The scale was originally designed in 1964 by Russian Astrophysicist Nicolai Kardashev who looked for signs of extraterrestial life within the cosmic signals.
It was based in the classification of three 03 classes, each with a level based on the management of energy:
· Type I (10^16 Watts)
· Type II (10^26 Watts)
· Type III (10^36 Watts)
Othernastronomers have extended the scale to Type IV (10⁴⁶ Watts) and Type . These additions consider both access to energy and the amount of knowledge to which civilizations have access.(1)
The Watt unit actually comes from the surname of the engineer and mathematician James Watt (1736-1819) , a scientist who did an important job creating the steam engine. The Watt or Watt symbol is the power unit of the International System of Units. Its symbol is W. It is the equivalent of 1 Joules per second.
If we look at the Kardashev type I scale, ancivilization on that scale has managed to use all the solar energy it receivesnfrom the sun or 10¹⁶ Watts, in other words 10, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000 Watts, without any doubt a very big ammount of energy. With this level of energy, we could controlnor even modify the climate, hurricanes, tides, etc. At this scale our present civilization is still thousands of times smaller in scale in terms of energy production and therefore could not be classified as one Type I civilization, we are still far from managing that capacity.
