I posted a joke mentioning the Amish country in my latest @dbuzz challenge post and yesterday I watched Isaac Arthur's video about creating purpose in a post-scarcity society. It made sense to me then to watch Isaac Arthur's video about low-tech Kardashev Type II civilization.
The Kardashev scale pegs a Type II at the ability of a civilization to harness the energy radiated by its own parent star. The Star Trek franchise is usually used in the media as an example of a Type II Kardashev civilization. Their fictional technology utilizes anti-matter for energy but realistically it's more likely that to obtain Type II status humanity will use massive amounts of solar collectors orbiting the Sun. As the video points out that is technology already known. What's needed is active refining metals in space mined from asteroids.
The video goes into how the energy harnessed from the Sun would be used. The possibility I like is also building a Matrioshka brain along with a Dyson sphere. The video also mentions using the energy to propel light sail crafts to a decent fraction of light speed. The video ends with the option of creating self-replicating machines to spread throughout the galaxy.
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