Quote:
One scientist classified civilizations in 3 categories:
- Category 1 civilization will harness all the energy of the planet. That means mainly: solar, wind, fosil, all mechanic energies that I can't name, nuclear, lava, tectonic energies.
- Category 2 civilization will harness all the energy a solar system will produce. That means category one plus harnessing the sun energy and taping directly into it and the planet gravitational movements energy.
- Category 3 civilization will harness all the energy of the galaxy. It is category 1,2 and a whole bunch of energy types that I don't understand at all...hehe
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Sounds to me like the kind of twaddle a scifi writer would come out with- Asimov or Clarke from the sound of it.
Why would you *want* to harness all the energy of a galaxy, or a solar system, or a planet? If we could harness all of Earth's energy, we would have thousands of times more energy than we had any clue what to do with. Perhaps we could fire a laser beam and blow up a neighbouring planet/solar system/galaxy or something. And how do you define *all* the energy on a planet anyway? If you have covered the entire planet in solar panels to harness *all* of the sun's rays, where are we going to put the wind farms to harness *all* the wind power? (which is just converted solar energy anyway) What level of energy conversion efficiency must we achieve to qualify for this arbitrary categorisation? 10%? 50%? 100%?
Theoretically, we have the technology to 'harness' all of Earth's uranium deposits right now (just dig up all the uranium and build lots and lots of power stations), but we haven't used it *all* until there's none left and we'd be idiots to do it all in one go. And why stop at Uranium? Energy can be derived from any matter- must we bleed every atom completely dry? Besides, there are useful things Earth's energy could be doing that don't directly involve us- like growing trees and sustaining our ecosystem for instance.
Similar problems apply to the supposed category 2 and 3 civilisations. And even if, for some absurd reason, humanity did want to harness every single scrap of Earth/Sol/MW's energy, who's to say that any other sentient species would have such an appetite? And even after reading the foundation series, I'm still not convinced by the prospect of an entire-galaxy-spanning civilisation either, which kind of rules out #3. It's just too damn big- it would be a real bugger to administer.
So all in all, a very narrow and somewhat pointless statement, imho. No offence to Jestak though, that's at least the second of your comments in this thread shot down- sorry dude.