Neil deGrasse Tyson

Yeah, when I lead off with that, and I'll hand the baton over to you, Nick.

So the Kardashev scale is a scale of how much energy you have access to and can exploit.

Oh, okay.

Okay, so I think there are five levels.

So one of them is

do you have access to all of the energy sources in your host planet?

And if you do and you can exploit them, you're civilization level one.

So that means you can go into a volcano and tap the energy.

You can tap the volcano the way you tap a cake.

You could use the energy and the crust of the earth that would otherwise make earthquakes.

You can tap that and use that for your own means.

Storm systems, this sort of thing.

So a level two civilization would control all of the energy that comes from its host star.

Okay.

Okay, so it's way more energy than what is embedded in your planet.

A level three civilization would control all the energy of your galaxy that you happen to live in.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

And you wield this.

And the history of civilization reveals that the nations or the nation states that had the most power, political power, cultural power, were those that actually wielded the most energy per capita.

in the world at that time.