Just My Type: Kardashev Civilizations in SF and Beyond
reason is that technological prowess and scientific knowledge increase exponentially. To put it another way, the more you know the more you can know. Currently, the total sum of human knowledge roughly doubles every 10 years. Put into these terms, it is easy to see what it could mean for a civilization to be a million years old.
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So how has the Kardashev system been utilized in SF? If we want to talk
about Type I civilizations, then the answer would be that it has been utilized
far and wide. Since a Type I civilization is one that controls the energy of
its home planet, just about any basic spacefaring civilization you find in SF
novels could fall into the category. Our own civilization is frequently portrayed
as Type I (in stories set in the relatively near future). To jump into specific
examples, let's move on to the far more interesting Types II and III.
The best-known example of a Type II civilization is the United Federation of Planets in Star Trek. (The Klingons, Romulans, Borg, and others would also fall into Type II.) The UFP's technology is sufficiently advanced that it can directly utilize the energy of a star, can propel ships at many times the speed of light, and can even accomplish semi-controlled time travel—an early indication of progress towards Type III status.
One thing that is very interesting about this is that Star Trek (in its three recent incarnations) is set only 300 years or so from the present day. Clearly we are not on track to achieve Type II status within that time frame. Nevertheless, Star Trek remains popular in part because the future it portrays appears to be an plausible, natural progression of our current state of affairs.
Moving on to Type III, a very good example—and one that Kaku gives in Hyperspace—is the civilization portrayed in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. This is a civilization that has not only had the time to expand throughout the galaxy, but has flourished for millennia and is facing collapse. The central plot of the original trilogy is the attempt to rebuild the empire in only a thousand years following the collapse, stemming off 10,000 years of potential barbarism.
Back in the Star Trek arena,
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