David Kipping

And you can even imagine using small artificial black holes as thermal generators, right?

So the Hawking radiation from them

kind of exponentially increases as they get smaller and smaller in size.

And so a very small black hole, one that you could almost imagine like holding in your hand, would be a fairly significant heat source.

And so that raises all sorts of prospects about how you might use that in an engineering context to power your civilization as well.

Yeah, it is surprising.

I think people tend to think that we're close to this scale.

The Kardashev Type 1 is defined as a civilization which is using as much energy as is essentially instant upon the planet from the star.

So that's a border, I think, for the Earth of something like 10 to the 5 terawatt, so 10 to the 7 terawatt is a gigantic amount of energy.

And we're using a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of that right now.

So if you became a Kardashev Type I civilization, which is seen not necessarily as a goal unto itself, I think people think, well, why are we aspiring to become this energy-hungry civilization?

Surely our energy needs might improve our efficiency or something as time goes on.

But ultimately, the more energy you have access to, the greater your capabilities will be.

I mean, if you wanna lift Mount Everest into space,

There is just a calculable amount of potential energy change that that's going to take in order to accomplish that.

And the more energy you have access to as a civilization, then clearly the easier that energy achievement is going to be.

So it depends on what your aspirations are as a civilization.

It might not be something you want to ever do, but...

Yeah.

I mean, computation is a great example of, I mean, already, I think something like 10% of US power electricity use is going towards the supercomputing centers.