This Is What a Godlike Civilization Would Look Like — Transcript

Everything we think about aliens might be completely wrong, an expression of how primitive humanity actually is. We imagine progress as Dyson spheres, interstellar travel and galactic empires. But what if this is just how cavemen imagine things? Bigger is better! We need more energy, more space, more stuff! What if the universe is full of old, godlike alien civilizations and we don’t even realize it? What if real progress doesn't mean expanding outwards, but inwards? Controlling the tiniest layers of reality?

Humans are expansionist and hungry for resources. In just a split second we spread across the entire planet, ate most of the large animals, felled a third of all forests, carved canyons for metals and burned mountains of dead plants for energy. And our appetite isn’t slowing down – it’s accelerating. The more we progress, the faster we devour the planet. So the next step seems obvious: head into space, claim new worlds, and devour them, too.

Going big and wide feels natural to us because in the brutal world of our ancestors, conquering more land meant more food and security. For most of human history, expansion was key to being richer and living better. Big is good. This logic should also be true for alien civilizations that expand outwards. They eat their planet, then they eat space. Based on this idea of “more”, scientists came up with a system to categorize civilizations by their energy consumption on the macro level, the Kardashev scale.

A Type I civilization harnesses its home planet. Type II controls its star system. And Type III has taken over its galaxy, becoming a vast empire of engineered stars, terraformed planets, and titanic ships among the stars. This scale is helpful but also very limited – growing outwards might have been more important in the past compared to the future. Because as our civilization climbed up the tech tree, progress stopped coming from the big and began to emerge from the small.

Our ancestors built the pyramids: an immense technical achievement on a scale 100 times their own. But at a scale 100 times smaller, they created something incomparably more impactful: writing – making knowledge eternal and allowing information to travel through time and space. Over the next thousands of years we gained more and more mastery over the small and our capability and standard of living rose in parallel. We learned how to mix metals to get better tools. Engineered medicines that saved millions from disease.

We turned air into fertilizer, feeding billions. We pushed all the way down to the quantum level to convert sand into transistors, compressing room-sized computers into tiny machines, hundreds of millions of times more powerful. Controlling the small world makes you richer, healthier and able to live better. So what if we categorize alien civilizations by how deep they can go into the micro level? This is the Barrow scale, which measures progress by your level of control of the small world.

It starts at Type 1-minus, which covers almost all of human history until the late 19th century. We were able to manipulate objects and building structures roughly at our own scale, mining minerals, combining and refining them. Type 1-minus already made us the masters of the planet but this was just the very start and where things become really exciting. Type 2-minus – The Immortal Gods of Nature Today humanity might have begun its journey to becoming a Type 2-minus civilization: Achieve complete control over the language of life: DNA.

It has been only 60 years since we cracked the genetic code and about 10 since we discovered CRISPR, one of the most powerful tools of genetic engineering to date. The reward for completely understanding and controlling DNA is immense. The jellyfish Turritopsis dohrnii can revert its cells to an earlier stage, making it virtually immortal. If evolution stumbled on immortality once, what could a civilization achieve that can tell cells precisely what to do? It could heal most, if not all diseases and enhance or change their bodies at will: better blood, bones or muscles.

Why not start developing superorgans? Eyes that see more colours, skin that heals without scarring, brains that sense magnetic fields. Or why not create organ banks where you grow spare hearts, lungs or eyes, so there are always fresh organs ready to implant in case you have an accident? And this is just us. We could make our pets immortal and modify species that hurt us. We could mold the biosphere of the planet however we felt like. And we could create new forms of life, either just for vanity or to serve a greater purpose.

Maybe even creating a new Cambrian explosion on earth, thanks to genetic engineering. Climate change might be laughably easy to fix if we engineer super fast growing plants that suck CO2 from the atmosphere and trap it in materials that don’t rot. “Hey Mr. Kurzgesagt! This sounds nice and all, but those super-plants are just science fiction!” That's right. But there are real and effective ways to help nature recover from the damage humans have caused – today! That's why we love our friends at Planet Wild.

They are an online community that crowdfunds nature protection projects worldwide. One of our fact-checkers has been a member for almost a year now! Every month, over 25,000 Planet Wild members fund a new mission to restore nature – all documented on YouTube, so you can see what your contributions achieve. Take their wildlife crossing mission in Canada: Grizzly bears need lots of space to survive, but highways have carved up their habitat. Planet Wild funded crucial infrastructure to reconnect protected areas and help create one huge wildlife corridor.

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Type 2-minus is already on the level of science fiction – but humanity reasonably might get there in the next decades to centuries. The farther down we move on the Barrow scale, the more surreal things become. Type 3-minus to 5-minus – The invincible Gods of Matter and Energy Beneath the basic bricks of life lie those of ordinary matter: molecules and atoms. Today we can manipulate them through chemistry but Type 3-minus and Type 4-minus civilizations have the ability to move and combine individual molecules and eventually atoms with the same ease we stack bricks to build a house.

Achieving this fundamentally transforms what a civilization is able to do. Just to be clear, at this point we can only speculate and you can really only look dumb predicting future progress. After all, manipulating matter at very small scales takes a lot of energy. But just as our ancestors could never have imagined the Internet, genetic engineering or drone warfare, we can’t know what our distant descendants might achieve. But if we push the known laws of physics to their utter limits, several astonishing possibilities appear.

It could begin with new materials that are more durable and versatile than anything we have today. Fabrics that shift texture with the weather or a coating that can turn into a screen. Roads and bridges that self-repair before cracks spread. Buildings able to react to light, sound, or stress by opening, insulating or reinforcing themselves. As this control over the small expands, matter itself becomes programmable. Today, the densest information-storage system on Earth is DNA.

But DNA is not magic, it’s just atoms arranged so precisely that the enormous amount of information needed to run a cell can fit inside the cell itself. If we could pack information with that level of efficiency we might be able to build microscopic nanobots that perform all kinds of tasks, from cleaning polluted water to performing surgery inside our bodies. “Utility fogs”, swarms of billions of nanobots, could gather into everyday objects like tools or furniture. Matter might turn into hardware that we could guide with software.

If this all sounds incredibly dangerous, that’s because it probably is. But it also offers incredible riches: Every object is just atoms arranged in a specific way. So if you can control those arrangements, the word “waste” begins to lose its meaning. Old, broken or rotten stuff becomes poorly assembled atoms waiting to be rearranged again. Scarcity largely disappears because a lot of stuff in your planet can be reused again and again. This might eliminate the need to expand outwards to gather resources.

Why travel light-years to conquer other planets when most resources we could ever wish for are already here? A civilization that can pack information into matter as efficiently as biology does could also build incredibly powerful computers. The capacity of all present-day datacenters might fit into a device as big as your fist – like the world's largest computers of a few decades ago are dwarfed by your Iphone. What kind of AIs could we build, what kind of simulation could we run, what kind of science could we do?

All of this only escalates with control of the next layer of reality, transitioning into Type 5-minus: 10,000 times smaller than atoms are atomic nuclei. Tiny cores that define what atoms are and the fuel that lights up the universe. Fusing the hydrogen of a mid-size lake could sustain present-day humanity for millions of years. So a civilization that can control atomic nuclei has access to all the energy they can ever need. Dyson spheres or other macroengineering projects may be entirely unnecessary on that level.

For a civilization where health, matter and energy are abundant, the true source of progress , the only frontier left to chase, isn’t space or land. It’s information. The ability to design and redesign your virtually endless resources. To compute. Inside nuclei, protons and neutrons pulse with “heartbeats” sextillions of times per second – billions of times faster than any transistor can flip a bit today. So if it were somehow possible to harness them for computation, nuclei would give rise to an entirely new class of machines.

Computers powerful enough to design entire new forms of life and matter, and start unveiling the ultimate secrets of the universe. From here on there is just one final step. 6-minus to Ω-minus – The Bottom of Reality At this point we are getting so far out of our reach from what we can do today that scientists can really only speculate what might be possible. Deep below atomic nuclei are elementary particles like electrons, neutrinos and quarks and here reality itself begins to dissolve.

Fundamental particles are like ghosts emerging in a quantum vacuum – an omnipresent cosmic fluid whose tiny vibrations give rise to everything that exists. We can’t even begin to guess what a Type 6-minus civilization, capable of manipulating reality at this scale, might achieve. Perhaps it will uncover and use new dimensions of space for fancy stuff. Perhaps it can locally reshape physics or slow down time for their whole planet or even star system. But one idea that scientists have considered for decades is even stranger: Full control of the quantum vacuum could enable the creation of new universes.

Our own cosmos might have started as a tiny instability of the quantum vacuum that inflated into everything we see today. If that’s true, then mastering the vacuum could give you the power to seed entirely new universes inside test tubes. At that point, you would become an Omega-minus civilization. An actual cosmic god – of the infinitely small. Do advanced civilizations retreat into smaller and smaller layers of reality? We can’t say. It is possible that, to do all the great things we have described at the small scales they might still need to exploit resources at larger scales.

So maybe they do a bit of both. But for all its speculation, exploring the barrow scale reveals something deep. The path to becoming as immortal and powerful as the laws of physics allow doesn’t always seem to lead us to the other side of the galaxy. It can also guide us into the small world around us. This may be the final stage of all advanced civilizations. Not becoming huge and visible, shooting through the void of space – but quiet gods of the gigantic small universe in their own corner of the galaxy.

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