> It assumes... It also assumes a level of technological sophistication not too different from our own, depending on advances in AI and automation this could f

> It assumes... It also assumes a level of technological sophistication not too different from our own, depending on advances in AI and automation this could feasibly be us in 200 years. We hobble ourselves by only considering an alien species to be somewhat more advanced than us, it's a forgivable fault because we want to keep things realistic but it prevents us from asking the harder questions about what would be possible in 1,000 years or 1,000,000 years of continued technological development. Kardashev dared to dream when he proposed his scale. What if we could convert our entire solar system including the sun into usable energy? an entire galaxy? It's akin to the hunter gatherer asking "what if we could harness the power of lightning?" he may be very far from that dream becoming a reality but it did eventually give way to man's ingenuity. We should ask those questions: What if we could control gravity? What if we could move faster than light? What if we could create any kind of matter or field from scratch out of the raw stuff of spacetime? What is beyond space itself and could we ever access it? Dreams maybe, for today at least but perhaps not forever.