06Established

Civilisation at Scale

Energy throughput and planetary limits

Kardashev's classification is a simple, honest yardstick: how much energy a civilisation can marshal. Human energy use is knowable, and the transition to planetary scale is an engineering question with published constraints.

What is established

Kardashev proposed classifying civilisations by energy throughput: roughly 10^16 W for a planetary civilisation, 10^26 W for a stellar one.
Human primary energy use is on the order of 10^13 W, commonly estimated at about 0.7 on the scale.
Energy transitions are measurable in detail: installed capacity, grid losses, storage duration, land use, and material intensity all have published figures.

What is proposed

That the next scale can be reached through field-based generation rather than known generation, storage and transmission technologies.
This archive makes no claim that a 'coherent' infrastructure removes the need for medicine, agriculture or civil defence. There is no evidence for that, and it is not part of the research programme.

What remains open

Which generation mix can plausibly deliver planetary-scale power without breaching material and thermal limits.
How storage and transmission constraints, not generation alone, set the practical ceiling.