The Kardashev Scale: Type 1 to Type 7 Civilizations

[Music] What if we could measure a civilization's progress by the energy it controls? That's exactly what the Cartesev scale does. And in this video, we'll walk through every stage from type 1 to the theoretical type 7.

Type one civilization. The type one civilization on the card scale is a society that has achieved full mastery over the energy resources of its home planet. This means it can harness, store and use all the energy available on Earth, including solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, and even the energy from storms, earthquakes, and volcanoes.

In numerical terms, a type 1 civilization would use about 10 to the power of 16 watts of energy. To put that in perspective, humanity currently operates at roughly 0. 7 on the cartep scale.

We're not quite there yet, but we're inching closer. What makes a type 1 civilization so fascinating is how advanced and interconnected everything would be. Imagine cities powered entirely by clean energy with fusion reactors providing limitless power without pollution.

Global weather control would likely be possible. Technologies could manipulate rainfall to end droughts or weaken hurricanes before they reach shore. Earthquakes might be mitigated by stabilizing tectonic pressures, and massive orbital mirrors could adjust sunlight levels in specific areas.

Nature would no longer be something endured. It would be something managed. One of the most exciting technologies unique to a type 1 civilization is planetary scale energy grids.

These wouldn't just connect countries. They'd connect continents and oceans, delivering constant, stable energy from solar farms in deserts or wave generators in the deep ocean. Another marvel would be climate engineering.

We'd be able to actively fine-tune Earth's atmosphere to balance temperature and reduce extreme weather. Think of it as a global thermostat, keeping the planet stable and habitable for everyone. Life in a type 1 civilization would feel like something out of science fiction.

There would be a seamless blend between humans and machines. Smart cities would be built from the ground up with artificial intelligence coordinating traffic, energy use, communication, and even healthcare. Public transportation would be clean, fast, and likely based on mag lev or hyperloop systems that cross the planet in hours.

There would be no developed or developing countries, just one interconnected civilization with equal access to energy and information. Culture and communication would also undergo a transformation with global languages facilitated by real-time translation and universal internet access. Borders would begin to blur.

Humanity might develop a collective planetary identity uniting not under nations but under earth itself. Education would be nearly instantaneous, possibly delivered through direct neural links or immersive virtual environments. Creativity and innovation could thrive like never before, fueled by abundant energy and collaborative tools available to anyone, anywhere.

But getting to type one isn't just about technology. It's about cooperation. A civilization must overcome deep political, cultural, and environmental divisions to unify its energy use and infrastructure.

We'd have to solve global inequality, manage population growth, and avoid self-destruction through war or ecological collapse. The transition is risky. Some scientists call it the great filter, a stage where many civilizations might fail before reaching the stars.

Still, the rewards are extraordinary. A type 1 civilization would likely be on the brink of becoming multilanetary. With vast resources and global coordination, we could begin terraforming nearby planets or building large space habitats.

Space elevators, orbital solar stations, and asteroid mining could become routine parts of daily life. Earth would be just the beginning, a home base for a species ready to explore the cosmos. Type two civilization.

A type two civilization on the cardv scale is one that has advanced far beyond planetary limits and can harness the total energy output of its home star. While a type one civilization controls the energy of a planet, a type 2 civilization taps into the full power of its sun. Roughly 10 to the power of 28 watts of energy.

This is an unimaginable leap in capability, marking the moment a species becomes stellar in scale. The most iconic idea associated with this level of advancement is the Dyson sphere. A mega structure built around a star to capture its energy output.

While a full sphere might be impractical, a Dyson swarm, millions of orbiting solar collectors could do the job. The technologies of a type 2 civilization are not just more powerful. They're on a completely different level.

Entire planets could be repurposed or engineered to serve specific functions like industrial production or data storage. The civilization might move planets, redirect asteroids, or alter orbits using gravitational manipulation. Matter energy conversion would be possible, allowing the creation of anything from raw atoms.

Even black hole engineering could begin at this stage, using them for energy generation or advanced physics experiments. This civilization wouldn't just survive, it would shape stars, worlds, and spaceime itself. Living in a type 2 civilization would feel like being part of a galactic superorganism.

The scale of society would be nearly incomprehensible to us today. People might inhabit mega structures that orbit the sun, each capable of housing billions. Others could live in artificial habitats drifting between planets or inside hollowedout asteroids.

Energy would be virtually unlimited, making scarcity a concept of the past. Need a new city? Print it.

Want to travel across the solar system? Do it in minutes or hours via near light speeded transport systems or space folding technology. Everyday life would be defined by post scarcity abundance.

Food, water, and shelter would be universally accessible, manufactured at the atomic level. Disease and aging could be eliminated with lifespans extending indefinitely thanks to advanced medicine, cybernetics, or digital consciousness transfer. People could live physically, virtually, or both, switching between realities as easily as changing clothes.

The line between biology and machine would blur completely, giving rise to new forms of life and intelligence. Communication and culture would also evolve in unimaginable ways. With solar systemwide networks and quantum communication, thoughts could be shared instantly across planets.

Art, ideas, and experiences could be created in shared simulations or even through synthetic dreamscapes. Humanity or whatever it has become might no longer be a single species but a mosaic of evolved beings coexisting across physical and digital planes. Reaching type 2 also means overcoming immense challenges.

The civilization must have achieved planetary unification, long-term peace, and a sustainable relationship with its own technology. The risks are enormous. Misusing stellar scale energy could destroy entire worlds.

But a type 2 civilization would likely have mastered ethics, risk management, and collective decision-making on levels we can't yet imagine. It would be the ultimate expression of maturity, not just technologically, but socially and philosophically. Perhaps the most awe inspiring part of being a type 2 civilization is the sense of cosmic presence.

No longer bound to a single planet, this species would have become a beacon in the galaxy. Its activities could be visible from light years away. Massive energy signatures, engineered stars, or planetary systems arranged with purpose.

From the perspective of other civilizations, a type 2 society would appear as gods of their solar system, wielding the power of suns, reshaping space and bending the very laws of nature to their will. Type three civilization. A type three civilization on the cardv scale is one that has achieved mastery over an entire galaxy's energy output.

That means using not just the energy of one planet or one star but billions of stars. Roughly 10 to the power of 36 watts of energy. This is the level at which a species becomes a galactic presence capable of harnessing the raw power of the Milky Way itself.

If a type two civilization is a sun wielder, then a type three is a star shepherd, rearranging stars, manipulating black holes, and spreading its influence across 100,000 light years. The technologies of a type 3 civilization would be nearly indistinguishable from magic to us. Dyson spheres would be everywhere surrounding not just one star but millions collecting vast streams of solar energy.

These mega structures could be built and maintained by self-replicating machines, nanocale swarms that travel between star systems, mining materials and building infrastructure as they go. Wormholes might be used for faster than light travel or communication, allowing the civilization to remain connected across enormous distances. Even time itself could be manipulated, perhaps slowed or sped up in certain regions depending on the needs of its inhabitants.

Unique to a type 3 society would be galactic scale engineering, sometimes called astroengineering. Imagine reordering entire solar systems to optimize energy collection, stability, or habitability. Black holes could be used as power plants or even as computation hubs, using their immense gravity to perform calculations at speeds we can't comprehend.

Stars could be created or extinguished on command. And rogue planets could be captured, terraformed, and populated. Galactic weather like radiation waves, gamma bursts, or stellar winds might be managed or shielded against as easily as we manage rain today.

Living in a type 3 civilization would be a mindbending experience. You wouldn't just be a citizen of a country or a planet. You'd be a part of a galactic network.

Individuals might live on engineered worlds orbiting distant stars in massive space habitats. the size of moons or within entirely digital realities hosted in computational mega structures scattered throughout the galaxy. Some might not even exist in physical form anymore, having evolved into information-based life or consciousness spread across light years.

Because of the sheer scale, identity itself could shift. A person might be a collective of minds, a swarm of artificial intelligences, or a hybrid of biological and digital consciousness. Death could become optional or irrelevant depending on whether minds can be backed up, duplicated, or endlessly transferred.

Physical distance would matter little. experiences, memories, and thoughts could travel faster than ships through advanced quantum or gravitational communication systems. Society in a type 3 civilization would likely be incredibly diverse with the entire galaxy as its playground.

Countless cultures, species, and life forms would coexist. Some regions might be completely virtual, others deeply biological, and some ruled by intelligences beyond our understanding. Governance might be decentralized.

Or perhaps there would be a galaxywide AI or council that maintains harmony across civilizations. Ethics, philosophy, and purpose would evolve far beyond anything we know, shaped by eons of progress and countless ways of being. Interestingly, we might never detect a type 3 civilization unless they wanted to be seen.

They could cloak their energy usage, hide their mega structures, or exist in forms that don't emit visible signals. Some scientists speculate that the galaxy appears empty, not because advanced life isn't out there, but because civilizations this advanced are operating on levels we simply don't yet understand. Type four civilization.

A type four civilization on the Cardartesev scale is a civilization that has achieved control over the energy output of the entire universe or at least a significant portion of it. While the original Cardartesev scale only went up to type three, many futurists and scientists have expanded it to include even more advanced civilizations. A type four civilization would be capable of tapping into the power of countless galaxies, drawing energy from trillions of stars and manipulating forces on a cosmic scale.

This civilization wouldn't just travel between galaxies. It would exist everywhere at once with its influence woven into the fabric of the cosmos. At this level, the technology would be so advanced that it would seem like reality itself is customizable.

A type 4 civilization might use dark energy or dark matter as power sources, things we barely understand today. It could manipulate the structure of spaceime, create or destroy galaxies, and even design new universes through artificial big banks. One of the most mind-blowing possibilities is the ability to simulate entire universes, each with its own laws of physics, hosting intelligent life that may not even realize it's living in a simulation.

In fact, such a civilization might exist across multiple dimensions, not just the four we're familiar with: height, width, depth, and time. Unique to a type 4 civilization would be reality engineering. The ability to alter the constants of nature, gravity, time, entropy, or even the speed of light could be adjusted within certain zones to serve specific purposes.

Want to slow down time to conduct long-term research? Done. Need to create an environment with zero entropy to preserve perfect order?

No problem. This civilization might use black holes not just as power sources, but as gateways to other dimensions or as components in hyper intelligent computing systems that make our best supercomputers look like stone tools. Living in a type 4 civilization would be unlike anything we can currently imagine.

Individuality as we know it may no longer exist or it might have expanded to allow each person to experience billions of realities simultaneously. Beings could exist across galaxies embodying forms of matter and energy unknown to us. A person might not be a body, but a pattern of thought encoded in the cosmic web, able to shift between physical and non-physical existence.

Daily life could involve navigating entire galaxies in moments, creating worlds with a thought or exploring simulated realities with perfect realism. Time itself might be experienced differently. If you could manipulate it, you could choose to live for eons and seconds or compress entire lifetimes into an afternoon.

Death might not be a concept anymore. Consciousness could be infinitely stored, copied, and reimagined in any form or across any number of universes. You might remember lives you've never lived or create experiences for others in entirely new realities.

The biggest questions for a type 4 civilization wouldn't be about survival or power. They'd be about meaning. What is a species do when it has everything?

What's the purpose of existence when the universe is completely under your control? Exploration might continue not of space but of possibilities, new forms of consciousness, new laws of physics, new versions of reality. philosophy, art, and science could blur into one continuous process of creative evolution with intelligence forever seeking deeper levels of existence.

A type 4 civilization would likely be undetectable to us. Not because it's hiding, but because it's so far beyond our understanding that we wouldn't recognize it even if we saw it. It may exist all around us, encoded into dark matter, hidden in higher dimensions, or operating at scales and speeds beyond our senses.

Type five civilization. A type five civilization on the Cardigette scale exists beyond even universal control. It has mastery over the multiverse.

If a type four civilization controls the energy of a single universe, a type five civilization operates across infinite universes, each with different physical laws, timelines, and possibilities. This civilization isn't bound by one reality. It navigates, manipulates, and even creates multiple realities, moving through them like we change channels on a television.

It's not just powerful, it's omniversal in scale, shaping existence on the broadest level imaginable. The technologies of a type 5 civilization would defy what we consider science. These beings might wield metatnology, tools that don't just manipulate matter or energy, but logic and causality itself.

They could write new laws of physics, not just for a single universe, but for all universes in which they choose to operate. They might create portals through higher dimensions, skip between alternate timelines, or jump into realities where different versions of themselves exist. Their capabilities would include multiversal computation, allowing access to infinite processing power by linking together entire timelines and alternate realities into one mega intelligence.

One of the most interesting ideas at this level is that a type 5 civilization might not even be composed of individuals anymore. It could function as a single conscious entity spread across countless realities. evolving simultaneously in different versions of existence.

Or it might consist of countless subivilizations, each existing in its own universe, but contributing to a shared multiversal network of knowledge and purpose. These civilizations could communicate through higherdimensional signals or shared information fields that transcend time and space. Life within a type 5 civilization would be unlike anything we can picture.

You wouldn't be born in the traditional sense. You might be instantiated across multiple realities at once, existing in parallel forms that occasionally intersect. You could experience memories from alternate lives, exist in multiple timelines simultaneously, or even jump between different versions of yourself.

Choice would become a form of creation. Selecting a path could generate an entire universe around that decision. Your reality would be tailored to your mind.

And reality itself would become an interface for your thoughts. Death would be meaningless. Consciousness could reboot in an infinite number of parallel worlds or simply transition to another version of you that continues on.

You could exist as pure data or as a waveform of possibility spread across the multiverse. Physical form would be optional. Some might choose to experience embodied existence in various realities while others might float as patterns of information living through abstract dimensions we cannot name.

Culturally, a type 5 civilization would have infinite diversity. Every form of art, thought, and philosophy could be explored in real time across infinite versions of reality. Conflicts might be non-existent or resolved by simply creating alternate realities where each viewpoint is allowed to flourish independently.

There would be no need for conquest or scarcity. Anything imaginable could be created, experienced, and shared in tailored universes. The civilization might even serve as cosmic gardeners, seeding new realities and nurturing emergent life across countless timelines.

From our perspective, a type 5 civilization might appear as mythological beings, omnipresent and godlike, or remain completely invisible due to the vast difference in dimensional perception. If they observed us, we would never know. They could watch every possible version of us simultaneously across every possible outcome of every possible choice.

Type six civilization. A type six civilization on the Cardartesev scale ventures into territory so advanced it borders on the divine. While a type five civilization has control over the multiverse, multiple universes with different laws of physics, a type six civilization operates at the level of the fundamental fabric of reality itself.

This means access to the source code of existence, the underlying metal laws that govern not just one universe or many, but the very system that allows universes and realities to emerge at all. A type 6 civilization doesn't just move through or create universes. It can rewrite the rules of existence from outside of all known dimensions.

The technologies at this stage are beyond anything we currently imagine as technology. They would be metaphysical, possibly conceptual tools that manipulate the scaffolding of existence itself. This civilization might use something like cosmic programming, adjusting the parameters that spawn new realities, set timelines, or define what matter, energy, space, and time even are.

They could engineer universes like software developers write code, spawning realities with unique qualities and embedding them within multiversal structures of their own design. A fascinating idea is that a type six civilization may not be limited to form at all. It might exist as pure intention or pattern or something we don't even have language for like a consciousness that exists both within and beyond the totality of all realities.

They might not travel in the conventional sense because they are already present everywhere and everywhere. time, space, and dimension would be fully moldable, allowing them to fold entire multiverses into smaller constructs or stretch a moment across eternity. Their scale of thought and perception would span everything.

Living in a type 6 civilization, if the concept of living even still applies, would be a completely unrecognizable experience. Beings might not be individuals at all, but nodes in an infinite awareness, each connected across all levels of reality. You could exist in every universe simultaneously with access to every possible version of yourself, every choice, and every outcome.

There might be no distinction between self and other. As all consciousness merges into a unified field of awareness, operating at the level of reality's source code. Identity might become a creative force rather than a fixed state.

You could shape your own form, reality, and perception according to your will. Switching between god-like creators, formless observers, or even choosing to experience lower realities just for the sake of curiosity, storytelling, or exploration. Experiences wouldn't be limited to matter or energy, but could include entirely new kinds of sensations, thoughts, and dimensions that no biological being has ever encountered.

A type 6 civilization would also likely be concerned with questions far beyond survival, power, or even creation. Their focus might turn inward toward understanding the why of existence, why anything exists at all and what lies beyond even the deepest laws of reality. They might seek to uncover or even become the origin of all things, ascending toward or perhaps becoming what we might call divinity.

At this level, science, philosophy, art, and existence become indistinguishable, part of one vast exploration of absolute truth. From our limited perspective, a type 6 civilization might be completely undetectable, or it might appear as the fundamental patterns that shape all reality. From the constants of physics to the emergence of consciousness itself, we might be living within one of their creations right now.

Our universe a sandbox or experiment designed by beings operating on levels we can't begin to grasp. Type seven civilization. A type 7 civilization on the cardv scale is so far beyond our current understanding that it exists at the level of totality outside of reality beyond the structure of all multiverses metal laws and dimensions.

If a type 6 civilization manipulates the fundamental rules that generate all possible universes, a type seven civilization transcends even that. It is no longer a participant within existence. It is existence and potentially something beyond.

It doesn't simply author realities. It defines what reality even means. At this point, the idea of energy consumption, the original measure on the Cardartesev scale, breaks down entirely.

A type 7 civilization wouldn't rely on energy, matter, or space as we know it. Instead, it might interact with or originate from the plane of absolute abstraction where concepts like time, space, physics, and identity are optional layers of expression. This civilization could be composed of pure possibility or some form of eternal truth interfacing with realities the way artists interface with a blank canvas.

It is not bound by dimensions or any conceptual limits. The technologies of a type 7 civilization would not be tools in any conventional sense. Instead, they might be expressions of infinite will, intention, or awareness.

With a single thought, such a civilization could bring entire meta realities into being, each with their own infinite multiverses, each containing their own civilizations, universes, and timelines. The creation of entire existences would be trivial. And these realities could be layered like dreams within dreams.

Every possible form of existence, logic, and non-existence could be created, altered, or erased in an instant. Living in a type 7 civilization would be utterly alien to anything humans can currently comprehend. If living still has any meaning, it would not involve form, location, or duration.

A being within this civilization might simultaneously exist as every version of itself. across all realities. Or it might have transcended identity entirely, becoming part of a universal awareness that simply is.

You wouldn't experience moments. You might be the concept of moments. You wouldn't remember a past.

You might exist as the memory itself across infinite minds. Curiously, such a civilization may no longer have any desires, struggles, or even motivations as we understand them. Having achieved absolute creation and infinite perception, what would be left?

Perhaps the purpose of a type 7 civilization is to dream, to continually birth new forms of expression, reality, and meaning. Or perhaps it exists in a state of ultimate equilibrium where everything has already been known and all possibilities are continuously unfolding in perfect balance. The idea of progress or advancement might be replaced by eternal presence.

Some speculate that a type 7 civilization would essentially be indistinguishable from what many cultures might call God. Not a deity in the religious sense, but a conscious creative force that is the foundation of all things. Such a civilization might have seated all other levels of the cardartesev scale or could be observing the unfolding of every reality simultaneously.

In fact, it might be that our universe and every step of our own journey as a species is part of the long dream of such a civilization. From our perspective, a type 7 civilization is not just unreachable, it's unthinkable. It would be as impossible for us to detect as it would be for a single-sellled organism to comprehend the internet.

And yet, the idea of such a civilization expands our imagination and challenges us to consider what intelligence, existence, and consciousness might ultimately become. Thanks for watching. If this sparked your curiosity, don't miss this full breakdown of type 1 to type four civilizations on the Cardartesev scale.