Musk’s AI Solar Empire Will Lift Humanity to a Type I Civilization: The Kardashev Scale

Part 17 of 27 in Homo Conspirans: The Humans Who Come After Us

Homo Conspirans · Musk’s dream: “a civilization that runs on the Sun’s energy” → a humanity whose energy buys the next step in evolution

Musk’s solar empire will lift humanity to a “Type I civilization,” one that commands all the sunlight falling on Earth. And what consumes most of that energy will not be people but AI. Humanity gained a big brain when it learned to handle fire. Humanity that learns to handle the Sun gains a vast second brain outside itself.

In 1964 the young Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev, while studying the signals alien civilizations might send, sorted civilizations into three types. He used one criterion: how much energy they use. A Type I civilization uses all the energy reaching its planet, a Type II all the energy of its star, a Type III the energy of its galaxy.[1] When Carl Sagan later turned the scale into a continuous number, humanity got a place on it. Today humanity uses about 20 terawatts, which puts it at Type 0.73. Reaching Type I would take 500 times today’s energy.

Musk’s bill

Musk brings up the scale often. Tesla’s “Master Plan Part 3,” released in April 2023, calculated what it would take to run the whole planet on sustainable energy: 30 terawatts of renewable generating capacity, 240 terawatt-hours of energy storage and $10 trillion of investment.[2]

In February 2026 he went a step further. Folding his AI company xAI into SpaceX, he described a plan to put a million solar-powered AI satellites into orbit as “a first step towards becoming a Kardashev II-level civilization.”[3] Power grids on the ground cannot feed AI’s appetite for electricity, so the plan is to go to space, where the Sun never sets. It starts at 1 gigawatt a year, then 10 and 100 gigawatts, and eventually adds 1 terawatt every year. He sketched what lies beyond that as well: factories on the Moon launching satellites with an electromagnetic mass driver, adding 500 to 1,000 terawatts in space every year.[4] The economics already point that way, and AI data centers will end up in orbit.

Also read: AI Will Split Humanity Into Two Civilizations That Can't Understand Each Other, American and Chinese: The DeepSeek Shock

AI already eats as much as a country

The fastest-growing consumer of electricity is AI. According to the International Energy Agency, the world’s data centers used about 415 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2024, 1.5 percent of the world’s total. By 2030 that more than doubles to 945 terawatt-hours, more than Japan uses in a year today. AI is the biggest driver of the increase.[5]

The energy a person needs to keep the body going is 2,000 kilocalories of food a day, about 100 watts. The energy one American uses today through home, car, factory and servers is roughly 90 times that.[6] Human history is a history of rising energy use outside the body, and AI bends that curve sharply upward again.

Fire grew the brain

Energy has changed evolution before. In Catching Fire, Harvard’s Richard Wrangham argues that the human body changed when Homo erectus began cooking food over fire about 1.8 million years ago. Cooked food yields more energy from the same amount and is easier to digest. So human teeth, jaws and guts shrank, and the spare energy went to the brain.[7]

Back then humanity shrank an organ inside the body and grew the brain. This time the same thing happens outside the body. Energy harvested from the Sun grows machines that think on people’s behalf, and people connected to those machines live with a bigger head than they would have alone. Becoming a Type I civilization means that most of the energy we use goes not to human bodies but to the AI connected to them.

August 2061: a grandmother switching off the lights

August 2061, an apartment in Daegu, South Korea, in the middle of a long heat wave. A 78-year-old grandmother turns off the living room light and scolds her grandson for leaving lights on in empty rooms. The 12-year-old laughs. This household’s electricity bill has been zero for five years. The apartment complex’s AI splits power from rooftop solar and power beamed down from space to cool the whole complex. The surplus flows, unclaimed, to data centers.

After sunset the two step out onto the balcony. In the western sky, glittering points pass in a single line like a string of pearls: a train of solar AI satellites. The grandmother watches the lights, then goes back inside to switch off the bedroom light anyway. It is the habit of a lifetime.

1 terawatt in space by 2035, Type I by 2085

This is the order in which humanity climbs to Type I.

• 2030: Global data center electricity use passes 945 terawatt-hours, and data centers account for half of the growth in U.S. electricity demand.
• 2035: SpaceX puts 1 terawatt’s worth of solar AI satellites into orbit in a single year.
• 2045: Humanity’s total energy use doubles from 2025, and AI uses a third of it. That is Type 0.76.
• 2061: Half of South Korean households pay no electricity bill. Electricity becomes a basic service, like tap water.
• 2070: Solar satellites built in lunar factories pour into orbit, and generating capacity in space passes 1,000 terawatts. That is Type 0.9.
• 2085: Humanity’s energy use passes 10,000 terawatts and reaches Type I. Ninety percent of that energy is used by AI beyond the Earth.

Kardashev built his scale to search for advanced civilizations somewhere in the universe. The signal he was looking for has not come. In 2085, if someone around another star is watching the Earth, the first Type I civilization goes onto their chart.

Next in the series · Musk’s Starlink Will Erase the Last Human on Earth Not Connected to AI: Starlink Direct to Cell
In 1914, after Britain cut Germany’s undersea cables, Germany’s secret telegrams fell into enemy hands. The next century’s lines run through the sky, and the last unconnected person disappears from the Earth.

Sources

1. N. S. Kardashev, “Transmission of Information by Extraterrestrial Civilizations,” Soviet Astronomy 8, 217, 1964. https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1964SvA…..8..217K
2. Physics World, “Here’s why Tesla’s Master Plan 3 makes a lot of sense for a sustainable future,” 2023. https://physicsworld.com/a/heres-why-teslas-master-plan-3-makes-a-lot-of-sense-for-a-sustainable-future/
3. Gigazine, “Elon Musk’s SpaceX officially acquires xAI,” February 3, 2026. https://www.gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20260203-spacex-acquire-xai
4. AI Magazine, “Space-Based AI: Musk’s Plan for AI Data Centres on the Moon,” February 2026. https://aimagazine.com/news/elon-musk-on-spacex-xai-merger
5. International Energy Agency, Energy and AI, Executive Summary, April 10, 2025. https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/executive-summary
6. Our World in Data, “Energy Production and Consumption” (per capita primary energy, United States). https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
7. Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, Basic Books, 2009 (Harvard Gazette, “Invention of cooking drove evolution of the human species, new book argues,” June 2009). https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/06/invention-of-cooking-drove-evolution-of-the-human-species-new-book-argues/