• Question: How likely is it that one day we will be able to become a type two or even a type 3 civilization?

    Asked by aberdeen savage to Hannah, Lucy, Phil, rochellevelho, Stephen on 14 Mar 2017.
    • Photo: Phil Sutton

      Phil Sutton answered on 14 Mar 2017:

      We are a long way off from truly harnessing a much higher percentage of the Suns energy than what falls on Earth. Instead of using all the energy emitted from the sun it would make more sense to learn how to create our own smaller scale suns as power sources. This is much more achievable and means we might be able to take such power stations with us as we travel the universe. We are currently trying to do this. In fact we have managed to get half way there already, we just can’t sustain the fusion process.

      However, I will just leave this here for you. Two stars have changed very strangely in brightness when we watch them. Some ideas being discussed are dyson spheres around the stars by other civilizations. The stars are called KIC 8462852 and EPIC 204278916. It is quite possible this is caused by some currently unknown physical process but shows something exciting nonetheless.

    • Photo: Hannah Sargeant

      Hannah Sargeant answered on 14 Mar 2017:

      Phil has given a great answer here so there’s nothing else I could add! A really great question though 🙂

    • Photo: Stephen Pulker

      Stephen Pulker answered on 14 Mar 2017:

      Humans will have to overcome the political challenges of not killing each other (accidently or otherwise) as well as the technical if we are to advance that far.

    • Photo: Lucy Kissick

      Lucy Kissick answered on 14 Mar 2017:

      This is a fantastic question and is something tremendously exciting to think about. As Phil said, we can just about manage fusion but at the moment the process consumes more energy than it creates. Hopefully we’ll get there in the end though, and with unlimited power supplies who knows what we’ll get up to? One of the most popular ideas is to create a Dyson sphere: a sphere around an entire star that captures most of its power output and can therefore power a society for billions of years.

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