Proposes a new model to measure civilizational progress, highlighting sustainability and complexity rather than energy use.
The Kardashev Scale (1964) measures civilisational advancement by energy consumption. While revolutionary for SETI research, this framework encodes an extractive paradigm that is thermodynamically incompatible with long-term survival — conflating energy throughput with progress while ignoring biosphere depletion. We propose the Neo-Kardashev Scale, which redefines civilisational advancement as negentropic enhancement capacity: the measurable ability to increase organised biological complexity rather than merely harness energy.
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Darryl J. Nicke II (2026) studied this question.
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