THERE ARE NO THREES UP THERE
an underwhelming counterpoint to eldritch superstates
There are no Type III civilizations out there. Period.
And I dare argue that exponentially less civilizations, should they exist, do it above what Sagan and Kardashev would call it, Type 2 (or K-II, you get the idea, I'm not gonna bother with how you write it).
This is a part of a beef I have with both ufologists and grand sci-fi enthusiasts alike, for the same set of reasons.
1. Not studying enough chemistry and physics.
2. Thinking that absence of evidence equals evidence of non-absence.
3. Underestimating human understanding.
Let's strip this from the top down.
For those somehow unfamiliar with, be it by newfound curiosity or just forgot about it, the Kardashev Scale as originally proposed by Soviet astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev is a way of ranking the level of technological development of a civilization through their energy consumption.
Assuming the growth of mankind at the time and how much energy we needed to consume to maintain our society, it seemed reasonable to assume that at one point in our future, we would need to soon consume the whole energy that reaches Earth from the Sun, and later, the entire energy from the Sun itself, and so on.
It has since been refined by Carl Sagan and others as follows:
CLASS // ENERGY NEEDS
TYPE I — 10^16 W, equivalent to the entire energy budget of Earth.
TYPE II — 10^26 W, about a quarter the Sun's energy.
TYPE III — 10^36 W, about the energy of the entire Milky Way galaxy.
By that measure, we humans stand currently at Type 0.70~0.73.
This concept often comes hand in hand with the concepts of mega-structures in space, since they are proposed as viable means of obtaining said energy and using it, serving as habitats for said advanced civilizations. Such as Dyson spheres or swarms, stellar engineering, stellar lifting, ring worlds, the whole seven rings.
Now, I'm far from being the first one — and the last one — to point out the obvious problem with the concept put into practice. Right? You see, all 10¹⁶-10¹⁷ Watts of power Earth gets from the Sun are used for other things. Take the wind for example, created by the updraft of air from heating the surface of the sea and land, or the energy used by bacteria and algae. All that is included in that energy bill. Should humanity harness all of it, we would live on a barren rock, not different from that of the Moon's surface.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN, YOU NEVER SEEN BLADE RUNNER?
If we needed this much energy, we would most likely, outright “make it”. That is, either through fission or fusion plants.
“Why not solar?” You may be asking yourself, perhaps believing what happened in Chernobyl is the norm.
First of all: Did you not hear what I just said? Solar is the motor of Earth's very biosphere, and you wanna tap into that?
Second...
Although solar energy is on average 10x as cheaper per watt than nuclear power, its land coverage is 10-20x as expansive as nuclear power. Also requiring the usage of rare earth metals for its manufacturing, not to speak of long term maintenance and recycling economy it would need to create to make that waste less wasteful. Yes, it is true that covering about 1.0-1.2% of the Sahara desert IN PRINCIPLE, would suffice for the world’s current energy needs. But what do we do about its climate change potential? Solar panels need to be dark to absorb energy, and that heats them up, creating heat islands that change the direction of winds, impacting the local weather. More so the global weather, if we actually bid on the insanity of turning the Sahara into a solar farm. And what do we do when we need to double that energy requirement? Another 115.000 square kilometers? How much about the strip-mining needed for that, and the contamination created by that much e-waste?
By land usage, nuclear would give us 10-20x the room to spare — in a way, I think that’s how one justifies the price tag — given how humans are organized and divided, nuclear sounds about as close one can get to clean energy for the whole planet. Even with it being as inefficient as it is (remember, it is still a steam machine), the waste heat produced would vastly be off-set by the non-emission of carbon waste, previously generated by coal and oil energy production. We sure could find use for the other 2 watts of hot water per watt of energy in the grid. And the spent fuel, after being further used by breeder plants, can be buried in geologically stable rock, or sunk in the bottom of the ocean for eras. Solar can’t be entirely discarded for some niche uses, such as isolated communities and industries, but for the masses? Give me those steam towers.
Which is why Dyson swarms were conceived, at least in part.
Obtaining this energy, without strip-mining or going nuclear. It’s
essentially solar/thermal but in space, and without disrupting the
climate.
WE DON'T SEE DYSON SWARMS, THOUGH
The average red dwarf emits about 1-10% of the Sun's energy output. Surrounding such a celestial object would still be a challenge, but not as colossal of a challenge as it would be to do the same to the Sun, in principle. Still, 1% of the Sun's energy output PER SECOND is about SEVEN THOUSAND TIMES humanity's energy usage PER YEAR (which is about 5.4x10^20 Joules per year).
I'm pretty sure any civilization with this much power at their disposal (224 billion times present day Humanity) is definitely far more capable than we are, and we should not give them shit if their energy bill is not equivalent to a whole sun-like star. From our current understanding of processes as a whole, this is basically limitless energy, even at a loss rate of 99%.
If it's so efficient and attractive. Why couldn't we find them? It is perhaps the easiest type of technosignature possible to find — and there is our answer. It is the easiest possible type of technosignature one can find. And they don't want to be found.
Dyson swarms, for the most attractive they can be, are very expensive lighthouses, quite literally. Except the moment you light it up, it’s only a matter of a few decades or a century before your home planet gets rained by a million relativistic kill vehicles (RKV). Either as a preemptive strike against a possible future competitor, or by fear of standing on an equal fight in the near future.
One must not discard the possibility, that if life is relatively common in the universe, one of those stars in the sky has a sniper rifle pointed at you (or a buckshot), even if it is only one per ten thousand civilizations. One example of it happening once before would be enough to settle the interstellar neighbourhood in curfew essentially forever.
And you don’t even need 1% of the Sun’s power to launch this many relativistic weapons. Even 0.1% would be enough to wreak havoc on galactic scales if we wanted to — and almost undetectable, without engulfing the star. In which case, looking for them becomes pointless — they’d be indistinguishable from dust clouds, even if they pose a threat to us.
ON THE MATTER OF VON NEUMANN PROBES
My favorite least favorite type of alien.
Such as building a Dyson swarm, it is not hard, in principle, to build a Von Neumann Probe. You only need to succeed once.
Build a machine that is able to get to a planet, mine and refine materials to make more copies of itself, and let it replicate away into the galaxy. Even if it just doubles each cycle, starting at 1 unit, taking the average distance between stars with rocky planets as 7 light-years, and travel velocity as 10% lightspeed, and 10-20 years for it to replicate itself.
That’s on average 80-100 years per doubling.
In 10 cycles down the line (1000 yrs) we got to 100 thousand stars, 100 million in 20 cycles, and in 30 cycles (3000 yrs) that’s 107 billion stars. By the 32nd iteration, we will likely put a probe in each system available in the Milky Way’s estimated 400 billion stars, in 3-4 thousand years only. And given the age of the universe, and our own galaxy’s, if nobody ever gave a stop order of such a machine, every atom of non-luminous matter in the galaxy would have been converted into machines already. Even at 1% of the speed of light, that's less than 40 thousand years.
At which point, we’re not even talking about finding little green men. Just any kind of evidence for that matter, DNA, weird fossils, signs of strip mining in the deep past, or a derelict alien vessel around Mars.
Von Neumann machines get even worse when combined with planet killer arrays, such as building RKVs launch stations and gamma ray bombs, we should be seeing them all around us. Or we wouldn’t be here.
Which means… >drumroll<… Nobody has done it yet. Somehow. Which takes us back to the Fermi Paradox again. We could be the first ones to conceive such an idea, the very last ones, or civilizations out there strictly forbid such a thing from occurring because they are little green space hippies.
Or perhaps the Late Devonian extinction even was such an attempt, who knows?
Technically speaking, civilizations focused on spreading as much as possible should follow a similar growing principle. As a disperse and forget tactic. But, would that be the case, we either live near a somehow untouched corner of the galaxy, unlikely at best, or no one is really doing it (simplest answer). Else, they would be here already, and we would not. It’s the anthropic principle again at play here. Now as to why they wouldn't be here, if they do exist, is anyone's guess.
Like between ants and humans. If a shopping mall already covers the landscape, the only time ants could've lived there is long before construction or long after the ruins crumble. In that sense, our existence might simply mean we’re living in the forgotten dirt before the galactic developers arrive. — call it the ANT-thropic principle, haha.
SPEAKING OF ANTS…
SETI, is a little frowned upon by some, sci-fi enthusiasts and ufologists alike, because of the indian vs conquistador mentality. But I’m sitting comfortably knowing that in principle, nobody is actually listening to us, and that, should they know about Earth — since it has been emitting readable biosignatures for at least 3 billion years — they would have been here already. And we would know about them too. (looking at you, Elder Things!)
Which is quite of a similar case against the Atlantean (ew!) and Silurian Hypothesis, and is another whole can of worms to open, which I will not. But in summary, there is nothing to suggest that we had other, previously advanced technological civilizations, living on Earth, prior to ourselves, be it during the last ice age, or millions of years ago. And trust me bro (or do your own research on how we tell things on geological timescales), we would know it.
What does that have to do with ants? The whole reason I started this post. I heard something over on a YouTube comment section like:
“The ants at the kitchen have spent the past two years scouting every nook and cranny of it, trying looking for holes, and pheromones. Concluded they were alone in their universe. Meanwhile, having that conversation right next to a family having an evening coffee.”
Which is, a somewhat stupid way of putting “We haven’t found aliens because they are too far beyond our comprehension to be found.”
Dear son. We went from using oil lamps and horses on the streets — to building nukes and a space station in the span of a lifetime. Progress is nearly exponential, and it only gets better the more people we have, and the more resources we have at their disposal. Yes we might be fading away from radio towards energy saving short-range technology, but that doesn’t mean we stopped using it altogether. It doesn’t mean that any other civilization out there will be unfamiliar with radio, because they have been there before.
The ants in the kitchen might not understand what the house or the humans are, but they know something is up, as they can smell the humans, and the food, and can see what is natural or not in their surroundings — so even that fails to save the argument.
The ants would notice the sugar, and plates and chairs changing places. And we would notice entire galaxies or stars suddenly moving or missing, or spawning out of nowhere.
I’m not saying humans have all the answers, but we’re close to modeling the rules of the game — we just don’t know how many players are on the field, or what their motives are. The models work 99% of the time, and we are figuring out why the 1% doesn't work, each time pushing the barrier further and further. It would be equally naive to assume we couldn’t possibly know it all, or get close to it a few generations down the line.
“Aliens could be made of sentient rocks, or be gas clouds.”
The day we get a halfway decent hypothesis — not just a buzzword soup of quantum states and gravity modulation — I’ll give it a thumbs up.
Same for silicon, sulfur, or antimony life proponents — carbon-water-oxygen life is still chemically more stable, more common, and far more energy-efficient. Not saying we couldn’t find exotic life, but we probably won’t be chatting with crystal men anytime soon. Most of those chemistries barely support self-replicating molecules, let alone cells or complex systems.
“Aliens could be communicating with gravity waves or neutrino beams.”
And I send texts to my friends using a nuclear plant’s smoke signals.
Long-distance communication can be done just as efficiently with radio — if not more. Generating enough neutrinos or a gravity wave to carry information requires absurd amounts of energy — the kind we only associate with supernovae or black hole collisions in distant galaxies. If someone nearby was using those, our detectors (built specifically to catch such things) would be lighting up like night-vision goggles in a dark room full of people holding infrared flashlights.
“What if they travel at or faster than light?”
About warp drives or stable wormholes — we’re back to the Von Neumann spread problem: why aren’t they here already? If every star is just one jump away, why isn’t someone already on our doorstep? The side effects would be loud. Relativistic mass-energy distortions, burst emissions, maybe even gravitational ripples. Something. Anything.
Such post-materialism, borderlining fanfiction and outright mysticism spoken as if it holds any water (pun intended) is infuriating, and anti-scientific by nature.
Like an invisible pet Dragon in my garage, I insist it exists because I can always argue its even more exotic as to avoid detection, at which point it might as well not exist. It gets to a point of such suspension of disbelief that we start to question if even chairs are real (and they aren’t!).
The only thing I can’t possibly argue with, at least, is metamaterialism. Yes aliens might survive eons, but locked in a 10km by 10km computer array around a red dwarf, being taken care of by AI servants, and we would never know about them, because they live in what’s virtually, a parallel reality to ours.
On a similar note.
Why would a civilization that works in the timescales of eons be interested in us at all, if such feat involves folding into themselves? They most likely would be sleeping long before we appear and wake long after we are gone. For all intents and purposes, they do not exist to us, and we do not exist to them.
WHAT DO I THINK? ( — asked nobody)
Personally? I don’t know.
I have a feeling, and it goes against what we do know. It seems impossible possibility that we are a fluke, but an understandable one at that, if the anthropic principle does us any favor — it means the Milky Way, or this arm of it must belong to us. We can be mostly sure that no-one within 40-60 light-years from Earth knows about us, humans in particular, because there are no detectable signatures back, biological or technological — remember, it's a two-way street.
As far as we know, there aren’t any Type II or III civilizations anywhere nearby — at least not within 3 million light-years — would they have existed in the past and at great distances, we would see their light from here. But there's plenty of room for Type 0.7s and 0.8s to hide.
Maybe that’s the real flaw in the Kardashev scale: it’s intuitive, but it fails to rigorously account for all paths of development. At worst, it assumes progress is linear and infinite — that it’s turtles all the way down.
In reality, no civilization may ever need to go beyond Type 1.5. The only reason to grow further would be sheer population pressure — or worse, blind momentum. The same way we collectively are Type 0.7 as a species, but the United States or China as superpowers are far below that threshold. As a species, we would have to be far too numerous and hungry collectively to have any one smaller collective organized entity needing as much power as whole star. Here I'm talking one vast alien empire existing as a network of Type 0.9 or 1.2 civs working together.
It’s also possible that beyond a point, each step up the ladder becomes exponentially harder to do so, somehow. If that's the case, then perhaps we don’t see Kardashev IIs or IIIs not because they’re extinct — but because the universe simply hasn’t been around long enough for anyone to make it that far.
In my works of fiction I try to not entirely pull the rug, instead relying on stagnation and societal decay as to why nobody, or almost nobody, ventures beyond the Dominion’s 240ly-wide bubble. Have you ever tried walking two miles into the Amazon? It is hard! And there are people there, very little, but yes, it's just not worth it most of the time without any roads, or supply lines nearby.
Who, beyond the most dedicated scientists and madmen, would do that? The average person is reading this from the comfort of their home, and it speaks volumes. Most if not all large Kardashev I civs would be too busy trying to manage the massive infrastructure and maintain its momentum (or inertia), trying not to break apart for them to keep moving forward because they can. But then we’re getting into the Big Alien theory, which might influence the actual scenario we live in.
In summary, aliens, if they do exist, they do at far more tame power and energy scales than Kardashev initially imagined would be necessary to sustain civilization. Either because of the logistics of such a societal project stalling their expansion as a whole, or because they value survival above expansion, preferring to fold into themselves or staying silent and spread thin instead of condensed and loud.
But as a precaution, we should do more active listening than beaming. Strip mine Mercury for weapons, and give them a proper welcoming salvo when they get to our shores.
- M.O. Valent, 12/06/2025
