Right now humanity is facing some bad times due to CO2 in our atmosphere trapping excess heat from the sun.
Presumably, a civilisation that was Type I on the Kardashev scale would be capturing all the available solar energy coming in to their atmosphere on purpose and using it to perform some function. But some of that energy would inevitably be transformed into heat due to no technology being 100% efficient.
So, wouldn’t a civilisation face catastrophic climate change really before they even got to be a fully Type I civilisation?
The climate would need to be in control for type I civ to exist.
If you have basically infinite energy, problems like climate change kinda go away. Type 1 is so insane, it’s hard to imagine what it would actually be like.
We could literally just pump energy into space and have more than we need left over.
Yeah - “air condition the planet” becomes a reasonable and viable option if you’re at K1
We could literally just pump energy into space and have more than we need left over.
Mars isn’t only colder because it’s further from the sun, it has a very thin atmosphere that largely radiates heat away into space, no thermal retention. The only reason we would need to “Pump” anything is because we’ve effectively wrapped the planet in an invisible thermal blanket that won’t let the heat out. The energy “wants” to flow out of our atmosphere and leave us a snowball. In fact, we were, basically a snowball for a few million years until we learned how to use oxygen to metabolize hydrocarbon fuel.
Our planet already captures almost al of that energy and almost all of it becomes heat immediately. Not too much would change climate-wise.
Well, if the solar panels were outside the atmosphere like some sort of inside out dyson sphere, theoretically, no heat would transfer to the planet. We’d have to ask why anyone would do this, and it seems wildly inefficient, but theoretically it could work.
Presumably, you would have figured out how to stabilize atmospheric gas concentrations to optimize radiant thermal control before you reach Type 1 or you would cook yourself, yes.
