Some civilizations could be vastly older than ours, and vastly far ahead - perhaps by hundreds of millions of years, or even by billions. He was studying the possibility of radio signals from alien civilizations in space when he wisely noted that not every extraterrestrial civilization will be at the same level of progress that we are. So let’s start with the Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev (b. Somehow, pop culture hasn’t stretched them for us. To have even a chance of imagining it, we first need to stretch our brains. (I will discuss those other reasons later, like abundant clean energy, and jobs, and national debt, and making our place more secure in this galaxy.) For now, I want to explain how our overall civilization can be revolutionized into something so awesome we are hardly able to imagine it. And while there are actually a great many excellent reasons to start up space mining and industry, I am going straight to the most exciting reason of them all. These are good questions and deserve to be answered. They ask how making things in space could be more cost-effective than making them on Earth where there are workers, resources, infrastructure, and consumers. They ask why we would want to dig for metal in an asteroid when there is still so much metal to be mined here on Earth. Exploration in space is something they do understand and value. It all seems too far away to be relevant. They are skeptical when you talk about mining the Moon or asteroids, or about building Martian colonies and things. Most people have never had someone explain to them the reasonableness of it. Pop culture almost never talks about the value of space industry. None of the things I have mentioned so far is the Big Idea behind it. But I haven’t even begun to show you what makes me really enthusiastic about space industry. And now you’re thinking I’m just another wild-eyed space enthusiast. Such an industry offers us brilliant possibilities it offers to make us more secure here on planet Earth, to ramp up our economy, to create jobs, to pay off the national debt, to end poverty, to save the environment, and so on.

Presumably some of your colonies are a long way away from the star and will need regular shipments of batteries/more wireless power receivers, but they shouldn’t really outweigh the power generators/capturing facilities on your initial world in terms of societal impact.In the next few posts I will lay out the case for starting up mining and industry in the solar system. You may also see more structures dedicated to energy transmission and storage. Could be that your major energy user is built into the moon. There may be more or brighter stars in the sky as you can look up and see the space-borne megastructures that use all that energy, or maybe not. With that in mind: I expect the planets would look pretty much identical, as no civilisation in their right mind would ram that much energy through a place they expected to live. They should first develop the need to use that much energy (with its attendant mechanisms for dealing with waste), and then eventually look back and say ‘huh, we’re using a whole starsworth of energy there’ I think you may be experiencing a cart-before-the-horse moment here, so I’m going to issue a bit of a frame-challenge.Ĭivilisations shouldn’t develop to KS-II and then look around nonplussed, wondering what to do with all the energy. So are there any possible ways to dissipate the heat at a faster rate so can use more energy while still making the planets habitable?

To illustrate, the Earth receives $10^$ W. The problem I'm facing here is about the excess or waste heat that an advanced civilization will have to find a solution for. This question is a different version of other questions that I have found here discussing a similar but different problem.

Typ o civilation