David Kipping

So there's a vast amount of current engine needs which are already going towards computing and will surely only increase over time.

If we start ever doing anything like mind uploading or creating simulated realities, that cost will surely become almost a dominant source of our energy requirements at that point if civilization completely moves over to this kind of post-humanism stage.

And so it's not unreasonable that our energy needs would continue to grow, certainly historically they always have at about 2% per year.

And so if that continues, there is going to be a certain point where you're running up against the amount of energy which you can harvest because even if you cover the entire planet in solar panels,

there's no more energy to be had.

There's a few ways of achieving this.

I talked about in the video how there were several renewable energy sources that we're excited about, like geothermal, wind power, waves, but pretty much all of those don't really scratch the surface or don't really scratch the itch of getting into a Kardashev-type one civilization.

They're meaningful now.

I would never tell anybody don't do

wind power now because it's clearly useful at our current stage of civilization, but it's going to be a pretty negligible fraction of our energy requirements if we got to that stage of development.

And so there has to be a breakthrough in either our ability to harvest solar energy, which would require maybe something like a space array of solar panels of beaming the energy back down, or some

developments and innovations in nuclear fusion that would allow us to essentially reproduce the same process of what's producing the solar photons, but here on Earth.

But even that comes with some consequences.

If you're generating the energy here on Earth and you're doing work on it on Earth,

then that work is going to produce waste heat, and that waste heat is going to increase the ambient temperature of the planet.

And so even if this isn't really a greenhouse effect that you're increasing the temperature of the planet, this is just the amount of computers that are churning.

You put your hand to a computer, you can feel the warmth coming off them.

If you do that much work of literally the entire instant energy of the planet is doing that work, the planet is going to warm up significantly as a result of that.

And so that clearly indicates that this is not a sustainable path, that civilisations as they approach Kalashev Type 1 are going to have to leave planet Earth, which is really the point of that video, to show that it's

A Kalashev Type 1 civilization, even though it's defined as instant energy upon a planet, that is not a species that is going to still be living on their planet, at least in isolation.