00:00How do you decide what progress a civilization has made that's the most objective metric,
00:09that any alien species, say, visiting us would calibrate how much progress we've made as
00:18a civilization?
00:19One of the most objective ways to do that is the amount of power that any given civilization
00:27has been able to harness.
00:30And there was a Russian physicist, actually, by the name of Kardashev, who thought about
00:36this and I think it's a good way to characterize it, which is you can have, you can assess how
00:47well a civilization is harnessing the power available on the planet.
00:52That's type one, and then type two would be how much of the star's power are you harnessing,
01:00and then type three would be how much of the galaxy's power are you harnessing.
01:06These are very objective and measurable numbers.
01:10So right now we're very low on the Kardashev one scale.
01:15Like if you say, what proportion of our planet's power are we harnessing, it's a very, very
01:22tiny number.
01:25And basically we're harnessing almost nothing of our star's power.
01:31So the Sun is truly an immense thing.
01:36It is difficult with words to characterize just how immense the Sun is, but this gives you
01:42sort of a sense of scale.
01:45It's a big difficulty jump going from level one to level two.
01:49Very big difficulty jump, yes.
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