Adam Frank: belief

Transcript context

…Do you think humans ever get to type one? I think that there’s a problem with type one, which is that we already know about climate change. The effects of our harvesting energy to do the work of civilization is already changing the climate state, and that’s something that Kardashev couldn’t have recognized. There’s the first law of thermodynamics, which is just about the different forms of energy. Then there’s the second law, which is about when you use that energy, Kardashev wasn’t thinking about the second law. If you get all that energy and you use it, there is waste heat. You don’t get to use it all. Right? Second law tells you that if I have a tank of gasoline, I can only use a certain fraction of the energy in that tank, and the rest is going to go to heating up the engine block. So that second law tells you that you can only use so much energy before the climate state is like, “Uh-oh, sorry, it’s going to change on you.” So there’s a way in which we probably can’t get to a type one without devastating the earth’s climate. The most important thing actually here is probably, this is why space becomes… So the colonization or settlement of space. If we have an idea that we’ve been working on for a while called service worlds, that at some point you probably move a lot of your industry off world. We’ve got Mercury, for example. There’s nothing on Mercury, there’s no life on Mercury. Why don’t you put your energy harvesting there? Because you can’t mess with the biosphere. The biosphere is more powerful than you are. And so there’s limits to how much energy we can harvest to do work on the earth without really adversely affecting the biosphere. It does seem that the best response to the climate change is not to use less technology, but to invent better technology and to invent technology that avoids the destructive effects.…

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