How to Categorise ET Civilisations

I’ve always felt that the well known approaches to categorising ET civilisations are arrogant, naive and myopic. I have my own model which one day I’ll include in my book of essays on Alienology, which goes well beyond the well known models. So why do I think so poorly of models like the Kardashev Scale and Michio Kaku civilisation types ? Essentially it gets down to their limited assessment of a civilisation based on technological development. Assessing an ET civilisation based on their technological development, does a couple of things :

It projects our understanding of reality on the ETs.
It projects our understanding of potential technologies and energy sources on the ETs.
It structures our perception of ETs around technology and ignores spiritual development, social organisation, cultural development etc.

There are so many ways to model, categorise and compare civilisations. Why would we limit ourselves to our own limitations and to one aspect of a civilisation ? I don’t get that ! Nor do I get why we leave such things to scientists ? If we must categorise ET civilisations as we seem to want to do with everything we encounter : sense, perceive, group/class/classify/categorise, judge, react; then surely we can do it collaboratively with the input of people from all kinds of disciplines, who bring with them many different perspectives and aspects for us to assess, evaluate and understand !

And why would we place technological development above spiritual development ? That makes no fucking sense to me ! Except that it’s done by people who have spent so much time with their heads up their arses thinking about science and technology that they’ve forgotten to explore what it means to be alive and to grow as human beings. Spiritual development has to be a critical aspect of any categorisation of ET civilisations ! Making an assessment like this will teach us so much about ourselves, about how we project what we know about ourselves onto ETs and about ET spirituality. We’ll have to decide to abandon the notion of comparative levels and to recognise both difference and similarity for what it is. Not better than or worse than ! If we truly embrace spiritual development as a critical signature of how we might understand an ET civilisation, then we might actually be forced to understand the process of growth, change and evolution (and if evolution even exists !). And we might also be forced to ask hard questions of ourselves, like :

How do we want to be as a species ?
How do we want to grow as a species ?
What are a critical faults, strengths, weaknesses and potentials as a species ?
How might we get from here to there in our development ?
What obstacles and challenges must we face and overcome if we are to grow spiritually as a species ?

There are of course many dangers of focusing too much on spiritual development or on emphasising spiritual development out of context. We might for example fall into a Ken Wilbur’ish form of self grandiosity at having seen all possibilities when we have actually seen nothing. Or more likely, we’ll develop spiritual development categories that like the Wilbur models, establish a kind of elitism towards which only certain humans can aspire and through which we can put the ETs in their place ! Any focus on spirituality has to be done through a lens like comparative religion, in which things are seen as they are and not categorised into levels – which ultimately depend on judgement and opinion. Factors which change all the time. For example, temperament and personality are ideas that are always in flux. What is popular today will be dead in a hundred years ! So any ideas that we create about categorising, must be flexible and open to change.

There is so much more we can do with how we look at and approach this entire concept of categorising civilisations. And up to this point, all we have is a handful of stuck up scientists telling us how it should be done and the rest of the human race watching from the sidelines like children at a circus !

If we are to truly develop a discipline like Alienology (and that’s just one possible, albeit lame name for such a discipline – I can’t stand Exopolitics and the like) in order to devote serious time, money, thinking and feeling towards understanding extraterrestrial life; then we must get past this science and technology driven way of approaching the subject !

Ultimately it’s science and technology that created so many of our human problems and that is pushing us towards the exploitation and weaponization of space. But it will be spirituality that helps us to grow enough to be truly ready to become space faring. We humans are kept non space faring because like certain men who think and acts with their dicks, we act with our heads and our technology and not with our hearts and our spirituality. Growing up is about learning to harmonise all aspects of our humanity. Right now it isn’t dick driven scientists and greedy fucking business men and politicians that make contact with ETs ! It’s people who know how to genuinely feel and who have a heart felt connection to the world around them. For whom separation, comparison and competition are irrelevant !

How would you look at an ET civilisation ? And how would you want them to look at us ?