Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - How powerful could a civilization get?

Episode Date: January 3, 2023

Daniel and Jorge discuss the Kardashev Scale, Kardashians, Cryptocurrencies and crpytozoology.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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featuring Michelle Obama. To hear this podcast and more, open your free iHeartRadio app, search all the smoke, and listen now. Hey, Daniel, how's our podcast doing these days? Are we number one in any territories right now? Unfortunately, we are only number three in natural science in the U.S.

behind some like paranormal and Bigfoot podcasts. Ooh, maybe we should do those topics. then we can be number one. Daniel and Jorge explain Bigfoot. How are those considered natural science? It doesn't seem very natural to me. I don't know, but the folks in the UK actually have us as number one in natural science ahead of the Bigfoot podcast.

So shout out to the UK science listeners. Maybe they don't have Sasquatch in the UK. Or maybe they call it something different, like Lochness or you furry guy. I don't know, but it makes me hopeful that we'll be number one in natural science in other places. Ooh. Are you thinking globally or are you thinking like solar system why? Yeah, let's go interplanetary. I want to become the top podcast of Martian colonists.

Why stop there? Why not go all the way to Jupiter or Uranus? I mean, Uranus. Sure. I want to also be number one podcast among aliens eavesdropping on human technology. You think we have alien fans? I just wonder if that's going to change who buys ads for the show. What kind of products do you think they would be trying to sell to humans?

I don't know, but thanks to cryptocurrency and Venmo, they can actually send their funds interplanetarily to us on Earth. You think they have Venmo in other galaxies or other planets? Also, how do they do the exchange rate? Don't you need like a central bank or something? We'll figure that out when we build our Daniel and Jorge Galactic Empire. Which will include cryptocurrency? I don't know, man.

Sounds kind of risky. Well, if we're not going to do cryptozoology, we've got to do crypto something. Crypto Economics. XO Crypto Economics. ExoCrypto Podcastomics. I'll be the first person with a PhD in that field. Hi, I'm Jorge, I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I own zero cryptocurrency.

Oh, how do you know? How do I know? I mean, is it all virtual? Couldn't you virtually own it, too? I mean, I checked my pockets and I didn't find any, so. That's what I mean. You wouldn't find it in your pockets. I mean, my digital pockets, man.

No, I'm not invested in cryptocurrency. I've not bought any cryptocurrency. I don't think that anything I own owns any cryptocurrency, to the best of my knowledge, as my lawyers advised me to say, I am not in the crypto universe. Well, it might be hard to tell these days. I wonder, like, if some mutual fund you buy, buy some other fond that buys another fund

that maybe has a little bit of crypto in it. We probably all have a little bit of crypto in us. Humans are pretty cryptic, I guess. But welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge, Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio. In which we attempt to do our best to decrypt the universe and explain all of its mysteries to you. We want to unscramble the craziness that is our cosmos

and explain to you how it can be understood in terms of a set of basic physical laws. It seems like so far, everything out there can be made sense of. It's possible to assemble simple mathematical stories that describe how balls bounce against each other, how galaxies form, and maybe even what's inside black holes, or the fundamental underpinnings of alien economics. That's right, because it is a pretty rich universe full of amazing and incredible treasures that you can invest in in order to grow your mind, I guess.

And so that's what we do here. We like to talk about it so we can have. a pretty good exchange with all of you about it. All we ask for is your time and a slice of your brain to sit with us and enjoy the crazy mysteries of the universe as we try to unravel them. While we are here on this tiny rock, we are able to cast our minds across the cosmos and wonder what's going on out there in other solar systems. Are there aliens looking up at their night skies wondering what we are thinking about

and whether we would be interested in buying their NFTs? Yeah, because it's a pretty big universe. And as they said in the movie, Contact, it'd be kind of a shame if we were the only living and sentient beings in it. It would be a pretty amazing thing to be the only ones in this vast universe that have some kind of intelligence or podcast. It would be pretty amazing to be alone and it would be pretty amazing to not be alone. Either answer to this famous question is mind-blowing. Does it depend you think on whether you're an extrovert species or an introvert species? I think it's nice to know that they're out there.

If you're an introvert species, you might not want to give them a lot. call but you still want to know that they exist you know i think everybody's probably curious about the universe but there's an assumption there right we're extrapolating our experience to the experience of aliens we're hoping that there is other intelligence out there in the universe because we know that we are capable of joy and love and beauty and we hope that aliens out there are also having a good time we hope that they aren't floating in their slime pits and just totally suffering would that make you i guess more of an exovert because you like exoplanetary life i am more of an ex-overt than an extrovert. That's true. I'm more interested in talking to aliens than

humans sometimes. Learning from them, I guess. Because if there are aliens out there, there's a lot that we could learn from them, right? There's a lot that we could learn about how to travel through stars or even just how to make it past our point in civilization to greater things. Or just how to be alive in this universe. When you travel even just here on Earth and experience different human cultures, you learn so much about the basic questions they ask about life, the approach they take, It makes you realize how much of your life and the way you think is kind of arbitrary and cultural. It opens your minds. It shows you the box that you have been thinking in.

And so talking to aliens would be the ultimate version of that experience. Could help us understand our context in ways we can't even imagine today. And of course, perhaps help us crack some of the longstanding physics problems we're banging our heads against. I feel like maybe we can do that on our own, Daniel. Why do humans need help? Can we figure it all out eventually on our own? It's certainly possible that we could figure it all out eventually, but we might not be the smartest species out there, right? I think humans are pretty clever, but it's possible we have a limitation to our fundamental neural capacity that makes it impossible for us to grasp the mathematics that underlie the universe.

There's also the possibility of false starts. You know, human science is fairly diverse, but it also has collapsed along a few pathways. Choices we made early on, being influenced by geniuses who came along. it's just interesting to think about other paths that intelligent species might have taken that might be more or less fruitful in terms of understanding the universe. I wonder how you would react

if one of your students said that to you. Like, hey, Dr. Whiteson, I don't think I'm the smartest person in this class. I just don't have the neural processes for it. Can I copy of that person next to me for our test? You would have to say yes, Daniel. I think the ultimate exam for an intelligent species is working together to figure out the mystery of the universe.

So we're all getting graded on a group project. That's how I see it. Well, it is an interesting topic to think about whether aliens exist out there. And just to be clear, Daniel, nobody has seen or talked to any aliens as far as physicists know, right? As far as this physicists know, we have no confirmed communications with aliens. Absolutely. That's a different podcast in the natural sciences. Maybe the Loch Ness Monster is actually an alien come to Earth to talk to his long-lost brother, Bigfoot.

I think you just found our new gold mine here. fun fan fiction about human fiction Cryptozoology but instead of thinking about what other weird kinds of life might exist in the lakes of Scotland or the deep forests of Alaska we like to think about what kind of life

might exist on other planets and whether it would be possible to communicate with them if we're going to hear messages from distant civilizations on the other side of the galaxy will of course need to receive those messages They'll need to be capable of sending us those messages.

So we have to think a little bit about what their civilizations might be capable of. Yeah, although this might seem like baseless extrapolation or speculation, it is something that physicists have been engaged in for a while. Physicists have published papers on these ideas about aliens and what aliens could look like. And even Carl Sagan was sort of famous for chiming in a lot about aliens. You say baseless extrapolation like it's a bad thing? I don't get it. Usually, but maybe in physics.

The bar is lower? Is that what you're saying? Well, you know, in physics, we're often tackling problems that are basically impossible. We don't know how to get started. And so what we usually do is we begin with the simplest, dumbest thing, which often involves baseless extrapolation. Like, we don't know how to tackle this. Let's just assume a spherical cow and start from there. And so we're going to talk about alien civilizations. The only example we have is our own.

And so we have to begin at least by making some assumptions about alien civilizations and their similarity to civilization on earth, knowing all of the time, keeping in the back of our heads that we are making these assumptions and that maybe one day we'll figure out how to relax them or break them or get out of that box. And then I guess the point would be that once we meet aliens, you can be like, hi, I told you so or, whoa, I was totally wrong. Is that the whole point of it? Yeah.

If you think this through and you come to some conclusions and then you meet aliens and discover they're totally different from what you expected, it helps you think through what you might have misunderstood. which aspect of your assumptions, which step in your line of thinking might have gone wrong. How much of your time did you waste? Well, it's that or just don't think about it, you know? That's right. It's do physics or just don't think about it. Those are the only two options.

Yeah, do physics or do nothing, right? I mean, is there anything else on the menu? That's right. Well, what else could there be in life to do? No, but when you are tackling really big, hard questions about the nature of the universe and alien civilizations, you don't often have first principles to start from.

So you just sort of explore the space using some assumptions to get yourself oriented. Yeah, so this is something physicists have been thinking about and in fact, there's an interesting framework to think about it.

And the question here is, what would an alien civilization look like? Can we extrapolate from human civilization? So to the end, the podcast, we'll be tackling how powerful can a civil civilization, can a civilization get?

Now, Daniel, is this powerful as in, like, awesome or powerful as in, like, we'll come and kill us? Powerful as in what is their number one podcast. Ooh, in the natural sciences, in certain countries. Clearly, a leading indicator of cultural value and progress, right? And handsomeness as well, don't forget. There's a clear correlation if you look at a certain data set. There's lots of ways to think about the power of a civilization,

But in a very practical sense, if we are going to discover an alien civilization without going there, they need to be pretty powerful because we have to receive their signals. If they are far, far away around another star for us to hear their messages, their messages have to arrive on Earth, which means they need a certain power in their broadcast. And so we can think about, like, fundamentally, what is the energy available to those civilizations? Would they even have enough energy to beam us a message from the other side of the galaxy? You mean sort of like, what's their footprint? Like, what's their energy footprint? Yeah, physicists tend to think about things as like simple black boxes, right? Like energy in, energy out.

But when a physicist thinks about nutrition, for example, it's just like calories in, calories burned, right? Physicists model humans as like simple bomb calorimiter. And so here we're modeling like the entire complexity of an alien civilization in terms of like how much energy do they have access to and how much energy can they afford to put it to their signal. I see. So today we're sort of asking like how much.

energy and alien civilization might be able to consume, I guess, a span or hardness or channel into one signal. Exactly. It's a way of thinking through our possible future for our civilization. What does that hold? What technology might we develop in the future that gives us access to stars or many stars or many universes? And so physicists have come up with, or at least some physicists have come up with a scale to measure how much energy

an alien civilization might be able to tap into around them in where they live. It's called the Kardashian scale. It's not related to the Kardashians. Yeah, the scale is how many Kardashians do you have on your social media? And so we've currently maxed that out. We're leading the galaxy. Yeah. I think one is maybe too many on that scale. But is it Kardashev? Kardashian. How do you pronounce it? I've heard it pronounced Kardashev. And it's a popular trope in science fiction also because it's a fun way of thinking about very powerful alien civilizations. And so it crops up everywhere, and a bunch of listeners wrote in and asked us to talk about the Kardashev scale.

And are you sure they weren't asking us to talk to a Kardashian on the podcast? Because that would probably put us in the number one spot. I reached out to all of them. None of them have responded. All right. So then let's talk about this Kardashev scale here on today's episode. And so as usual, we were wondering how many people out there had heard of this scale and how it measures an alien civilization's possible energy use.

So thank you very much to everybody out there who participate. in these questions and answers, it's really fun for us to hear what people are thinking. If you'd like to participate for future episodes of the podcast, please don't be shy. Write to us to questions at Danielanhorpe.com. So think about it for a second. What do you think a Cardish of scale is?

Here's what people have to say. I'm pretty sure I've heard of the Cardishev scale, but I'm blanking on what it is. Something in the back of my mind is saying it's something about the size of stars or something like that. I have no idea. I don't know. I don't have any idea.

Kardashian-ev scale. No. I don't know what the Kardashian-Skale is, but if I had to take a guess, I would say it is some sort of high-energy scale at which quantum effects become important, like in a black hole or something, because of the very high energy density and, yeah, so quantum properties become important. All right. Maybe we need a, we have no idea scale. because everyone seemed to max it out on the I don't know scale. There really was no recognition. I'm sort of amazed given the number of listeners who asked us to talk about this,

the listeners I happen to sample here had never heard of it. Well, that's what we're here for to talk about the Kardashians or alien scales that measure their energy. I wonder what the alien Kardashians are like. Oh, my gosh. I kind of hope they don't have Kardashians. Maybe the Kardashian scale is how much your civilization has jumped the shark. Well, we have jumped the shark and the Bigfoot and the Lochness monsters.

I think we're in big trouble. We're due for cancellation any moment. The Galactic Netflix is going to pull our budget, huh? That's right, yeah. No, I want to see what happens in season 5,000 of humanity. Oh, which season are we on now? I haven't been binging humans. I'm not cut up.

Everyone's talking about it. Everyone's like, oh, you've got to watch this. You've got to see these kids. Who has the time, you know? Spoiler alert, a lot of people die. Sounds like a depressing show. Well, let's jump into it, Daniel. What is the Kardashev scale?

So the Kardashev scale was suggested by a physicist, Kardashev, of course, that tries to imagine how civilizations will grow specifically in their energy use in order to understand how much energy they might have available to pump into signals to beam to Earth so that we can describe them. The original Kardashev scale has a fuse to,

But in the meantime, people have built on this and expanded on it and taken it all sorts of new directions. So it's sort of a fun framework for understanding how a civilization might grow to tap into the natural energy available to us in the universe. I see. Is it more like a scale that measures how much energy a civilization uses or just kind of keeps tab of where they would get this energy? It's both. It's an accounting of how much energy is available to a civilization. But of course, there aren't infinite arbitrary energy sources in the universe. And so it imagines how they might find those sources of energy. And it's broken into three categories, one where you think about all the energy available on a planet. Another way you think about all the energy available in the solar system.

And then a third where you think about all of the energy available in the galaxy. I see. So like a stage one civilization is one that only has the energy of a planet available to them. Or alternatively, you assume that they have access to all the, energy that a planet can have. Yes, precisely. All right, well, let's get into each of these stages and see where humans are and where aliens might be at.

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All right, welcome back to our podcast, baseless speculation with Daniel and Jorge about aliens. The first steps in understanding the universe with Daniel and Jorge. I thought the first step was always obvious. observation, Daniel, in science. Well, we've been trying to observe aliens, but we have zero data. So that's one thing we have to try to understand, right? I see. Step one is observe. Step 2A is if you don't observe anything, start making stuff up.

Is that what you're saying? Yeah, well, also, if you don't observe anything, try to understand why you didn't see something. One thing that motivated Cardasheff's paper was the famous Fermi paradox. The idea that the galaxy is quite old, certainly old enough for alien civilizations do have developed and beamed us signals, and yet we haven't heard from any of them. So Kardashev was motivated to think about like, well, how would they send us messages?

Would they actually have enough energy and how would they do it? So it's a way of thinking about also why we haven't heard from aliens. I see. It's kind of like they haven't come. This it is, why would that be? And if you can't see them, why would that be? And if you think about different scenarios, maybe you can come up with a way that you could see them.

Exactly. It might make the problem harder because maybe you discover, oh, it's quite trivial for aliens to have enough energy to beam us messages. Or maybe you discover that in order for aliens to send us messages from across the galaxy, they would have to harness all the power of the entire galaxy. And that might explain why we can't see Kardashians from other worlds. Which is a bad thing? No value judgments here, man.

This is just science. Well, apparently this idea of how much energy and alien species might be consuming or have available to them is all measured on something called the Kardashev scale, which, as you said, has three stages. So let's step through these stages. What's stage number one? And is that something we're at or are we past stage one? Where are we in this stage system?

So stage number one is a civilization that uses all of the energy available on its planet, meaning all of the solar energy, for example, that hits the surface of the Earth. We are not even at stage one. I mean, we are capturing some fraction of the solar energy, for example, and digging up fossil fuels that have effectively stored solar energy. from the past but on the earth what's available to us is something like 10 to the 17 watts watts is a unit of power so it's energy per second is that the kind of wattish like if you had a solar panel the size of the earth that's how much energy we would be getting from the sun if

yes if you can cover the entire earth with solar panels so you built like a solar panel that completely made the earth in shadow that's how much energy you could theoretically capture or that's how much energy is falling onto those solar panels. Solar panels, of course, not 100% efficient. But that's sort of like how much energy you have access to. And that's interesting how you said that basically like fossil fuels even what we have here, maybe even wind energy, it all comes from the sun eventually, right? All that energy originally does come from the sun.

Yeah, wind also comes from the sun because it involves heating of pockets of air by the sun. So all of that originally does come from the sun. There are, of course, other sources of energy we could tap into on Earth that are not directly from our sun. Like when you do fission, you're breaking apart uranium, that uranium was formed in some other process, maybe the supernova or collisions of neutron stars well before our solar system was even birth. So you're tapping into energy sources that have been stored there for a long time. Wait, you're saying all energy is solar energy. So when I'm at the gas station, I'm actually pouring solar energy into my car.

Yeah, well, gas is sort of like a solar battery. But the idea of the Kardashev scale is not to argue that the maximum energy you could get on Earth is just to cover it with solar panels. It's just a way to sort of set a level to fix a standard. There's actually more energy available than that. If you could like take the components of the earth and new fission and fusion, you could release even more energy than the sort of stage one Cardishaf standard. But it's just sort of like how to define a threshold. All right. So then is the threshold defined by the solar energy we get from the sun?

Or like all the energy in all of the uranium and heavy atoms and maybe even the water, because if you can figure out fusion, you could also fuse water to make energy. Is that how you define how much energy is available on planet Earth? No, it's just the amount of solar energy that falls on planet Earth defines the Kardashev scale. So you can in principle exceed it without leaving your planet, right? For example, you could achieve this by doing matter, anti-matter annihilation, right? Like two kilograms of matter, anti-matter annihilation every second would achieve Kardashev's stage one energy levels, even without doing any solar power. Right, but I wonder if maybe in his scale, he was more thinking about like long-term

sustainable energy sources, right? Like maybe we can figure out vision and fusion, but eventually we're going to run out of these fuel elements on a single planet. But the sun is going to be burning for billions of years. That's true, although a lot of these sources would last us a really long time. If, for example, we could do fusion, you know, we'd need like 300 kilograms of hydrogen fused per second to reach Kardashev stage one. That sounds like a lot, but there's a lot of hydrogen out there on the planet. You know, like a cubic kilometer of water has like a hundred billion kilograms of hydrogen.

So a cubic kilometer of water is like hundreds of years of energy at the Kardashev stage one. And there's a lot of cubic kilometers of water out there. So even if you were ignoring solar power, you could achieve this level and do it for a long, long time, even without solar power. I feel like you're trying to convince me that this Cardiff scale is not really valid. So I guess what are you saying? Or what is the scale supposed to be measuring then? The scale is just to set a standard to say, what could you achieve using the energy of a planet? Obviously, how much energy you could actually extract from a planet over billions of years depends on what's in that planet, for example.

How big is that planet? How much mass is there? But this is just like to set a standard. In the end, of course, it's arbitrary, but it's also a useful measure. It's an approximate value just to sort of guide your thinking. And one thing to realize is that we are far from that threshold here on Earth. If the standard is two times 10 to the 17 watts, we're about a factor of 10,000 below that. Human civilization uses like 10 to the 13 watts.

So we're well below a stage one civilization. Okay, so these stages are defined by wattage. So a stage one civilization is one that uses approximately 10. 10 to the 17 watts of energy. Is that kind of how the scale works? It's like if you're a solicitation and you're using about 10 to the 17 watts of energy, then we'll categorize you as a stage one. And usually that may, that will probably mean you're in the range of like still stuck in your planet.

Exactly. That's what you're capable of. Even if you're stuck on your planet, right? You're capable of something of that order. Maybe you figure it out matter, anti-matter annihilation. Maybe you figured out fusion. Maybe you've covered your planet in solar panels. Maybe you've built space-based solar panels.

that then beam the energy down to Earth. But if you're a very advanced civilization, but you're still on your planet, that's sort of the order of magnitude of energy that you have available to you. All right. So then where are we? You said we're below that maximum usage?

Yeah, we're about a factor of 10,000 below officially being stage one, crowned by the Galactic Empire as a baby civilization, age one. Carl Sagan estimated that we're like a type 0.7 civilization on the Kardashev scale. He tried to make it continue continuous instead of just having like one, two, three.

And he estimates that we're around 0.7. And it's kind of like a logarithmic scale, right? Like the difference between 0.7 and 0.8 is it's probably like an order of magnitude or something. Yeah, he was using a logarithmic extrapolation. And the reason is that we tend to increase the consumption of energy by our civilization fairly exponentially. Like in the last decade, energy use has gone up by 2.3% every year. Every year, that's a larger increase because it's 2.3% of a bigger number. And so people estimate that if we increase our energy use every year by 3%, then in 150 or 200 years, we would be at type 1 civilization.

I wonder if this scale also depends on like how many people there are or how many individuals of a certain species there are. Like, you know, if one person was using 10 to the 17 watts, it must be a super duper advanced civilization, right? with, you know, one person being able control all this energy. But, you know, there's like a trillion or trillion, trillion people. And each person is just using a little bit of energy, then maybe it's not that impressive of a thing. Yeah, maybe Alien Kardashians are dominating the alien energy market. It's a good question, how they use their energy.

And I think for Kardashev, the goal was to think about what fraction of their energy they might devote to sending a signal to outer space. If they have access to 10 to the 17 watts of energy, maybe they would devote 1% of it to pumping messages to the stars or 0.01% of it. But it just sort of gives you a scale for what they have access to. All right. Let's talk about what they might use all this energy for.

But I guess let's step through the rest of these stages. So if we're like almost up stage one civilization, what would be a stage two civilization? Stage two would be to unshackle yourself from your planet and then take advantage of all the energy put out by your state. star. Now, here we are on Earth, even if we gobbled up all of the photons that come to the Earth from the Sun, that's a tiny fraction of the Sun's energy. The Sun is also shooting out photons that don't hit the Earth, of course, in all sorts of directions. And so the idea is capture all of the

energy of your star, not just the fraction that falls on your planet. I see. So stage two is like we've left the Earth and we're living in space, basically. You don't even have to leave the Earth and you don't have to live in space necessarily, but you have to have somehow had the technology to harness the energy of that star, which probably means building some megastructure, like a bunch of solar panels that envelop your star to gather all of that energy. Right, but that would be a pretty big construction project. I mean, you would need people living out there just to build something so big or at least have the ability to like, you know, move around space pretty easily, which is a lot more than what we can do now. We definitely are nowhere close to doing that. You

probably would need people out there, but you also might be able to automate a lot of it. You could have robots, for example, that build more robots and then build this massive structure. It's hard to get your mind around like sort of the size of this thing. This would be the biggest thing anybody ever built. If you make it really close to the sun, it can be smaller, but then it's subject to a lot of solar radiation. If you make it further away from the sun, then it's got to be like ridiculously massive. Like, for example, if you built this thing at one AU, so you have like now a sphere who's radius is the radius of the Earth's orbit, then the inside of this thing is going to be 550

million times the surface area of the Earth. So imagine a construction project that rebuilds the surface area of the Earth 550 million times. That's definitely not going to be on budget or on schedule. Right. Although the positive thing is that it'll always be sunny inside of that sphere, right? Just like here in Southern California. Yeah, or Philadelphia. But I mean, this is sort of like one way that you could harness the power of the sun, which is to build a giant solar panel that basically like envelops the sun so you can capture all of its energy. And what does that take us up to in terms of wattage?

So stage one, remember, was 10 to the 17 watts. Stage two, using all the energy available from the sun is like four times 10 to the 26 watts. So that's like a billion times or two billion times more energy. than stage one. Really? Only a billion times to go from the Earth to the Sun? Only a billion times more energy. Wow, you don't seem impressed.

Well, isn't the Earth super tiny compared to the Sun? The Earth is certainly super tiny compared to the Sun, but the sort of cross-sectional area of the Earth, which is the fraction of the Sun's energy that it captures, is approximately one billionth of the surface area of a sphere whose radius is the orbit of the Earth. That's why if you built the Dyson sphere, it had to be like many hundreds of millions of times the surface area of the earth to cover the

inside of that sphere. So a fact of rebellion is about right. But again, this is just solar energy. Like we could probably maybe get to that level of wattage if we figure out fusion or fission more efficiently right here on Earth. It's conceptually possible to achieve a stage two civilization to get that same level of energy without building the Dyson sphere, you know, developing some other way to extract energy from within the earth, you know, antimatter. or fusion or something else crazy. Again, this is just sort of like a scale. The sun is the cheapest, most abundant,

easiest to identify source of energy in the solar system. So what could you do if you could capture all of the energy that it produces? Right. All right. Well, let's step through quickly. What are some of these other stages? If you use all the energy in the sun, where do you go from there?

All the energy in the galaxy? Yes, exactly. Where else could you go except from our star to all the other stars? So Kardashev's stage three says use all the energy in the galaxy, which basically is like all the energy in each individual star. And that takes you up another 11 orders of magnitude, another factor of 100 billion to four times 10 to the 37 watts. Remember stage one, which we're not even at, is 10 to the 17 watts. So now we're talking about 20 orders of magnitude more energy than stage one. Like somehow if you have solar panels around every star in a galaxy, then you could harness all of the light that is coming out of a particular galaxy, right?

In principle, if you didn't think building a Dyson sphere was a big enough construction project, you could build one around every single star in the galaxy. I can't even say it without laughing. It's such a ridiculous idea. But in principle, if you develop the machines to build more machines to complete your Dyson sphere project, they could just go off to the rest of the galaxy and keep working. Maybe your robots are like a virus. Once they start building dice and spheres, they just don't stop. That sounds like a negative thing. To snuff out a whole galaxy, basically, right?

Yeah, it depends on what you do with that. You know, if the robots develop these dice and spheres and then channel the energy to you for you to use for good for building your civilization and feeding your people, et cetera, awesome. If they just harness the energy of the galaxy and snuff it out, then yeah, the galaxy is going to go dark, right? all the stars would be burning inside these dyson spheres, there'd be no more light being released

for like astronomy and stargazing and romantic dinners. Well, you can imagine maybe an alien civilization doing this, and we have imagined then, apparently, and I think we've talked about this also in our podcast about this possibility. But maybe let's talk a little bit about why this is kind of relevant, right, to our question of aliens and do they exist and could we see them out there? Because the idea is that not just that there's an alien civilization using all this energy, but maybe they're using it in a way that would allow us to communicate with them or at least see them, right? Exactly.

Having aliens out there in the universe is not enough for us to discover them. We need to get signals from them. And at least up till now, we've relied on messages from electromagnetic radiation. That's what we're looking for. You know, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is scanning the sky for messages essentially in the radio. And to produce those radio waves takes energy. When your radio station is pumping out music that you like over the airwaves, they're doing so by running an antenna, by sending electricity, up and down that antenna, by wiggling those

electrons so that they radiate the photons that you pick up. You know how some radio stations are very powerful and other radio stations you can't really pick up in some areas. That's because some have more powerful broadcast antennas because they spend more money to build more antennas and use more energy. So in order to be heard a further distance, you need more energy. Well, I guess maybe I don't understand the scenario that you're imagining here. Are you imagining like there's an alien civilization using all this energy,

maybe all the energy in a galaxy and somehow we can pick up on that? Or is this scenario more specific where you're imagining like, all right, if there are aliens broadcasting out like, hey, we're here, signal, how much energy would they have available to put into that so that we could hope to see it? I think Kardashev is imagining the second one, that if aliens are intentionally sending out messages in the cosmos, how powerful could they make those messages? And what kind of civilizations could support ridiculously powerful messages that we could even hear from across the galaxy or from other galaxies? I mean, a civilization that harness the entire energy of their galaxy could do incredible things,

probably including sending very powerful messages across the millions of light years between galaxies. but also, you know, like galactic engineering projects. I mean, you have that much energy available and you can almost do anything. Right. I guess that's a whole separate question is like, would they use some of that energy to send out a signal to other people saying, hey, come check out our awesome engineering? Yeah, I mean, would we, right? We're currently using a very, very tiny fraction of our energy budget to even listen to messages

from outer space. We're not even really sending very many, at least not intentionally. You know, as you said before, our use of energy makes us visible from other. planets, but not from very far away, because those messages are not broadcast in like a tight beam that's sort of generally diffused. And so you'd have to be pretty close to Earth or have very, very sensitive antennas to even pick up our messages. And I guess you're also imagining, or Kartashev was imagining the scenario where you're broadcasting blindly, right? Like if you're broadcasting blindly in all possible directions and you hope that somebody listens to

it, how much energy would you need for that? But if you want a more focus communication, then you wouldn't need that, right? That's exactly right. If you don't know where people are, you need to broadcast in every direction. And so the power of your message falls very quickly. It goes like one over distance squared. Just like the brightness of the sun falls

as you get further and further away from it because the sun is not focused like a laser beam on your eyeball and a good thing too. So if you're broadcasting your message indiscriminately in every direction, then it has to be super powerful for anybody to pick it up. As a concrete example, the signals that we sent from Erescebo could only be received by an Erecibo-like telescope

if it was less than one light year away. And we know that there aren't any other solar systems less than a light year away. So aliens with our level of technology could not pick up our signals, even if they were around the closest star. Interesting. All right. Well, let's get into what this could mean for our search for extraterrestrial life and whether or not there are Kardashians in other galaxies.

That's a very important question. But first, let's take another quick break. I'm Dr. Joy Harden-Bradford, and in session 421 of therapy for black girls, I sit down with Dr. Afia and Billy Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our identity, mental health, and the ways we heal. Because I think hair is a complex language system, right, in terms of it can tell how old you are, your marital status, where you're from, you're a spiritual belief. But I think with social media, there's like a hyper fixation and observation of our hair, right? That this is sometimes the first thing someone sees when we make a post or a reel is how our hair is styled. We talk about the important role hairstyles play in our community, the pressure to always look put together, and how breaking up with perfection can actually free us.

Plus, if you're someone who gets anxious about flying, don't miss session 418 with Dr. Angela Neil Barnett, where we dive into managing flight anxiety. Listen to therapy for black girls on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about exploring human potential. I was going to schools to try to teach kids these skills, and I get eye rolling from teachers or I get students who would be like,

it's easier to punch someone in the face. When you think about emotion regulation, like you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome as a result of it if it's going to be beneficial to you because it's easy to say like go you go blank yourself right it's easy it's easy to just drink the extra beer it's easy to ignore to suppress seeing a colleague who's bothering you and just like walk the other way avoidance is easier ignoring is easier denial is easier drinking is easier yelling screaming is easy complex problem solving meditating, you know, takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever wished for a change but weren't sure how to make it? Maybe you felt stuck in a job, a place, or even a relationship. I'm Emily Tish Sussman, and on she pivots, I dive into the inspiring pivots of women who have taken big leaps in their lives and careers.

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Smokey Bear lives within us all. Learn more at smokybear.com. And remember, Only you can prevent wildfires. Brought to you by the USDA Forest Service, your state forester and the ad council. All right, we're talking about the Cardiff scale, which is a scale that physicists have invented

as a way to think about how much energy alien civilizations might be consuming or have available to them to send out, hey, we're here a signal, which we might be able to pick up. Which I guess is important, right? Because if we have a whole project called SETI to explore or to look for alien signals, it would be good to know if we even have a chance of seeing as signals from other alien civilizations, right?

Exactly. And it's a kind of thought experiment that physicists like to think about. Let's make some simple assumptions about the trajectory of civilizations and think about who we're looking for. Are we looking for a fairly young civilization like our own? Are we more likely to only be able to spot very advanced civilizations? So let's try to spend a minute or so thinking about what they might look like, how they might communicate, and what technology they might have available to them.

Right. And like you said, if we were to send a signal out to another star, we would need a ton of energy because the nearest star system is more than a light year away, which means we would need a lot of energy. So I guess to see an alien civilization in another galaxy or to hope to see an alien civilization in another galaxy sending out a signal that they're there, we would need to imagine an alien civilization pretty advanced, right, with access to an enormous amount of energy. That's right. Unless we were extraordinarily lucky and we happened to resolve a single star in their galaxy and see them do some crazy construction project on it or they were manipulating the star itself to pulse with messages that we could resolve, that would require crazy advanced technology and access to energy that we can't even imagine. Yeah, some fraction of all the energy of a galaxy. And so that's where the Kardashev scale would say, it's like, that's another stage in that scale, which is like if you can harness all of the energy in a galaxy, then maybe you might put some of that energy to putting out a signal, which would make you visible to aliens or to humans in other galaxies, right? Yeah. Maybe you have a prison planet where you put all of your Kardashians and you just want a big flashing warning signs, like do not go here, young civilizations. I feel like you just took it to another level there against the Kardashians there.

Now you're talking about jailing them in planets? Remember, we want them on the podcast. Oh, that's right. We want them on. Yes. Sorry, I'm talking about a luxurious island just for alien Kardashians. That's right. Your own private planet, yes.

And you get to hang out with the Lochness Monster in Bigfoot. Also, future guests on our podcast. That's right. Stay tuned. Keep listening. But this kind of thinking lets you imagine the kinds of things that aliens might be able to do. If you had access to all the energy of your solar system or of your galaxy, you could like move stars around. You could like obliterate planets.

You could build new kinds of stars. Nobody had ever seen before. You could have a whole new branch of engineering, you know, galaxy engineering. Yeah. And so that takes us to about stage three in the Cardiff scale, right? That's where you maybe built solar panels around every star in your galaxy. Is there a stage four? Can you go bigger than that?

Let's keep baselessly speculating. You want to extrapolate our extrapolation. Sure, let's do it. Well, Kardashev ended his extrapolation at stage three, imagining only use of the entire galaxy. But that was in 1960, and it's been a popular topic for people to think about. And so there have been extensions to the Kardshev scale. Stage four says, what if you could use all the energy in the universe? What?

Isn't the universe potentially infinite? It is potentially infinite, absolutely. And this stage imagines not just capturing all of the energy from all the stars in each galaxy, but also somehow tapping into that mysterious form of energy, dark energy, which is accelerating the expansion of the universe and has a much bigger slice of the universe's energy budget than just the paltry matter in stars, which you might remember accounts for less than 5% of the energy in the universe. Right. All the matter in our universe only counts for 5%. 5% right. There's also dark matter and dark energy. Are you saying like even if we harness all the energy coming out of the stars of a galaxy and even if you take all of the energy in the matter of that galaxy, that's still only 5% of all the energy available to someone, right?

Yeah. And so if you want to think big, right, then let's attack the biggest slice of the pie. And most of the energy of the universe is in dark energy. 70% of all the energy in the universe is now devoted. to accelerating the expansion of the universe. If you want to build a really big engineering project, you might as well start with the biggest slice. I wonder if maybe dark energy is an engineering project, Daniel. I mean, if slides were basically speculating, I'm going to speculate that dark energy is just aliens making the universe bigger. Well, that's a really clever idea,

but you're not actually the first one to have it. One physicist, Zoltan Galantai, argued that if there are civilizations that can do that, they could not be detected because their activities would be indistinguishable from the workings of the universe. We have no baseline to compare them to, right? We are assuming that the universe is driven mostly by natural processes, but if there are civilizations out there that are type four

and they've been playing games with the universe, then that's what we've been observing this entire time. Are you saying that the laws of physics are indistinguishable from the workings of a mysterious being? You're making the case for God, basically. Well, these civilizations would have almost godlike powers. We think they would still be constrained by the laws of physics, but remember, we don't know what those laws are. We have no understanding of dark energy, really.

We see that this is happening, but we do not understand the mechanism for it or what is controlling it. So it is potentially possible that there's an alien civilization out there with some knob, and they are driving the expansion of the universe. I mean, this is speculation on speculation, absolutely. But yes, we don't understand the mechanism of it. So it could be down to some alien civilization. This is the turductant of speculation. Is that way you're saying we're going deep? Yeah.

And there are more levels. What? What could be more powerful than all the energy in the universe? Well, stage five says use all the energy in the multiverse, right? Why be limited to do a single universe when apparently there's an infinite number of possible universes out there for you to harness and manipulate? Yeah, why not? Let's go there. So this is assuming that the multiverse exists and that somehow some alien civilization has access to all of these different universes and also have the ability to harness their energy. You sound incredulous and that's for a good reason because it's a pretty ridiculous idea. You're right. We don't even know if the multiverse exists like are there other universes out there? If the multiverse does exist, is it the flavor of multiverse that would allow us to communicate with other universes?

There are some in which these universes are forever separate and can never communicate with each other. And so that would prevent any alien civilization from harnessing them. For example, the quantum multiverse from the many world's interpretation of quantum mechanics says that the universe splits every time a quantum object has to make a decision. But you can't ever access those other universes. But in principle, there are versions of the multiverse where the other universes could interact. with ours. And so in principle, some aliens might figure out how to manipulate those portals and somehow have a cross-universe civilization. I guess though, well, two things. First of all, I guess if you're using all the energy in the universe, wouldn't you be taking away that energy?

Like if you're somehow using the dark energy in our universe, wouldn't that stop the expansion of the universe? Potentially, or maybe the dark energy is just like a waste product of something else they're doing. Maybe this is just like the crumbs on their table. I mean, let's think really big. I see. You're saying the expansion of the universe is a byproduct of whatever nefarious or maybe, or I guess we can't judge, pre-judge, but whatever, you know, thing it is they're doing with the inherent energy of the universe.

Is that what you're saying? Like maybe there's something deeper than dark energy. And dark energy is just like the smog of whatever process they're using to steal the, use the energy of the universe. Mm-hmm. I'm just trying to anticipate what's going to happen in season 60 million when we're only on season 5,000. So obviously there's a lot of dot, dot, dot happening. But yeah, potentially. Are you equating us to like online forums where people are posting fan theories? Is that all physics is, fan theories? I think I saw that in a comic strip somewhere. Yeah, exactly. That's XKCD. All theories are just fan fiction about the universe. And in some sense, yes, that's what's happening here. We're trying to imagine what an alien civilization. might be like what are the limits on it essentially we're not suggesting that there are aliens out

there manipulating the universe and controlling it and that dark energy is just their pollution but we're just trying to push up against the boundaries of our thinking and wondering what is possible in the end do we have arguments that suggest that that would be impossible because if not let's keep an open mind to what might be happening out there the second thing i want to say was that i feel like there would have been a fun sequel to the matrix to find out that actually our universe is just like a battery for somebody else's universe. Ooh, the meta-matrix. Yeah, the multi-matrix.

The multi-metamatrix. I like it. It's that one. All right. Well, this Kardeship scale is a pretty interesting way to think about aliens, what they might be doing, how big they can get, or I guess, you know, just pushing the idea of what can a sentient species do in the universe, like what's possible for a sentient entity or entities. Yeah, and it leaves completely aside the very important question of what a sentient

entity should do with the universe. If you are capable of building Dyson spheres that completely blot out every star in the sky, should you? Is that the right use for your technology? Should you be measuring your civilization by how much energy of the universe you can capture for your own purposes? Maybe alien civilizations have taken another route trying to live harmoniously with the universe rather than trying to manipulate it for their own ends. Wait, are you calling God an alien? Technically, a God would be an alien, right? Unless they were born on Earth.

I don't know how you can have the word technically God and alien in the same sentence. I just don't get it. I don't get it either, but this is a natural sciences podcast. I think that's allowed. Technically, Bigfoot is a locked nest monster. That's right. Technically, it's all natural science because it's being taught. talked about naturally by scientists. So therefore, it is natural science. Yeah. And this is sort of the

way that physicists think about civilizations. How much energy do we have? How much energy is available to us? It's, of course, not the only way to think about civilizations. And one thing we're trying to do in our civilization is actually tamp down our energy use, right? Well, we talked to earlier about how every year we increase our energy use by 3%. And that might take us to stage one civilization. Don't think about that like a goal. It's not like a badge we're going to put on our civilization. Hey, look, we increased our energy use by 10,000. Yay. That would probably be a bad thing for life on Earth if we were using so much energy. Yeah, it would be bad if we were using all the energy in the universe and then stopping expansion and then accidentally, oops, we caused

the universe to contract and crunch down. Was that us who made the whole universe collapse into a black hole? Our apologies. Please take this voucher and try civilization in another one of our multiverses. We should have gone green. Much sooner. All right. Well, it's definitely fun and interesting to think about these wild and crazy scenarios. But as you said, it is a little bit part of science to imagine what could be possible because you might come up with something that you didn't think about before that maybe

shapes a future experiment or how you look for answers in the universe. Yeah. And while we sometimes think about natural science as very rigorous and founded in experiments at high precision, an important part of it, which is just creative. exploratory and wondering about what is possible. Sometimes the most fun parts of science are when you're tackling a really big question that nobody's tackled before. And so you have to begin with a few crazy, fairly simple ideas.

Many things is just fun to talk about aliens, which I think, let's be honest, Daniel, it's really the main point of you choosing this topic. Yes, I always do enjoy talking about aliens. And I hope that the aliens listening to this podcast enjoy our baseless speculation about their lives and motives. That's right. And if the Kardashians are aliens, they're also welcome to come on the podcast. Open invitation to any Kardashian or alien.

And or alien. All right, well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. Thanks for listening. And remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeart Radio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio. Radio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

He never thought he was going to get caught, and I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. This technology's already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's start with a quick puzzle. The answer is Ken Jennings' appearance on The Puzzler with A.J. Jacobs. The question is, what is the most entertaining listening experience in podcast? podcast land.

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