Level 1 - Planetary Scale. Infrastructure that supports activities on a global scale include transportation and communications networks that span the globe. Intercontinental airlines require large airports with long, robust runways, and large terminals to support large passenger volume. Global scale telecommunications networks require fiber optical cable strung across oceans and satellites in orbit to support billions of customers' conversations on the surface. Earth is nearly at this level, but there are still many justifications for national boundaries. These include conflicts and technical challenges in the accommodation of thousands of languages, religions, cultures, traditions, hundreds of political & legal systems, etc. The diversity of barriers around the world keeps growing with the world's population, now approaching 8 billion, and seems increasingly intractible. It is arguable as to whether this quagmire can ever be fixed.
Level 2 - Solar System Scale. Infrastructure to support the flow of materials and communications between worlds. These might include space elevators around every planet & large moon, each having terminals for cargo and passengers. Freighters with large fusion-powered ion engines cycle through the solar system, and never land. Most people live in space on Stanford Rings, or stacks forming O'Neil Cylinders, attached to orbital rings fully encircling whole planets and moons. Immense swarms of Langrange Point telescopes are built and operational, able to resolve detailed images of exoplanets thousands of lightyears away, and detect exoplanets millions of lightyears away. There is a chance that evidence of alien life has been detected this way, in the form of artificial structures on distant worlds, although imaging the actual aliens might still be too much of a challenge.
Level 3 - Galaxy Scale. Starship technology is a Kardashev Level 3 technology, and a requirement for any multi-system civilization. At this scale, not only has technology become almost unimaginably advanced, but the ability of the species to accommodate temporal discontinuities amounting to 10s of thousands of years between star systems is fully developed. Alien life, extant and extinct, has been discovered and sampled wherever it was found. In order to accommodate multiple species, and multiple human subspecies across vast expanses of space and time, a superorganism might evolve, using some sort of biotech to enable the participation of as many living things as possible in the galactic community. It might be rudimentary biochemical, instinctive, dream-state, or fully conscious participation, but it would be necessary as there cannot be just one species spanning an entire galaxy!
Level 4 - Intergalactic Scale... or something else entirely? Up to this point, climbing the evolutionary ladder from one level to the next entailed some dramatic infrastructure changes. I cannot imagine what might be possible beyond Level 3. Perhaps something to do with the black holes at the centers of galaxies. A Level 4 civilization might develop technology that involves multiple active galactic nuclei. Why? Who knows!
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