Keeping up with the Kardashev (scale)

Back in September, after completing the analysis of data obtained in the weeks after the impact, the NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) team concluded that the spacecraft's kinetic impact with its target asteroid, Dimorphos, successfully altered the asteroid’s orbit. The success of the DART experiment represents the first full-scale demonstration of asteroid deflection technology, and a major addition to the list of options humanity has, if faced with the event of a celestial object on a crash course with earth. More importantly, at least on an evolutionary scale, DART marks humanity’s first time having meaningful effect on a scale beyond our own planet, by purposely changing the motion of a celestial object.

Then this week, after literally years of delays, the?Artemis 1 mission finally on its journey to the moon . The Artemis program aims to "land the first woman and first person of colour on the Moon", explore the lunar surface, and lay the groundwork for sending astronauts to Mars in the near future. Artemis 1 is the “dry run”, an uncrewed test flight which will circle and fly past the Moon; in 2024?Artemis 2 will follow as a fully crewed flight taking humans the furthest they’ve ever been in space; finally, in 2025,?Artemis 3 will bring humans back to our satellite’s surface, landing the first female astronaut and first astronaut of color.

Even more importantly, DART and Artemis represent our first real steps towards the next milestone in the evolution of our civilization. Historically, the technological evolution of our species has been measured based upon how much usable energy we can make ourselves available: that is the Kardashev scale. The scale was originally designed in 1964, right at the peak of the space age, by Russian astrophysicist?Nikolai Kardashev, who was looking for signs of extraterrestrial life within cosmic signals.

The Kardashev scale has 3 base classes, each defining a specific level of energy disposal of a civilization:

• Type I class (101?W), usually defined as of a civilization that can harness all the energy that reaches its home planet from its parent star;
• Type II class (102?W), of a civilization capable of harnessing (all) the energy radiated by its parent star. (E.g. by successful completion of a?Dyson sphere );
• Type III class (103?W), of a civilization capable of getting ahold of energy at the scale of its own?galaxy.

In the years after Kardashev's original formulation, other astronomers have extended the scale up to Type V class, accounting for civilization capable of handling energy amount that would equal that of all energy available in not just our universe, but in all universes and in all time-lines. As humans, we are just at the beginning, inching towards evolving to a fully fleshed Type I civilization.

But why does it matter? After all, with so many unresolved problem on the Earth’s surface, why would we waste resources into space? (#whataboutism )

In reality, aiming at the stars - literally and figuratively - is what propels our species forward. Our civilization faces unprecedented challenges in the next century, form overpopulation, to new diseases, to natural resource depletion. Evolution seems to have pushed on the throttle. If we want a standing chance, or even anything more than just surviving, we then need new technology for new materials, new ways to communicate, new systems to elaborate data. We also need to better understand our environment to reduce the impact we have on it, minimizing our “biological footprint”. And we know for a fact that space exploration is key to achieve these advancements.

In other words, we need to understand our world - we need a way deeper understanding of it - if we want to maximize our resiliency as its inhabitants.

To understand the Earth is to understand the Earth as a planet, which means to understand what planets are, how they formed, how they evolved and how they relate to their stars, and so on. The Moon is so close to us, and Mars is right around the corner: going there, and beyond, is going to be both critical and consequential for us to improve our understanding of our place in the Universe and, by reflection, our understanding of ourselves.

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe”

Carl Sagan

Disclaimer

What's above represents?my personal views?and not the opinion or policy of my employers or any other company, organization or individual I can be associated with.

The facts expressed here belong to everybody, the quoted sections, stetements, and imagery belong to their respective authors, the opinions only to me: the distinction is yours to draw...