Uploaded August 2021 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
A few months back, we looked at an alternative way to characterize different civilizations in terms of their information content as proposed by Carl Sagan. Sagan believed that the amount of information available to a civilization should be an important criterion when trying to come up with a useful metric to measure different Types of civilizations. He assigned a lettered scale from A-Z where each letter meant an order of magnitude increase in the volume of information a civilization can hold. Though there can be exceptions, but generally, we would expect a civilization that is high on the energy scale to also be high on the information scale according to Sagan. Now, although he does not go into details on every single Type of civilization on his lettered scale, he does comment on a few from which anyone can make some educated guesses and figure out some characteristics of all the Types from A to Z. In this series, we will be focusing primarily on the Information content of various civilizations to determine what they are capable of under the assumption that energy scale and information scale have a positive correlation in general. So, let’s buckle up, and dive right into a Type A civilization!
According to Sagan, a Type A civilization is one that processes 10^6 unique bits of information. This would correspond to a primitive civilization without a written language but with a spoken one. So, civilizations such as this would be extremely limited in their knowledge. They would be more primitive than any human society we have on record and a good starting point for the Information Mastery Scale.
Watch The Information Mastery Scale Playlist from the link below:
youtube.com/watch?v=nCJiLhFkMLU&list=PLVxAxdw4ctDaefaRPyG11nfs97dSLYhaz
A few months back, we looked at an alternative way to characterize different civilizations in terms of their information content as proposed by Carl Sagan. Sagan believed that the amount of information available to a civilization should be an important criterion when trying to come up with a useful metric to measure different Types of civilizations. He assigned a lettered scale from A-Z where each letter meant an order of magnitude increase in the volume of information a civilization can hold. Though there can be exceptions, but generally, we would expect a civilization that is high on the energy scale to also be high on the information scale according to Sagan. Now, although he does not go into details on every single Type of civilization on his lettered scale, he does comment on a few from which anyone can make some educated guesses and figure out some characteristics of all the Types from A to Z. In this series, we will be focusing primarily on the Information content of various civilizations to determine what they are capable of under the assumption that energy scale and information scale have a positive correlation in general. So, let’s buckle up, and dive right into a Type A civilization!
According to Sagan, a Type A civilization is one that processes 10^6 unique bits of information. This would correspond to a primitive civilization without a written language but with a spoken one. So, civilizations such as this would be extremely limited in their knowledge. They would be more primitive than any human society we have on record and a good starting point for the Information Mastery Scale.
Watch The Information Mastery Scale Playlist from the link below:
youtube.com/watch?v=nCJiLhFkMLU&list=PLVxAxdw4ctDaefaRPyG11nfs97dSLYhaz
