Some People Have a Different View of the Future
So the hazard of blogging about the distant future using a Karashev 2 civilization is you end up doing a lot of searches for the Kardashev scale. So I ended up on an interesting series of posts on the Kardashev Scale and Christianity by Griffin Paul Jackson. (Found here: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV) In my opinion the essays are hopelessly naive. They very much beg the question by assuming Christianity as the true religion and all the future is going to be influence by that. It is true that Christianity is the dominant religion on the planet in 2019, at 29.81%. Clearly however there is no majority faith on the planet. Also here in the US the trend has been the decline of Christianity and the rise of the unaffiliated. So we can be looking thousands of years in the future so who knows what religion will exist or even if religion exists. Where is Zeus, Anubis, or Huitzilopochtli today?
Let’s Massively Expand the Kardashev Scale
In his first essay Griffin defines the scale and expands it. His definitions are:
- Type I – Complete control of energy on our native planet
- Type II – Complete control of energy of our host star
- Type III- Complete control of energy of our galaxy
This is where Kardashev stopped, because honestly you are starting to get lost by going bigger, but Griffin goes on:
- Type IV – Complete control of the energy of our entire universe
- Type V – Complete control of the energy of the multiverse.
- Type VI – Complete mastery over time and space and the ability to create universes. (I am just going to mention here the ability to create universes pretty much defines you as a god. You think Christianity will still be around?)
- Type VII – Beyond our ability to hypothesize. (In other words left as an exercise for the reader.)
So What is in the Cards for the Future
So the TLDR version of all 4 essays really is the whole cosmos belongs to god. We are not god-like even in a Type III or Type IV. We should carry the glory of god to all the universe and not our sin.
So really there is nothing new here. We haven’t added anything new to Christianity or really to what religion is to an advanced society in the future. This is not to imply that faith and beliefs might exist. But a society with dominion over it’s home star probably would interpret things differently. In the next post we can explore what the functions of religion might be in a future society.