Elon Musk reveals ambitious plan to move humanity beyond Earth
By CNN, July 11, 2026Elon Musk’s plans for the future of SpaceX and humanity are rooted in an idea conceived in the 1960s, when astronomers began to detect mysterious, unknown radio sources in the cosmos.
Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev was a pioneer in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence at the time, and some of the signals fascinated him.
Intrigued by the idea that transmissions from potential alien civilisations could be detected from Earth, he proposed a scale to classify such civilisations based on the energy they could produce and then devote to interstellar communications. His concept is now known as the Kardashev scale.
Musk has referenced the scale often, most recently in a video shared on X, his social platform, ahead of SpaceX’s blockbuster initial public offering in June and in a signed statement on the company’s website, which summarises a request filed this year with the US Federal Communications Commission.
In the request, SpaceX asks for permission to send up to 1 million new satellites into orbit, to create data centres in space. Musk said that this new constellation of satellites would represent “a first step towards becoming a Kardashev II-level civilisation.”
The Kardashev scale has three levels, moving from planet to star to galaxy. A Type I civilisation can use all the energy of a single planet, either produced by the planet itself for example in the form of geothermal or wind power or received from its host star, like solar power.
A Type II civilisation can use the entire energy output of a star, as well as send information across galactic distances. A Type III civilisation can harness the power of a whole galaxy and send information across multiple galaxies.
The Kardashev scale has its detractors, but it has been a catalyst for discussion for the past six decades, and the subject of many revisions that have added extra levels of categorisation. Experts have recognised the framework as a useful tool to grade potential civilisations, albeit one that is not used in any official capacity.
“The Kardashev scale is, in principle, almost the only scientific framework we have for objectively assessing a civilisation’s technological level, specifically in terms of its ability to harness and utilise energy,” said Zaza Osmanov, an affiliate of the SETI Institute and associate dean of the School of Physics at the Free University of Tbilisi in Georgia. “More precisely, it allows us to estimate and compare the scale of energy resources that a civilisation can control and exploit.”
Judging by that standard, any alien civilisation that were to happen upon Earth now likely wouldn’t be too impressed, Musk suggested in the video SpaceX shared last month.
But could the company’s plans for orbital data centres, which face a number of technical hurdles, and its ongoing development of Starship, the most powerful launch system ever built, really change that view? Even if they did, experts say continuing to level up in the Kardashev sense could be complicated — and consequential.
A SpaceX Starship spacecraft rolls out toward its launchpad past the Starbase Manufacturing Facility in August 2025. Steve Nesius/Reuters
Earth on the scale
Kardashev first published the scale in a 1964 scientific paper titled “Transmission of Information by Extraterrestrial Civilisations,” and it soon became the subject of scrutiny.
“In the 1960s the idea that we could communicate with alien species was all rather new, and everyone was trying to figure out how possible it was,” said Jason Wright, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University. “Nikolai Kardashev was a young radio astronomer who got very excited about this idea, and he started thinking about a new type of radio source that had recently been discovered. We now understand them to be supermassive black holes in the centres of galaxies quasars but at the time they were still trying to figure out what they were.”
Without precisely specifying where Earth sat on his scale, Kardashev described Type I as a “technological level close to the level presently attained on the Earth.”
American astronomer Carl Sagan proposed a revision of the scale in the 1970s to address what he believed was a major flaw: a lack of subtlety. Sagan added decimal points to make the scale continuous and suggested that humanity was about a Type 0.7 on his new version. It’s important to note, however, that Sagan’s version of the scale — which has become influential in its own right — is not linear but logarithmic, meaning that the gap between 0.7 and 1 is much larger than it may appear at first glance.
American astronomer Carl Sagan proposed a popular revision of the Kardashev scale in the 1970s. Santi Visalli Inc./Getty Images
“The Kardashev scale is often criticised because it tries to project our understanding of human history and progress onto aliens,” Wright said, “but Sagan’s version allows us to simply set all of that aside and say species use some amount of energy, and this is how we describe how much energy they use. In that way, I think it is useful.”
The most recent approximation of where Earth sits on the adapted Kardashev scale comes from a 2023 study. Using economic, demographic, climate and ecological variables, it estimates that humanity is currently a Type 0.7276. The study also projects that by 2060, humanity would reach Type 0.7449, or about a 50% growth in energy consumption.
Going off-planet
Detractors of the Kardashev scale say that even reaching Type I status is not actually a realistic goal.
“Nobody really wants to use all the energy of a planet, because you would completely destroy the planet in the process,” said Philip Metzger, a planetary physicist and a research professor at the University of Central Florida who had an extensive career at NASA. “My view is we don’t use any more of the Earth’s energy. I’ve been arguing for a couple of decades that we need to move industry off the planet.”
Echoing Musk’s approach, Metzger said he believes that the future of energy production and industrial manufacturing should be in space or on the moon, essentially leapfrogging Type I to aim directly at Type II.
Living in space is also becoming a popular idea, at least among billionaires. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has openly supported the concept of “O’Neill colonies,” orbiting structures that would be miles wide and each hold up to 1 million people, using resources such as frozen water that can be harvested from the moon.
A study published in 2024 looked at 5 million stars in the Milky Way galaxy and found seven candidates that could potentially be hosting Dyson spheres.
“What that showed is that if Dyson spheres exist, they are extremely rare, so we now know that this is not a common phenomenon in our galaxy,” Wright said. The candidates are nevertheless “very interesting” and more observations are underway, he added, to find out more about them using the James Webb Space Telescope — although they might simply turn out to be false positives, or not really Dyson spheres.
“There is a possibility that some other galaxy has been filled with Dyson spheres as a Type III. We’ve done some work to try and see if that’s the case,” said Wright, talking about a forthcoming study that aims to ascertain “whether these things are common in the universe or not.”
The search for alien signals
When it comes to the possibility of extraterrestrial life, most scientists will exercise caution.
“The existence of Type II or Type III civilisations is certainly plausible in principle, given the age and scale of the universe,” said Tomo Goto, an associate professor of astronomy at the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, in an email. “However, the lack of observational evidence for such civilisations suggests that they are either extremely rare, short-lived, or fundamentally different from what the Kardashev framework assumes.”
Ever since American astrophysicist Frank Drake launched Project Ozma, the first search for alien signals, in 1960, there has been no shortage of similar projects, and technological progress is constantly improving their reach and scope.
Kardashev, who died in 2019 after an illustrious scientific career, followed up on the scale with two papers, published in 1980 and 1985.
These suggested strategies to spot signals coming from intelligent civilisations and dealt with the possible implications of such a discovery for humanity. Even though his scale focuses on energy production, he believed that “the concepts of morality and goodness are universal, like the Pythagorean theorem. Civilisations do not survive if they do not follow these concepts.”
“The Kardashev scale is a useful thought experiment for classifying civilisations in terms of their energy consumption,” Goto said. “However, it is important to keep in mind that more advanced civilisations may prioritise efficiency, computation or information processing rather than simply increasing total energy usage.”