Even if such a civilization has conquered the entire universe, we probably wouldn’t know it—or even be capable of figuring it out.
Think about it: a Type III civilization wouldn’t just be “aliens” to us. No, they would be gods. The human mind and its limited intelligence wouldn’t be able to comprehend what such beings are capable of. We likely wouldn’t even recognize their technology if it were presented to us in the middle of a bustling city parking lot.
A civilization capable of harnessing the energy of an entire galaxy to play Candy Crush wouldn’t rely on something as rudimentary as Dyson spheres. They would likely employ technology that transcends time and space, bending the very fabric of the universe to their will. Such beings would operate beyond the laws of physics as we understand them.
They might exist in higher dimensions or pocket universes, inhabiting a realm of “unknown unknowns” that our simple minds couldn’t begin to fathom.
Consider the ants in your backyard. They don’t stop and gape in awe when you reverse your Porsche out of the garage. It’s not that they don’t care—it’s that they have no concept of what your car is or the technology behind it. They’re incapable of understanding it, and frankly, they don’t even know you exist, let alone that you’re capable of creating something called “technology.” To a Type III civilization, we’d be comparable to bacteria—and calling us ants would be a generous analogy.
The technology of a Type III civilization wouldn’t just seem like magic to us—it would be godlike.
(Only a deluded mind would imagine that an alien from a Type III civilization could bear any resemblance to this monstrosity.)
There are many possible reasons. Without reading other responses, here is what I came up with:
1 Nobody has had enough time to reach Type III yet.
2 It isn’t physically possible to reach type III.
3 No one has come up with a project that would need that level of energy and be worth the effort required.
4 Other civilizations have decided that there is no need to expand through the entire universe. They are fine staying close to home, as there is no big advantage to quality-of-life being all spread out beyond a few local stars.
5 The speed of light is not only unreachable, even half that speed is totally impractical. Thus the travel times within a galaxy are so long that multigenerational vehicles are required, and that really sucks for those who will never walk under an open sky.
6 All creatures that have achieved space travel have complicated and sensitive bodies that cannot be frozen and thawed and still function. Thus any form of hibernation to allow the original astronauts to reach their target is unusable.
7 Many civilizations have been expanding for a very long time; they keep encountering each other and either tend to kill each other off, or get into endless battles that would be the envy of the Middle East. In fact our area of the galaxy is surrounded by some of these guys, so we are effectively cut off from the rest of the universe.
8 They’re on the way! But space is really, really, REALLY big, and they just haven’t had time to get here yet.
9 Subspace communication remains pure Sci-fi, and with data sharing between stars limited to light speed, a lack of real-time conversation further separates cultures, and they tend to focus more on their individual needs rather than any multi-star-system conglomerate plans that people in the history books made a long time ago.
I guess I’ll stop there. I just realized that after the first three reasons I was pretty much just listing possible solutions to the Fermi Paradox, and that can be a pretty long list on only a partially related topic.
I have noticed that the subject of Kardeshev’s vivid imagination is fairly popular, perhaps to the point where a significant number of folks believe that attaining these levels of science are absolutely doable. My research was unable to determine approximately what percentage of scientists in related fields are of the opinion that a Type III civilization is possible. But I was able to find information concerning their existence nearby. Here is an excerpt from Scientific American:
Unlike traditional SETI surveys, Wright and his team did not seek messages from the stars. Instead, they looked for the thermodynamic consequences of galactic-scale colonization, based on an idea put forth in 1960 by the physicist Freeman Dyson.
Dyson postulated that a growing technological culture would ultimately be limited by access to energy, and that advanced, energy-hungry civilizations would be driven to harvest all the available light from their stars. To do that, they might dismantle a planet or two as feedstock for building star-enveloping swarms of solar collectors.
A star’s light would fade as it was encased in such a “Dyson sphere,” but Dyson noted the constructions could be detected by the mid-infrared glow of their radiated waste heat—essentially the same phenomenon that causes your computer to warm up when it’s running. In 1963 the Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardashev extended these ideas by developing a tripartite classification system for a civilization’s energy use.
A “type 1” civilization would harness all the energy of its home planet whereas a type 2 uses all the energy of its star, perhaps by building a Dyson sphere around it. A type 3 civilization would be capable of using all the energy of its galaxy, presumably by encasing all its stars in Dyson spheres.
Image from wallpaperaccess.com
Unable to secure funding from standard sources such as NASA or the National Science Foundation, Wright’s group instead turned to the Templeton Foundation, a private organization with a history of supporting controversial and speculative research. With that funding the team searched for type 3 civilizations in an all-sky catalogue from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE).
They looked for objects that were optically dim but bright in the mid-infrared—the expected signature of a galaxy filled with starlight-absorbing, heat-emitting Dyson spheres. After using software to automatically sift through some 100 million objects in the WISE catalogue, Wright’s student Roger Griffith examined the remaining candidates by hand, culling those that weren’t galaxies or that were obvious instrumental artifacts.
The result was about 100,000 galaxies, with about 50 in particular that emitted much more heat than light. Jessica Maldonado, a student at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, then scoured the astronomical literature to determine what was already known about those top candidates.
Many of them were well studied, and can be explained as pairs of galaxies in the process of merging or as isolated “starburst” galaxies—two processes that can heat galactic quantities of light-blocking dust to generate powerful infrared glows.
According to the researchers, an additional 90 galaxies with less extreme heat-to-light ratios warrant further study but, by and large, the results are null. “On Kardashev’s scale, a type 3 civilization uses energy equal to all the starlight produced by one galaxy,” Wright says. That would equate to an infrared-bright galaxy seemingly bereft of stars. “
We looked at the nearest, largest 100,000 galaxies we could find in the WISE catalogue and we never saw that. One hundred thousand galaxies and not one had that signature. We didn’t find any type 3s in our sample because there aren’t any.”
Even if advanced civilizations do not build Dyson spheres, Wright’s null result also applies to any other energy-intensive “astroengineering” taking place at galactic scales. “Looking for the absence of light as well as the waste heat like Wright and his colleagues have done is really cool,” says James Annis, an astrophysicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory who in the late 1990s used different methods to survey more than a hundred nearby galaxies for type 3s. “In some sense it doesn’t matter how a galactic civilization gets or uses its power because the second law of thermodynamics makes energy use hard to hide.
They could construct Dyson spheres, they could get power from rotating black holes, they could build giant computer networks in the cold outskirts of galaxies, and all of that would produce waste heat. Wright’s team went right to the peak of the curve for where you’d expect to see any sort of waste heat, and they’re just not seeing anything obvious.”
After all the reading of Sci-Fi stories over the last sixty-or-so years that contain intelligent aliens, it is a little disheartening to know that available data does not throw any bones of hope to me. But I am not surprised. In the last few years I have read several books about many of the conditions that helped humans become the advanced species we are, and there are a LOT.
If the subject interests you, I recommend John Gribbin’s Alone in the Universe. Spoiler alert: he believes it likely, if not close to certain, that because of all the conditions useful to make us, we are either completely alone, or others are so rare we might as well be.
