AI’s depiction of what a city center would look like in a type one civilization.
A type one civilization on the Kardashev scale can utilize all the available energy on their home planet. The abundance of energy can help power many advanced technologies like:
- Medicines to slow or stop aging.
- Machines that help control the weather, or manipulate natural disasters to humanity’s advantage.
- More and more countries developing, with access to decent infrastructure.
- Manual labor jobs being fully automated, leaving humans to pursue more intelligent and technical careers.
The power consumption would be about 10^16 watts or one followed by 16 zeroes. It would look like: 10,000,000,000,000,000.
Now let’s multiply that number by 8766, which is the number of hours in a year, to find out how much energy we would need to keep the power running for a whole year, which is almost 10^20 (100,000,000,000,000,000,000) watt-hours, (The actual number 8.766 X 10^19, or 87,660,000,000,000,000,000. However, lets round up to 10^20 for simplicity).
(That amount of energy is a rough estimate. Energy demands could decrease throughout a period of time, and energy can also become more efficient. This means that less energy would be required to maintain the same amount of power – which is a good thing).
Difference between watts and watt-hours
Watts are a unit of power, and watt-hours are a unit of energy. If a machine is consuming watts, it means that the machine is consuming that amount continuously while it’s operating. Watt-hours are the energy that feeds/fuels the machine while it’s running. Here is an example:
Examples of watts are:
- A cell phone in operation, whether during a phone call, or if it’s running certain apps.
- How powerful a laser pointer is when it’s turned on.
- How powerful a fan is when it’s turned on.
- A car driving at a certain speed.
Examples of watt-hours are:
- The battery percentage of that phone.
- How much battery is left in that laser.
- The amount of electricity available for that fan, or battery percentage if the fan is wireless.
- How much fuel is in that car.
So if a powerful laser consumes one Watt during operation, and has 100 Watt-hours of energy stored, the laser can stay on for 100 hours before the batteries die out.
Anyways, let’s get back to the energy available in a type one civilization which was the 10^20 watt hours annually. Let’s divide that by 8 billion, which is the amount of humans on planet Earth as of 2024. This gives us about 12.5 billion Watt-hours per person annually, which equates to about 34 million per day.
If you still have trouble understanding that amount, no worries. Let’s see exactly how much that is.
As of April 2024, the average American household consumes about 875,000 watt-hours per month.
This means that a type one human would consume more energy in one day than a 2024 American household would in three years!
In the early 21st century, fossil fuels are our main source of energy, particularly oil and gasoline. Exactly how much oil would we need?
One barrel of oil is about 1,700,000 watt-hours, so a single person would deplete 20 barrels of oil per day, which equates to 840 gallons. Imagine how much oil a city or state would deplete!
The US has 330 million people as of April 2024. If all Americans consumed as much energy as a type one human, we would deplete the entire planet’s oil supply – about 1.5 trillion barrels – in just 200 days.
This is why fossil fuels aren’t feasible for humanity’s future. Energy demands increase as technology improves, and fossil fuels are a finite resource. Humanity should look forward to developing more renewable energy sources like solar, wind, or nuclear.