When we physicists look in outer space for alien life
we don't look for little green men.
We look for type 1, type 2 and type 3 civilizations.
A type one civilization has harnessed planetary power.
They control earthquakes, the weather, volcanoes.
They have cities on the ocean.
Anything planetary they control, that's type one.
A type two civilization is stellar.
They've exhausted the power of a planet
and they get their energy directly from their mother star.
They don't just go and get a sun tan on a weekend,
they use solar flares.
They use the power of the sun itself to energize their huge machines.
Eventually they exhaust the power of a star and they go galactic.
They harness the power of billions of stars within a galaxy.
Now, what are we on this scale?
We are type zero.
We don't even rate on this scale.
We get our energy from -- not from stars or galaxies --
we get our energy from dead plants: oil and coal.

Historians will look back and say:
"Holy shit! They were making materials, selling them for corporation profit
over and over and over and over again with absolutely no reference to what the planet had
and recycling protocols and everything else.
They were burning fossil fuels at a million times the rate of their actual renewability."
They're gonna laugh at us, wondering what the hell kind of a primitive dumb-ass species we actually were.
If we even survive to reach that point.

From an extra-terrestial perspective our global civilization is clearly
on the edge of failure in the most important task it faces:
preserving the lives and well-being of its citizens and the future habitability of the planet.

This transition is also the most important because it's not clear if we're gonna make it.
When we look at outer space we see no evidence of type 1, 2 or 3 anywhere.
No evidence whatsoever.
The mathematics say that there should be thousands of type 1, 2 and 3 civilizations in the galaxy.
We see no evidence of any whatsoever. And why is that?
Because the transition from type zero to type one is the most dangerous of all transitions.
We may not make it.

I hope everyone out there will understand that either we change or we die.

War, poverty, corruption, hunger, misery, human suffering will not change in the monetary system.
That is, there'll be very little significant change.
It's going to take the re-design of our culture and our values and it has to be related to the carrying capacity of the Earth.
Not some human opinion or some politicians' notions of the way the world ought to be
or some religious notions of the conduct of human affairs.

So again, the generation now alive and our grandchildren are the most important generations ever to walk the surface of the Earth.
We are the generations that will determine whether we make the transition from type zero to type one
or we destroy ourselves because of our arrogance and our weapons.
Now, every time I read the newspaper I see evidence of this historic transition from type zero to type one
and I am privileged to be alive in the most important era in the history of the human race:
the transition from type zero to type one.

The old appeals to racial, sexual and religious chauvinism
and to rabid nationalist fervor are beginning not to work.
A new consciousness is developing which sees the Earth as a single organism
and recognizes that an organism at war with itsself is doomed.
We are one planet.