[00:01] Everything we think about aliens might be completely wrong, an expression of how primitive humanity actually is. We imagine progress as Dyson spheres, interstellar travel, and galactic empires. But what if this is just how Kaisman imagined things?
[00:16] Bigger is better. We need more energy, more space, more stuff. What if the universe is full of old god-like alien civilizations and we don't even realize it? This real progress doesn't mean expanding outwards, but inwards, controlling the tiniest
[00:33] lanes of reality. Humans are expansionists and hungry for resources. In just a split second, we've spread across the entire planet, ate most of the large animals, felled a third of all forests, carved calyons for metals, and burned mountains of dead plants
[00:50] for energy. And our appetite isn't slowing down, it's accelerating. The more we progress, the faster we devour the planet. So, the next step seems obvious.
[01:02] Head into space, claim new worlds, and devour them too. Going big and wise feels natural to us, because in the brutal world of our ancestors, conquering more land meant more food and security.
[01:15] For most of human history, expansion was key to being richer and living better. Big is good. This logic should also be true for alien civilizations that expand outwards.
[01:27] They eat their planet, then they eat space. Based on this idea of more, scientists came up with a system to categorize civilizations by their energy consumption on the macro level. The Karchev Scale.
[01:40] A type 1 civilization harnesses its home planet. Type 2 controls its star system. and planet 3 has taken over its galaxy, becoming a vast empire of engineered stars, terraformed planets, and titanic ships among the stars.
[01:55] This scale is helpful, but also very limited. Growing outward might have been more important in the past compared to the future, because as our civilization climbed up the tech tree, progress stopped coming from the big and began to emerge from the small.
[02:10] Our ancestors built the pyramids, an immense technical achievement on a scale 100 times their own. But at a scale 100 times smaller, they created something incomparably more impactful.
[02:22] Writing, making knowledge eternal, and allowing information to travel through time and space. Over the next thousands of years, we gained more and more mastery over the small, and our capability and standard of living rose in parallel.
[02:36] We learned how to mix metals to get better tools, engineered medicines that saved millions from disease. We turned air into fertilizer, feeding billions. We pushed all the way down to the quantum level to convert sand into transistors,
[02:50] compressing room-sized computers into tiny machines, hundreds of millions of times more powerful. Controlling the small world makes you richer, healthier, and able to live better.
[03:02] So what if we categorize alien civilizations by how deep they can go into the micro level? This is the Barrow Scale, which measures progress by your level of control of the small world.
[03:14] It starts at Type 1- which covers almost all of human history until the late 19th century. We were able to manipulate objects and building structures roughly at our own scale, mining minerals, combining and refining them.
[03:27] Type 1 already made us the masters of the planet but this was just the very start and where things become really exciting Type 2 The Immortal Gods of Nata Today, humanity might have begun its journey
[03:41] to becoming a Type 2- civilization, achieve complete control over the language of life, DNA. It's only been 60 years since we cracked the genetic code, and about 10 since we discovered CRISPR,
[03:53] one of the most powerful tools of genetic engineering to date. The reward for completely understanding and controlling DNA is immense. The jellyfish Pterotopsis donae can revert itself to an earlier stage, making it virtually immortal.
[04:09] If evolution stumbled on immortality once, what could a civilization achieve that can tell cells precisely what to do? It could heal most, if not all, diseases and enhance or change their bodies at will to better blood, bones or muscles.
[04:24] Why not start developing purple organs? Eyes that see more colors, skin that heals without scarring, brains that sense magnetic fields. Or, why not create organ banks where you grow spare hearts, lungs or eyes,
[04:39] so there are always fresh organs ready to impart in case you have an accident. And this is just us. We could make our pets immortal and modify species that hurt us. We could mold the biosphere of the planet however we felt like.
[04:52] and they could create new forms of life either just for vanity or to serve a greater purpose maybe even creating a new Cambrian explosion on Earth thanks to genetic engineering
[05:04] climate change might be last of the easy to fix if we engineer super fast growing plants that suck CO2 from the atmosphere and trap it in materials that don't rot hey Mr. Kortkazak
[05:16] this sounds nice and all but all those super plants are just science fiction That's right. But there are real and effective ways to help nature recover from the damage humans have caused today. That's why we love our friends at Planet Wild.
[05:31] They're an online community that crowdfunds nature protection projects worldwide. One of our fact-checkers has been a member for almost a year now. Every month, over 25,000 Planet Wild members fund a new mission to restore nature,
[05:45] all documented on YouTube so you can see what your contributions achieve. take their wildlife crossing mission in Canada. Grizzly bears need lots of space to survive, but highways have carved up their habitat.
[05:57] Planet Wild funded crucial infrastructure to reconnect protected areas and help create one huge wildlife corridor. To protect our planet's ecosystems and help keep our channel going,
[06:09] join us at Planet Wild. You can give any amount that feels right to you and cancel at any time. The first 100 people to sign up using our code courses are online will get their first month paid for by us. Just scan the QR code or click the link
[06:24] in the description. If you want to see them in action first, check out their wildlife crossings video linked below. And now, back to custom plants and animals. Type 2 minus is already on the level
[06:38] of science fiction, but humanity reasonably might get there in the next decades to centuries. The further down we move on the Barrow scale, the more surreal things become. Type III- to V- the invincible gods of matter and energy.
[06:54] Beneath the basic bricks of life lie those of ordinary matter, molecules and atoms. Today we can manipulate them through chemistry but Type III and Type IV civilizations have the ability to move and combine individual molecules and eventually atoms with the same ease re bricks
[07:12] to build a house. Achieving this fundamentally transforms what a civilization is able to do. Just be clear, at this point we can only speculate, and you can really only look dumb predicting future progress. After all, manipulating matter at very small scales takes a lot of
[07:29] But just as our ancestors could never have imagined the internet, genetic engineering or drone warfare, we can't know what our distant descendants might achieve. But if we push the known laws of physics to their utter limits, several astonishing possibilities appear.
[07:44] It could begin with new materials that are more durable and versatile than anything we have today. Fabrics that shift texture with the weather, or a coating that can turn into a screen. Roads and bridges that self-repair before cracks spread.
[07:57] spread. Buildings are able to react to light, sound, or stress by opening, insulating, or reinforcing themselves. As this control over the small expands, matter itself becomes programmable.
[08:10] Today, the densest information storage system on Earth is DNA. But DNA is not magic, it's just atoms arranged so precisely that the enormous amount of information needed to run a cell can fit inside the cell itself. If we could pack information with that level
[08:26] of efficiency, we might be able to build microscopic nanobots that perform all kinds of tasks, from cleaning polluted water to performing surgery inside our bodies. Utility parks, swarms of billions of nanobots could gather into everyday objects like tools or furniture.
[08:42] Matter might turn into hardware that we could guide with software. If this all sounds incredibly dangerous, that's because it probably is. But it also offers incredible riches. Every The object is just atoms arranged in a specific way, so if you can control those arrangements,
[08:59] the word waste begins to lose its meaning. Old, broken or rotten stuff becomes poorly assembled atoms waiting to be rearranged again. The scarcity largely disappears because a lot of stuff in your planet can be reused
[09:11] again and again. This might eliminate the need to expand outwards to gather resources. Why travel light years to conquer other planets when most resources we could ever wish for are already here. A civilization that can pack information into matter as efficiently as biology
[09:28] does could also build incredibly powerful computers. The capacity of all present-day data centers might fit into a device as big as your fist, like the world's largest computers of a few decades ago are dwarfed by your iPhone. What kind of AIs could we build? What kind of
[09:46] simulation could we run? What kind of science could we do? All of this only escalates with control of the next layer of reality, transitioning into Type 5-. 10,000 times smaller than atoms are atomic nuclei, tiny cores that define what atoms
[10:02] are and the fuel that lights up the universe. Fusing the hydrogen of a mid-sized lake could sustain present-day humanity for millions of years. So a civilization that can control atomic nuclei has access to all the energy they can
[10:16] ever need. Dyson spheres or other macroengineering projects may be entirely unnecessary on that level. For a civilization where health, matter and energy are abundant, the true source of progress,
[10:28] the only frontier left to chase isn't space or land, it's information. The ability to design and redesign your virtually endless resources To compute Inside nuclei protons and neutrons pulse with heartbeat six billions of times per second
[10:46] billions of times faster than any transistor can chip a bit today. So if it was somehow possible to harness them for computation, nuclei would give rise to an entirely new class of machines, computing powerful enough to design entire new forms of life and matter,
[11:01] and starts unveiling the ultimate secrets of the universe. From here on, there's just one final step. Six minus to omega minus, the bottom of reality.
[11:14] At this point, we're getting so far out of our reach from what we can do today that scientists can really only speculate what might be possible. Deep below atomic nuclei are elementary particles like electrons, neutrinos and quarks
[11:26] and here, reality itself begins to dissolve. Fundamental particles are like ghosts emerging in a quantum vacuum, an omnipresent cosmic fluid whose tiny vibrations give rise to everything that exists.
[11:40] We can't even begin to guess what a type 6 minus civilization capable of manipulating reality of this scale might achieve. Perhaps it will uncover and use new dimensions of space for fancy stuff.
[11:52] Perhaps it can locally reshape physics or slow down time for their whole planet or even star system. But one idea that scientists have considered for decades is even stranger. Full control of the quantum vacuum could enable the creation of new universes.
[12:09] Our own cosmos might have started as a tiny instability of the quantum vacuum that encased into everything we see today. If that's true, then mastering the vacuum could give you the power to seed entirely new universes inside test tubes.
[12:24] At that point, you become an Omega Minus civilization, an actual cosmic god of the infinitely small. Do as far as civilizations retreat into smaller and smaller layers of reality, we can't say.
[12:39] It is possible that to do all the great things we described at the small scales, they might still need to exploit resources at larger scales. So maybe they do a bit of both. But for all its speculation, exploring the Barrow Scale reveals something deep.
[12:53] The past becoming as immortal and powerful as the laws of physics allow doesn't always seem to lead us to the other side of the galaxy. It can also guide us into the small world around it.
[13:06] This may be the final stage of all advanced civilizations. Not becoming huge and visible, shooting through the void of space, the quiet gods of the gigantic small universe in their own corner of the galaxy.
[13:23] Our shop is turning ten. It's become one of our most important sources of income, so we can keep our videos free for everyone. The human era calendar is the product you always look for the most, and the new edition is dropping very soon.
[13:37] But there's more. To thank all the birds visiting our shop, We launched a rewards program, the Cosmic Expedition, where you can earn XP and unlock special rewards like discounts and exclusive products.
[13:50] Be surprised to know when the calendar drops, stay in the loop on all things Cosmic Zod, and subscribe to our newsletter. If you want to listen to the beautiful soundtrack without my annoying voice, well, it's up to you.
[14:02] Just select the audio track Interlingua down here and watch the video again as a music video. Thank you.