Arriving at Our Kardashev Score
Previously we looked at the different Kardashev societies. The Wikipedia page gives the equation for calculating the Kardashev number. But I don’t think it is that clear, so let’s work through it. The equation is:
K will be the Kardashev number
P is the total power output of the civilization in watts.
So where can we find some numbers. There is a World Energy Consumption Wikipedia page. You will find the data for various years given in Terawatt hours. This is for a year so you will want to break this down to the overall energy production. There are 8,760 hours in a year so by dividing by this number you now have total terawatt production. The population also adds an energy budget the Kardashev Civilization page also adds another 100 watts that each human produces. So, lets run some numbers:
Energy production 2017: 162,494 TWh
World Population 2017: 7.6 billion
So, lets run the numbers the total watts we used in 2017.
Also, we need to add the population.
So, the total energy is:
Drop this into our formula:
This is where we get ourselves as a Kardashev 0.72 Society.
Scaling Up for a K2 Civilization
So, let’s consider the scale of a future civilization. For purposes of a story I was going with a civilization with a population of 9.5 trillion people. I can’t think of a good way to know what the energy usage of a K2 citizen would be. We can assume they would have greater efficiency, but also more energy use. So as a starting point by dividing the 2017 energy usage by 7.6 billion people we get a per capita rate of 2,440 watts per person.
Although this is a little low since in less developed countries energy use is very low and drags down the average. Let’s scale this up to Americans who are the biggest energy users in the world. In 2008 the per capita usage in the US was 87,216 kWh. To convert this to watts we divide by 8,760 hours per year and multiply by 1,000 to get kilowatts to watts. So, the average US citizen uses 9,956 watts. Also, just to make this simply let us just round up to 10,000 watts.
Multiple that by our 9.5 trillion population energy usage is 95 quadrillion watts.
This is before adding the 100 watts per person which now takes us up to 96 quadrillion watts.
So the new Kardashev score is:
So, I expanded our current population by just over 3 orders of magnitude with the energy growing linearly with that population and using more energy than the average American used in 2008 and we are only to a Kardashev 1.098 society and I am already having trouble rapping my head around the scale. Since the scale is logarithmic, just by the math you can see you are going to be using 10 to the 26th of watts of power or 100 Septillion watts if you get to a true K2 civilization. My head is beginning to hurt.