BACKCASTING KARDASHEV ONE / К ЕДИНИЦЕ КАРДАШЕВА И ОБРАТНО
https://backcasting-kardashev.one/
Yevheniia Berchul (UA) | Yulia Besplemennova (RU) | Stuart Turner (UK) | Iani Zeigerman (BR)
This is a project about energy, civilisation and planetarity. It repurposes a scale — invented by Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev in 1964 to classify extraterrestrial civilisations — to assess what planetary civilisation means here on earth.
The Kardashev scale proposed that mastering huge amounts of energy would be a fundamental requirement of any advanced technological civilisation that we might hope to detect across the vastness of space.
In the decades since then, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has not revealed the existence of inhabitants of other worlds. What scientific efforts have revealed – primarily through climate sensing and modelling – is that exponentially increasing energy consumption has planetary-scale geochemical consequences.
This inadvertent, and already-disastrous, terraforming reveals that we exist on a planet, which made a civilization, which is now remaking the planet.
In that context, using the insights of Kardashev and others as our guide, we ask: where are we on the scale and what does that say about our level of advancement? What might be the thermodynamic and civilisational consequences of advancement on the Kardashev scale? What is the scope of our agency as we head towards many possible futures – and what might those futures look like? And finally working backwards from them, what might we learn about inhabitation of earth during our current anthropogenic crisis of energy metabolism?
Credits:
The project was developed during The Terraforming 2020 at the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design in Moscow, Russia
https://theterraforming.strelka.com/
Project team: Yevheniia Berchul, Yulya Besplemennova, Stuart Turner, Iani Zeigerman
Program Director: Benjamin H. Bratton
Program Tutors: Nicolay Boyadjiev, Lisa Dorrer
TTF 2020 – Backcasting Kardashev One