Microdimensional Mastery (Reverse Kardashev Scale) | Introduction

In 1964, Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev figured that civilizations can be categorized by the total amount of energy available to them. He called it the Kardashev Scale. He initially came up with 3 civilization types; type 1, type 2, and type 3. According to Nikolai Kardashev, a type 1 civilization has access to all of the available energy of its home planet; a type 2 civilization has access to all the energy available of its home star, and a type 3 civilization has access to all the energy available in its home galaxy. Now the Kardashev Scale may be one of the best in terms of measuring and understanding the progression of different types of civilizations in our universe. But it too comes with some limitations. The main criticism of the Kardashev scale comes from the fact that its approach solely relies on the available energy of a civilization as a means to measure its progression and how advanced it is. So, the more energy a civilization processes, the more advanced it becomes. Furthermore, under this model, it is assumed that every advancing civilization would want to expand further outwards into the universe consuming more and more energy as it expands. This of course is based on the very limited sample of human history available to us. But this may not be the only way of looking at things. Many Others have since proposed changes to the original Kardashev scale using different metrics such as 'mastery' of systems, amount of information used, or progress in control of the very small as opposed to the very large. So today, we are going to be exploring an alternative version of the Kardashev Scale; Microdimensional Mastery. Microdimensional Mastery extension to the Kardashev Scale was first proposed by an English cosmologist, and theoretical physicist, John David Barrow. Barrow did not focus his idea on the expansionist history of humans like Kardashev, he instead chose to focus on the fact that humans have had better success trying to manipulate microstructures like molecules and cells. He observed that humans have found it more cost-effective to extend their abilities to manipulate their environment over increasingly smaller scales rather than increasingly larger ones. So, for Barrow, manipulation at the smallest of scales like the atomic scale and beyond was the way to go instead of the outward expanding idea proposed by the original Kardashev Scale. He, therefore, proposed a reverse classification downward from Type I-minus all the way down to Type Omega-minus.