Type I, II, III Civilizations (An excerpt from the book of Michio Kaku)

This book by Michio Kaku was suggested to me as a reference to looking to the future of technology and advancing our kind. I found it interesting on the level of our development and progression to shaping out own bodies.

Our civilization, by contrast, can be categorized as a Type 0 civilization, one that is just beginning to tap planetary resources, but does not have the technology and resources to control them. A Type 0 civilization like ours derives its energy from fossil fuels like oil and coal and, in much of the Third World, from raw human labor. Our largest computers can- not even predict the weather, let alone control it. Viewed from this larger perspective, we as a civilization are like a newborn infant.


Although one might guess that the slow march from a Type 0 civilization to a Type III civilization might take millions of years, the extraordinary fact about this classification scheme is that this climb is an exponential one and hence proceeds much faster than anything we can readily conceive.


With all these qualifications, we can still make educated guesses about when our civilization will reach these milestones. Given the rate at which our civilization is growing, we might expect to reach Type I status within a few centuries.
For example, the largest energy source available to our Type 0 civilization is the hydrogen bomb. Our technology is so primitive that we can unleash the power of hydrogen fusion only by detonating a bomb, rather than controlling it in a power generator. However, a simple hurricane generates the power of hundreds of hydrogen bombs. Thus weather control, which is one feature of Type I civilizations, is at least a century away from today's technology.


Similarly, a Type I civilization has already colonized most of its solar system. By contrast, milestones in today's development of space travel are painfully measured on the scale of decades, and therefore qualitative leaps such as space colonization must be measured in centuries. For example, the earliest date for NASA's manned landing on the planet Mars is 2020. Therefore, the colonization of Mars may take place 40 to 50 years after that, and the colonization of the solar system within a century.


By contrast, the transition from a Type I to a Type II civilization may take only 1,000 years. Given the exponential growth of civilization, we may expect that within 1,000 years the energy needs of a civilization will become so large that it must begin to mine the sun to energize its machines.


http://www.angelfire.com/sd/occultic/civili.html