Kardashev index
0.728
Based on primary energy power · Type I = 1
AccelerationFour-dimensional view5 years ago
2022-04-06
Generative Images
DALL·E 2, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion turn text into images, giving painting and design generative tools the general public can use.
Art style · Contemporary realistic technology illustration
Origin of Life on EarthDinosaurs and MammalsAI Agents
Arrow keys step through pictures · Wheel to zoom · Drag or click to select time
Civilization metrics
Each sparkline shows the documented history of a metric on a logarithmic time axis. The dot marks the selected moment.
8.04Bpeople
Comparable to today
1.9×10¹³W
1/1 of today
4.6×10¹⁰floating-point operations per second per dollar (FLOP/s per $, nominal dollars)
1/2 of today
0.03 seconds
Comparable to today
39,897km/h
Comparable to today
Near this moment
The eight closest milestones. Select a title to jump there.
An infrared space telescope lifts off to observe the early universe. Source
A paper describes training language models on human demonstrations and preference rankings so answers better follow user instructions; the approach was later used for ChatGPT. Source
Text-to-image generation reaches the mainstream. Source
Anonymous authors publish a case for effective accelerationism: build, accelerate, climb the Kardashev scale. Source
Striking images from a text prompt, now open to the public. Source
An image generation model released with open weights that runs on personal computers. Source
Models interleave reasoning with external actions and adjust their next step based on what comes back, becoming a key research path for tool-using agents. Source
With the Mengtian module repositioned, China's space station completes its basic T-shaped configuration in orbit. Source
Capabilities
Acquired104 / 121 items
Recently acquired
Not yet available
Scenes across eras
Each era illustrated in its own style.
Every timeline entry cites its source. Metrics interpolate logarithmically between sourced data points. Forecasts include institutional and community views, and attributed site scenarios; years are not guaranteed realization dates. Illustrations are AI-generated in each era's style.