Nikolai Kardashev was a Soviet radio astronomer and astrophysicist who wanted to know how one could even detect extraterrestrial civilizations at all, the “SETI problem”.
He concluded: by energy consumption. The Kardashev scale is therefore not an ISO standard (ISO = Interstellar Standards Organization?), but a thinking tool devised by one person.
The scale says:
- Type 1: Uses all the energy available to its planet. For example, an albedo-zero world completely covered in solar cells.
- Type 2: Uses all the energy available to its star system. Not a million satellites in orbit, but a Dyson sphere that captures all the light and radiation of a star.
- Type 3: Uses the energy of all stars in a galaxy.
The idea of launching data centers into space, more precisely into LEO, must therefore be evaluated on a different scale:
The Kardashian scale
- A Type 1 civilization on the Kardashian scale has a public discourse that is no longer driven by facts, but by emotion and attention.
- A Type 2 civilization no longer has this discourse under control, and counterfactual emotional discourse begins to control politics, research, and the economy, where unscientific and outright stupid narratives now take over steering.
- A Type 3 civilization has complete epistemic decoupling: visibility has fully replaced truth, reach beats evidence, and consistency is irrelevant as long as the narrative is exciting. Physical limits are dismissed as “bad vibes”, and criticism is read as a moral flaw and subversion.
So we are not measuring energy, but loss of contact with reality. Many tech visions of recent years (everything from and including Bitcoin onward) map directly onto this scale.
We are now already a Kardashian Type 2 civilization.
