SpaceX's Million-Satellite Filing Borrows a Scale Built for Alien Civilizations
More American companies are betting they can beat the laws of physics by launching thousands of enormous satellites to create orbital “AI data centres,” according to The Conversation Canada, with names like Cowboy Space’s Stampede. SpaceX’s own filing asks for one million satellites and invokes the hypothetical Kardashev scale — a measure originally proposed to gauge an alien civilization’s level of technological advancement — in language the outlet likens to teenage fan fiction rather than a serious government document.
According to the article, the United States Federal Communications Commission repeated that language back when it filed acceptance documents, stating that the satellite system would represent a “first step towards becoming a Kardashev II-level civilization – one that can harness the Sun’s full power.”
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The strangest artefact here is a licensing document that repeats the applicant’s cosmic vocabulary back at it. Paperwork doing the marketing is a genre of its own.
Betting is the operative word: these are proposals and ambitions, not achievements. And the technology is untested, with some proposed satellites twice the size of the International Space Station, which is a lot of hardware to promise on the strength of a nice idea.