THE CONSCIOUSNESS SCALE AND INDIA AS A CIVILISATIONAL STATE

As China and America lead the race of the Kardashev Scale of energy exploration and exploitation, India, while securing its energy sovereignty, can do better. It can underline its identity as a civilisational state through a scale of geoethics.

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Elon Musk has a favourite scale, even though this is less discussed than almost everything other thing that he is interested in. It is called the Kardashev Scale. This scale is named after Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardashev who presented it in a research paper in 1964, and it measures civilisations on the basis of their energy access and use. Kardashev, an astrophysicist with a PhD in physics and mathematics, was the deputy director of the Astro Space Center of the PN Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. His assessment or scale for different kinds of civilisations was on the basis of the quantum of energy that a civilisation was able to tap into and use.

He developed the idea that there were there three kinds of civilisations.

Level 1, where a civilisation was able to harness and use all the energy available on the planet in which it was situated; Level 2, where a civilisation was able to harness and use all the energy from its star (for instance, the sun for earth); And Level 3, where a civilisation was able to harness all energy sources in its galaxy including from its star and other sources in the galaxy, including from Black Holes.

This framework of thinking is absolutely essential to the way Musk thinks about the future of the human race as a multi-planet civilisation, which can co-exist in various planets making use of each planets energy sources as it pleases and human beings changing their habitat and habits according what was available in that planet.

This way of thinking also adds a new dimension to the geopolitical framework of civilisational states-hitherto used for states with a long and unique history which forms the source material or code for the raison d'etre of their nationhood. By this logic, India is certainly a civilisational state, so is China, even though technically Mao's Great Leap Forward was a great act of destruction wrought upon the Chinese civilisation.