshev and Dyson. And more to the point, why are the vanguard of human thinkers on the advancement of our civilization so seemingly stuck on not only big engineering but retaining our physical bodies. Our bodies are inefficient bio-machines…they even die! I will repeat a mantra: why do we hang on to the idea that space travel requires us to haul around food supplies, maybe a garden, plus a sewer plant? Our real selves are E/M brain patterns which need only storage and processing assistance to be immortal - and we are already close to having those with nano-storge, room temperature superconductors and quantum computing.

[Graham Hale]

The assumption that the older a civilization is the more power it will use may be false. As a civilization gets smarter it may actually use less power and ensure its survival by migrating its sentience to a robust medium like silicon . Its probes may be content to observe the universe and not change it. Where interventions are made , a deep understanding of processes means they could be made far away from the desired outcome so no obvious chain of causality is visible to us.

[farticustheelder]

Forget the million year old civilization. If the technological singularity occurs, this civilization of our won't make it to the 500 year mark in any form that we could understand. The successor civilization will be virtually immortal of course, but the point is that even the next century will bring so much change as to be to us unpredictable.

[Jericho]

This whole article is very narrow minded - and focused only on technology. Incorporate human consciousness and awareness into the equation and the quantum leaps possible become truly astounding, and a lot more simple

[Mark D]

Bob... I thought about interplanetary travel since I was a youngster. It really stirs the imagination. The practicalities even aeons into the future are first and foremost that human physiology suffers quite rapidly in zero-gravity environments. We don't travel too well in that respect. Not in a thousand years will we be able to circumvent space-time or ultimately life and death.

The challenges and limitations of inhabiting relatively near-at-hand planets are enormous. The moon is a feasible target by 3000 AD. Mars will remain an unattainable objective for perhaps centuries.

No doubt you will know that the average distance between Mars and Earth is about 230,000,000 kms. Once every two years we come closest [Mars / Earth opposition: 60 - 100 million kms] and the closest ever distance may have been 56 million kms. The greatest distance may be more than 400 million kms. In other words, the numbers are immense and the obstacles no less so...

I wish it were otherwise.

[Michael Haynes]

I think that we can get lost in awe of the destination and not look at the journey.

It is clear to me that is we are going to travel the universe (which I think is totally possible), we have to detach ourselves from all that has gone before and focus on the future. This is far reaching. We obviously have to sort out the gross inequalities around the world for the simple reason that the greatest astrophysicist mind might be in a squalor in West Africa or in the favalalas of Brazil. We must utilise and give opportunity to every mind in the world to give ourselves the best statistical chance of discovering a great intellect who can act as a catalyst of human progression.

Race, religion and territorial conflict must be left in the past, no good can come from it and it only provides an easy distraction from actually considering and facing these big scientific questions.

Science needs a spring clean. We have to accept that not knowing what is happening is far better than blindly following "science" or some 300 year old theory. Not saying that science is wrong, but false assumptions only limit what we are capable of thinking, especially in regards to the human mind, consciousness and the power of thought.

Once we can allow ourselves to unreservedly think, process and consider any problem, the universe will be at our finger tips.

[Gareth]

@michael haynes
i agree, we do have some valid points here.
The animal human brain has one dominant pattern - self importance.
This patterns grows evermore so and the creative thinking suffers. Back in the 1700's the patterns locked out dogma and self importance which is why so many brains the world over , started discovering.
Now, the modern day human is only concerned with wealth and money - creative thinking dwindles.
Going by this, only a few human brains are able to discover - those who detach the material world from the real world. But the majority of human kind are locked into a material mindset which only points to one outcome
in the distiny of human kind - destruction via greed and title.

[Gareth]

And may i point out - scientists earning material wealth
for humanity's sake will find themselves lacking any creative juice. Science should not be linked to high sallay - we have a world full of qualified scientists
earing sky high sallaries, discovering nothing - earning money just because they remembered all they studied.
You may fill your brain with information but 'tis the new information which is important for humanity, not that in the textbooks of the past.

[Mark D]

Gareth - are you serious? The science community punches well above its weight in results and outcomes.

It's not scientists who are getting rich. It's the Zuckerbergs: internet engineers or coal seam gas profiteers getting rich.

[NotGareth]

Mark D
Dont feed the trolls and in a week or 2 they go away.

[m.emin bayram]

teknolojimizin daha genç olması bizi prometheus daki gibi üstün atalarımızın yaratmadığını savunuyorum... dünya oluşumundan bu yana birçok medeniyetin varolup zamanı geldiğinde de birden yok olduğunu ,ve tekrar yeni ve baştan medeniyetlerin oluştuğunu ve tekrar yok olduğunu savunuyorum bu döngü milyarlarca yıldır böyle dvam etmiş kanısındayım .. en son döngü şu an yaşadığımız durumdur bundan sonra da olmayacağını düşünüyorum.