Originally posted by Phoenycks
For my money, the universe will never end, though it will burn out. We've got several billion years before that happens. By then we should be time travellers though, so we'll just go back to an earlier time.

Since Kardashev gave the original ranking of civilizations, there have been many scientific developments which refine and extend his original analysis, such as recent developments in nanotechnology, biotechnology, quantum physics, etc.

For example, nanotechnology may facilitate the development of Von Neumann probes. As physicist Richard Feynman observed in his seminal essay, "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom," there is nothing in the laws of physics which prevents building armies of molecular-sized machines. At present, scientists have already built atomic-sized curiosities, such as an atomic abacus with Buckyballs and an atomic guitar with strings about 100 atoms across.

Paul Davies speculates that a space-faring civilization could use nanotechnology to build miniature probes to explore the galaxy, perhaps no bigger than your palm. Davies says, "The tiny probes I'm talking about will be so inconspicuous that it's no surprise that we haven't come across one. It's not the sort of thing that you're going to trip over in your back yard. So if that is the way technology develops, namely, smaller, faster, cheaper and if other civilizations have gone this route, then we could be surrounded by surveillance devices."


Lastly, there is also the possibility that a Type II or Type III civilization might be able to reach the fabled Planck energy with their machines (10^19 billion electron volts). This is energy is a quadrillion times larger than our most powerful atom smasher. This energy, as fantastic as it may seem, is (by definition) within the range of a Type II or III civilization.

The Planck energy only occurs at the center of black holes and the instant of the Big Bang. But with recent advances in quantum gravity and superstring theory, there is renewed interest among physicists about energies so vast that quantum effects rip apart the fabric of space and time. Although it is by no means certain that quantum physics allows for stable wormholes, this raises the remote possibility that a sufficiently advanced civilizations may be able to move via holes in space, like Alice's Looking Glass. And if these civilizations can successfully navigate through stable wormholes, then attaining a specific impulse of a million seconds is no longer a problem. They merely take a short-cut through the galaxy. This would greatly cut down the transition between a Type II and Type III civilization.

Second, the ability to tear holes in space and time may come in handy one day. Astronomers, analyzing light from distant supernovas, have concluded recently that the universe may be accelerating, rather than slowing down. If this is true, there may be an anti-gravity force (perhaps Einstein's cosmological constant) which is counteracting the gravitational attraction of distant galaxies. But this also means that the universe might expand forever in a Big Chill, until temperatures approach near-absolute zero. Several papers have recently laid out what such a dismal universe may look like. It will be a pitiful sight: any civilization which survives will be desperately huddled next to the dying embers of fading neutron stars and black holes. All intelligent life must die when the universe dies.


Today, we realize that sufficiently powerful rockets may spare us from the death of our sun 5 billion years from now, when the oceans will boil and the mountains will melt. But how do we escape the death of the universe itself?

Astronomer John Barrows of the University of Sussex writes, "Suppose that we extend the classification upwards. Members of these hypothetical civilizations of Type IV, V, VI, ... and so on, would be able to manipulate the structures in the universe on larger and larger scales, encompassing groups of galaxies, clusters, and superclusters of galaxies." Civilizations beyond Type III may have enough energy to escape our dying universe via holes in space.