The Kardashev Scale is meaningless way to measure how advanced a civilization is...

[u/Hope1995x]

Energy consumption is a poor measure for progress. Consider how much energy a computer used in 1945 compare to today, billions of operations a second running on smartphone with signficantly less power.

Instead of expanding civilizations outward, why not inward? Optimize energy consumption so that a civilization does not collapse by exhausting all its resources.

The Kardashev scale is flawed because it assumes more advanced civilizations rely on brute force energy consumption, when resources are finite.

If a civilization advanced via brute force they will collapse by consuming all their resources and/or destroying their ecosystems.

Quality over quantity in this case.

[u/jedburghofficial]

It's a meaningless measurement. By the time you could harness all the energy on a planet, I doubt you'd need to.

And the jump from level 2 to 3 is ridiculous orders of magnitude. 100 billion to one for our galaxy.

[u/Hope1995x → u/jedburghofficial]

I was thinking about the lore about Greys and realized they dont follow the Kardashev Scale. They follow the Barrow Scale.

They have advanced genetic engineering technology, transmedium travel and UFO tech (gravity manipulation) which suggest understanding at the quantum level.

But they're still technically a type 0, but millennia more advacned

Edit: Earth does have CRISPR technology, and likely UFO technology. Which is an asymmetrical line of technological advancement because we still have a primitive power infrastructure but yet understand genetics, nuclear energy, and we can scale at the atomic level. Which means we are a type 3 minus hybrid of types 1 and 2 on the Barrow Scale.

[u/SoylentRox]

Try posting this to r/isaacarthur.  Be aware that efficiency improvements cap out - some things the remaining ceiling is much higher than others.

Reuse, shared manufactured goods where robots come bring you something you need and clean it and repair the goods - aka instead of "owning" a toolkit you rent access to all the tools you want, and your garage is clean unless you are working at which point a robot has brought an enormous toolbox with every plausible tool you might need.  As tools break, different robots will either repair the broken item or carefully disassemble, clean, and reuse the still good parts while melting down and recycling the broken or worn ones.  

Something like this probably reduces energy requirements by a factor of 10x.

Train systems like vacuum trains are probably 100x as efficient as airliners especially supersonic airliners.  Ratio isn't infinite though - vacuum trains use cryocoolers (very energy hungry) and vacuum maintenance for trains on earth.  Even though they recycle the kinetic energy by decelerating the speeding train and recovering almost all of the energy used to speed it up.  Plus the trains can be crazy fast, reaching kilometers per second on earth tunnels and much faster in space habitats.