This Is What Extraterrestrial Life Would Look Like

Take a look at the daily lives of aliens.

In the year 1600, Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake for suggesting that there might be other civilisations on other worlds. Nowadays, the first person to prove Bruno right will probably be given a Nobel Prize. The thing is about trying to find alien civilisations is that they're a bit, well, alien. We can't really be sure what we're looking for. Despite this, some of the world's boffiniest of boffins have had a good go at predicting what the daily lives of extraterrestrials might look like and, from the sound of it, those boffins have watched a lot of sci-fi. Unfortunately, as the experts were trying to figure out just what we're looking for in the search for aliens, they have inadvertently come up with a list of reasons as to why we'll never contact them. Many of these visions of alien society would mean that either the aliens are too advanced to give a damn about us, or too concerned with their own business to bother. Oh well, it's still fun to imagine, right?

8. Type I: Planet Masters

Right, to kick everything off, there's this thing call the Kardashev Scale. The Kardashev Scale is a way of sorting different levels of civilisation into rough categories - Type I, Type II and Type III - and it's all to do with where you get your energy from. A Type I civilisation is a planetary civilisation. That is to say, they are able to harness all of the energy available to them on their home world. This would include large scale fusion power, the harnessing of anti-matter and renewable energy such as wind, solar and hydroelectric. Fossil fuels don't count as they're unsustainable. A Type I should also really have taken control of the weather systems on their planet and geological activity (that's volcanoes, earthquakes and so on). Want rain? Just hit a button. Don't fancy that Earthquake? Pull that lever. Of course, non of this can be achieved unless you've got a stable, global government, as opposed to a few individuals sitting on their separate bits of rock and aiming nukes at each other. Now, as a beady-eyed, quick-witter reader, you may have spotted that this means that the human race is not yet a Type I civilisation, and you'd be right, as we're probably more in the region of 0.8. Not to worry, though, as many experts think we'll probably hit the Type I milestone in the next hundred years, so there's that to look forward to.
 
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