Backcasting Kardashev One

by Claude Speeed

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1.	Energy, Civilisation and Planetarity 02:26	buy track
2.	Indice 02:23 video	buy track
3.	SP01KN 01:07 video	buy track
4.	NMSD 02:53	buy track
5.	fm86c (edit) 01:50	buy track
6.	NK (in other words: a plan) 02:16 video	buy track

about

This EP comprises the score for the short film "Backcasting Kardashev One" made for our final group project as part of the 2020 cohort of The Terraforming postgraduate programme at the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design, in Moscow.

Watch the film – and read the accompanying essay and timeline – on the project website: www.backcasting-kardashev.one

The essay is also included as a PDF download with this release.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION:

This is a project about energy, civilisation and planetarity. It repurposes a scale, invented by Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev in 1964 to classify extraterrestrial civilisations, to assess what planetary civilisation means here on earth.

The Kardashev scale proposed that mastering huge amounts of energy would be a fundamental requirement of any advanced technological civilisation that we might hope to detect across the vastness of space.

In the decades since then, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has not revealed the existence of inhabitants of other worlds. What scientific efforts have revealed – primarily through climate sensing and modelling – is that exponentially increasing energy consumption has planetary-scale geochemical consequences.

This inadvertent, and already-disastrous, terraforming reveals that we exist on a planet, which made a civilisation, which is now remaking the planet.

In that context, using the insights of Kardashev and others as our guide, we ask: where are we on the scale and what does that say about our level of advancement? What might be the thermodynamic and civilisational consequences of advancement on the Kardashev scale? What is the scope of our agency as we head towards many possible futures – and what might those futures look like? And finally working backwards from them, what might we learn about inhabitation of earth during our current anthropogenic crisis of energy metabolism?

credits

released September 4, 2020

CREDITS:

Music written, recorded and produced by Claude Speeed at Sunwheel II in Berlin. SP01KN contains audio samples obtained from NASA, used in accordance with its guidelines.

The Terraforming 2020, Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design. Programme Director: Benjamin Bratton. Programme Tutors: Nicolay Boyadjiev, Liza Dorrer. Backcasting Kardashev One Team: Yulya Besplemennova, Stuart Turner, Iani Zeigerman, Yevheniia Berchul

THANK YOU:

Yulya, Iani and Zenia; Benjamin, Nicolay, Liza, Vlad; the rest of the Terraforming 2020 cohort and faculty and everyone else at Strelka. Special thanks to LW <3.

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