Orion Digest №16 — Future in the Stars; World Federation and the Kardashev Scale

Our immediate future is concerned with the creation of a democratic world federation and staving off the coming climate crisis. But beyond that, where do we venture? After all, the goal of what we do is not to reach a summit, to achieve peace and call it good, but to provide a foundation on which to build future generations of innovation and discovery. We want to make a better world so that our descendants worry about how to increase efficiency in our spaceships rather than if war will break out or what they’ll eat tomorrow.

Even if we are able to delay the change in Earth’s climate for our survival, one day we will not be able to live on this planet anymore, due to a variety of causes (the climate crisis happening anyway, the Earth being swallowed by a dying sun, an unforeseen collision from a celestial body), which means that one future priority is to expand our territory outward from our home planet and onto others. None of the planets in our solar system are adapted for life, but through terraforming or biospheres, we can create new land for us to live on, which provides us with both extra space to grow, a backup option in case of emergency, and a source of potential new resources.

Our early expeditions to the moon and our robotic probes have only scratched the surface of what we can do with the other seven planets in our local system, not to mention the untapped power of the sun. Strategically placed waystations throughout the solar system could make interplanetary travel much quicker and more coordinated, reducing risk and allowing us to understand more about our home, as well as to get closer to other star systems for observation, and eventually, interstellar travel. Our current science tells us that travel between stars would come at great difficulty due to the threshold that is the speed of light being nigh-impossible to reach, but we have plenty to explore within our reach now, and by the time we’ve accomplished that, who knows how much our engines and technology will have advanced.

Even with what we know now, travel between star systems closest to us would take only years if we travel at the speed of light, and if we can develop ships capable of hosting intergenerational crews, we could make long term investments on trips to nearby stars. Humanity could survive even the loss of our solar system as we begin life and civilization anew on a multitude of planets in strange and unfamiliar solar systems, this time with the benefit of knowledge and history on our side. As the distance between humans and Earth increased, the concept of federation may become looser, as two largely separated civilizations orbiting different stars might have limited contact, and would be capable of focusing on their own issues rather than each others. However, if we can manage to find peace in our current time, it would be unlikely to see needless conflict between colonies and Earth.

While we send out crews to establish colonies elsewhere, the future of Earth and our native solar system could be for advancement — to use pre-established structures to use our planets and star to the fullest, with this idea exemplified best by the concept of a Dyson sphere. Named after physicist Freeman Dyson, the Dyson sphere is a theoretical structure created around a star that would harness the energy it created, given that stars are, in their most basic description, colossal engines of heat and radiation. While solar panels use light to generate moderate amounts of electricity, they hardly scratch the surface of what the sun casually produces on a daily basis, and while such a structure is far beyond our current ability to create, it would fuel a civilization far more massive than we are now, and could alleviate the stress of energy industries to constantly find more fuel.

To harness the energy of the sun in the most efficient way possible would act as a major milestone for humanity, as it would firmly move us along the Kardashev scale. This theoretical model of space faring civilizations was developed in 1964 by Nikolai Kardashev, and determines how advanced these civilizations are based on how they fuel their energy use — which is tied directly to both technological development and sustainable production capacity. Coming back out of fantasy for a bit, our modern world uses many of the resources of our own planet unsustainably, and has a constantly increasing production capacity, but not one we can maintain with our own technological limits (hence the need for organized federation to manage and maintain a balance until we innovate).

The creation of a world federation and the subsequent management of environmental policy and industry could bring us shortly to the Type I level — a civilization that sustainably uses the energy of their entire planet. This is not too far from our reach (in the realm of a few centuries), and would provide a good foundation for future space-faring and the development of our solar system, but as I have said, would not hold us forever. As we both develop colonies elsewhere and make the best use of our neighbor planets, we could develop a Dyson sphere (or more practically, a Dyson swarm of satellites that orbit around the Sun) to upgrade ourselves to the next level. A Type II civilization harnesses the energy of it’s entire solar system, and would turn Earth and it’s surroundings into a futuristic powerhouse; a launching point for interstellar missions and a center of federal democracy.

But who says we have to stop there? Beyond a Type II civilization is a Type III civilization — whereas a Type II will consist of a solar system’s energy production, a Type III will harness the energy of the entire galaxy. It seems like a far-off, Star Wars-esque fairy tell to assume we could develop a ‘Galactic Federation’, but we are considering now perhaps thousands of years into the future. The more we create colonies and master interstellar travel, the more we may learn about space and the speed of light in general. We cannot properly discuss things that we might not know precisely because we do not know them, but to be on the safe side, I like to assume that we never know 100% of what there is to know about the universe. So much of the cosmos is still a mystery, and by the time we become a Type II civilization, our worldview may have changed drastically, along with the secrets of quicker space travel.

The possibilities are endless, as even what we know of our universe, even the farthest limits of what we’ve observed are simply the most distant lights on our horizon. The universe could be, in fact, infinite, and once we learn to manage our societal problems, the only thing that limits us will be time. I like to imagine the future often — a united human race, working day after day to aim and go higher and further than ever before. If we learn to stop fighting each other, if we see past petty divisions of class and identity and collaborate, we would do things our ancestors thought unachievable a thousand times over. And so that is what we fight for, among other things, when we seek to make change in the world. We fight for peace so that humanity can stop fighting each other, and instead fight against our own limitations.

The Sword of Orion’s most basic motto is “respice ad futurum, respice ad astra,” Latin for “Look to the future, look to the stars.” We are destined not to kill each other and have thousands of years of human civilization remain rubble in the dust, but to travel the universe, to understand the nature of science, and perhaps even to meet and learn from other civilizations on our trek. It will take a movement and change that Earth has perhaps never seen before, but such a future is one worth fighting for.

- DKTC FL