One of the most fantastical claims SpaceX is making during the countdown toward an initial public offering of shares is that it is helping create one of the most advanced civilizations across the Milky Way.
Because that extraordinary claim is woven into SpaceX’s IPO application to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, says a leading space sector scholar, there’s a remote chance that SEC regulators could investigate that section of the filing.
Elon Musk, founder of what has become the world’s first independent space superpower, lofted that claim for the first time in a signed mission statement he published on the SpaceX website, on the eve of filing for the IPO.
“SpaceX has acquired xAI to form the most ambitious … innovation engine on (and off) Earth,” he boosted, “with AI, rockets, space-based internet, direct-to-mobile device communications and the world’s foremost real-time information and free speech platform.”
SpaceX’s newly forged alliance of leading-edge spacecraft and AI agents, Musk suggested, would power its launch of an astounding super-armada of satellites.
“Launching a constellation of a million satellites that operate as orbital data centers is a first step towards becoming a Kardashev II-level civilization,” Musk said, “one that can harness the Sun’s full power, while supporting AI-driven applications for billions of people today and ensuring humanity’s multi-planetary future.”
The problem with Musk’s claim of SpaceX’s helping skyrocket humanity to become “a Kardashev II-level civilization,” one of the most advanced techno-societies in the galaxy, or the entire universe, is that the Earth is now rated by astronomers worldwide as not even reaching a Kardashev I civilization, says pre-eminent space scholar Brian Hurley, founder of the influential New Space Economy think tank and digital magazine.
Musk’s claim on helping foster a leading-edge technological civilization, echoed throughout the SpaceX IPO application to American securities regulators, Hurley told me, would find zero support among astrophysicists and astronomers leading the search for advanced extraterrestrial outposts across the galaxy who use the Kardashev classification system while scanning for “techno-signatures” that could be emitted by hyper-tech astronomers and engineers orbiting other stars.
This system was formulated by the Soviet Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardashev, during the dawn of the first Space Age, to aid in stargazers’ search for alien societies at the forefront of spacefaring and planet-scale engineering technologies across and beyond the Milky Way, says Hurley, a world-leading expert who chronicles the rapid-fire expansion of the modern space sector across the globe and its missions spanning the solar system.
Kardashev’s genius was in realizing that while the cultures of advanced societies might wildly differ across myriad planets and solar systems, the universal laws of physics would mean that as each society progressed, it would ultimately tap all of the energy available on its planet (Kardashev I civilization), star system (Kardashev II) or galaxy (Kardashev III), with the exploding levels of energy use observable via infrared telescopes.
Kardashev and his apostles in astronomy, and in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, realized that on any planet, as a society became more advanced, it would tap more energy to power an expanding population and global computing web, and then to begin terraforming nearby worlds, ultimately aiming its wanderlust and colonies across an entire galaxy.
The onetime SETI leader Carl Sagan and his disciples have classified the Earth’s society as perhaps three quarters of the way toward reaching a Kardashev I civilization, Hurley says.
The planet and its eight billion global citizens are moving through an extremely dangerous transition period, marked by the development of high-tech doomsday weaponry like thermonuclear bombs, but without the deeper wisdom and embrace of universal peace hypothesized to be the hallmarks of the societies that survive to become Kardashev civilizations, he adds.
If Elon Musk has studied the decades of scholarship on Kardashev societies, he is certain to be aware that Earth is passing through this high-risk era.
During a fantastical overview he presented at his Starbase launch center, Musk sketched out his vision on transforming Mars into an off-world sanctuary as the penumbra of war darkens the fate of the Earth.
“There’s a high urgency to making life multi-planetary.”
“The overarching goal of the company is to extend life sustainably to another planet – Mars is the only option really – and to do that ideally before World War III,” Musk warned.
Rapidly building a haven for humans on Mars is imperative, SpaceX’s chief rocket designer said, before “there’s something that takes out Earth – like let’s say there’s a World War III – global thermonuclear warfare.”
Tim Wright, Treaty Coordinator at the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, the group that won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for its central role in promulgating the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, told me following that presentation that Elon Musk, with his immense following, should join the anti-nuclear movement and press for the universal adoption of that treaty to save the planet and its peoples.
A nuclear-free world would also speed up the transition to becoming a Kardashev I civilization.
Space scholar Brian Hurley says Kardashev’s followers have proposed that level II civilizations might build fantastical super-structures like Dyson Spheres, or sun-encircling webs of satellites, to channel all of a star’s energy to colonies across a solar system, and that these stellar engineering projects might be observable across a galaxy.
Elon Musk’s scheme to create “a one-million-satellite constellation would not make Earth a Kardashev I civilization,” Hurley says, “and it certainly would not make humanity a Kardashev II civilization.”
“A Type II civilization is associated with harnessing the energy output of its star,” he told me.
“A million satellites, even an extremely large constellation of orbital data centers, would still be many orders of magnitude below that standard.”
But Elon Musk’s claim on SpaceX catapulting the planet beyond the realm of Kardashev I civilizations, first in his Web-published mission statement, and then echoed across SpaceX’s IPO filing with the Securities Commission, could present a vexing problem for regulators.
“Because the Kardashev statement is in the S-1 [IPO application to the SEC], the issue is not simply whether the reference is scientifically accurate,” Hurley says.
“The SEC is unlikely to referee astrophysics or speculative futurism directly.”
“However, the real question is whether it is material, supportable, and potentially misleading in the context of the offering.”
“The SEC probably would not say, ‘That is not Kardashev II.’”
“It would be more likely to ask, ‘Is this statement adequately supported, qualified, and disclosed in a way that does not mislead investors?’”
Could it be even remotely possible that the SEC would complain that SpaceX’s Kardashev Civilization II claim inside the IPO application might potentially mislead investors?
“Yes I think it is possible,” Hurley told me. “I would be disappointed if they did not question the statement.”
