Do you think alien invasions are about flying saucers coming to bomb us? That's naive; it's the biggest insult to an advanced civilization.

A truly Level 7 civilization doesn't even need to know we exist to destroy humanity. They only need to casually rewrite a physical law, and the entire galaxy could evaporate like a soap bubble, and we wouldn't even know what happened. It's like stepping on an ant while walking—do you need to kneel down and declare war on it? Do you need to feel guilty for even a second? No, because you don't care at all.

Now let me tell you a harsh fact: in the hierarchy of cosmic civilizations, humans are not even ants. We currently have a level of 0.73, not even touching the threshold of Level 1, while the highest Level 7 civilization can create the entire universe as easily as molding clay. Even more terrifying is that humans may have already been exposed. Over the past 100 years, we've emitted countless radio signals into space, covering all star systems within 100 light-years. We're like holding a torch and shouting in a dark forest, but we have no ability to escape.

Many are curious about how this civilization level is actually calculated. In 1964, a Soviet scientist did something that made physicists worldwide fall silent—his name was Kardashev. He said that to measure a civilization's advancement, don't look at politics, culture, or morality—look at how much energy they can consume. This standard is so simple it's almost cruel. For example, a firefly and a star both emit light, but you wouldn't think they're on the same scale. Humanity's civilization is still that firefly, proud of being able to shine a little brighter. After a year of hard work, our total energy consumption is less than a sneeze from the Sun, while a Level 1 civilization would drain the energy of an entire planet.

Humans are about 300 times short of this goal. With current technological progress, it will take at least another one or two hundred years to barely reach the threshold of Level 1. But that's not the most painful part—the worst is that most civilizations probably won't live to see that day.

Astrophysicists have created a statistical model that reveals a strange phenomenon: according to probability calculations, there should be tens of thousands of intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way, but we haven't found any. Where have they gone? One theory suggests they've all died—died during the transition from Level 0 to Level 1. Think about what humans are facing now: nuclear weapons enough to blow up Earth dozens of times, runaway climate change, AI development so rapid it’s frightening, and potentially deadly asteroids on collision course. Any one of these could wipe out a civilization. It’s like an exam with only life-threatening questions and no retakes. Scientists call this the "civilization bottleneck." Humanity is currently stuck at the narrowest part of this bottleneck, but if luck is on our side and we manage to get through, what happens when we become a Level 1 civilization?

A Level 1 civilization has absolute control over its planet—what does "absolute" mean? When a typhoon forms, they can deploy energy matrices in the atmosphere to convert storm kinetic energy directly into electricity. When a tsunami approaches, they can release stress from the seabed in advance, preventing tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, and extreme weather—things that are disasters to us are just free power banks for a Level 1 civilization. Moreover, they have expanded their influence across the entire star system: cities on the Moon, farms on Mars, mining stations in the asteroid belt. Space travel becomes as common as taking a high-speed train—you could work on Earth in the morning and soak in hot springs on Jupiter’s moon at night. Sounds sci-fi, right? But to a Level 2 civilization, a Level 1 civilization is still poor because they still rely on the energy of planets.

A Level 2 civilization’s ambition is to swallow an entire star. How? Imagine building a gigantic shell outside the Sun, completely enclosing it. Every bit of energy the Sun releases is absorbed by this shell, with no waste. How big is this shell? About 550 million times the surface area of Earth. This structure has a special name, but let me tell you how extreme it is: collecting one second of solar energy with this structure would power human civilization for 20k years. With this level of energy, what can a Level 2 civilization do? They can manipulate planets like kneading dough, placing them wherever they want. They can build massive ships that traverse galaxies, each as large as an asteroid. They can even use black holes as trash processors—throw in waste and recover energy in the process. But a fatal weakness of Level 2 civilizations is the speed of light: even if their ships travel at 99.99% of the speed of light, crossing the galaxy still takes 100,000 years. The galaxy is so vast that even they feel despair.

A Level 3 civilization aims to solve this despair by breaking through the speed of light. How? Wormholes. Imagine the universe as a sheet of paper. Walking from one side to the other takes a long time, but if you fold the paper, the two sides are pressed together. Poke a hole, and you can pass instantly. A Level 3 civilization masters the technology of folding the universe like this. A distance of 100,000 light-years might be just a blink for them. With this ability, they can treat the entire galaxy as their backyard—2 trillion stars, each a charging station. They can exist simultaneously in different parts of the galaxy, transform stars at will, and create entirely new planetary systems. Even more astonishing, they have probably cracked death: they can fully copy, store, and transfer consciousness. When their bodies fail, they replace them; if a planet explodes, their consciousness has long been backed up thousands of light-years away. For them, death is just a system reboot. But do you think Level 3 is the ceiling?

A Level 4 civilization would make a Level 3 civilization realize what true boundlessness is. They control not just a galaxy but the entire observable universe. How big is the observable universe? It contains 20 trillion galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars—numbers beyond human comprehension. But the most terrifying ability of a Level 4 civilization isn’t their energy scale; it’s that they can modify the rules of the game. The speed of light—300k km/s—is a fundamental constant of our universe, but a Level 4 civilization can locally change it to 3 km/s or 300 million km/s, alter gravitational constants, time flow, space curvature. The physical laws we consider fixed are just sliders in their hands. They could even create a new universe in a laboratory, setting the physical laws to their liking—no gravity, time flowing backward, anything. This raises a terrifying question: could our universe itself be an experiment conducted by a Level 4 civilization?

A Level 5 civilization pushes this question even further into the abyss. They are no longer satisfied with a single universe. According to some interpretations of quantum physics, every quantum event causes the universe to split. If you turn left or right this morning, the universe splits into two versions. A Level 5 civilization can see all these parallel universes and jump between them. What does this mean? For them, there’s no such thing as a wrong choice—every outcome they experience exists somewhere. No failure exists, because in some parallel universe, they are always successful. That version of themselves doesn’t die, because consciousness can transfer to any surviving parallel copy. They become the embodiment of probability itself.

A Level 6 civilization can no longer be called a civilization in the traditional sense—they are not just using physical laws but rewriting them. The underlying logic of the entire universe is like a document in a computer: they can change it at will. They might have no fixed form, existing purely as information or consciousness. Time, space, causality—things that seem like cages to us—are just malleable clay in their hands. Some scientists speculate that our entire universe might be a program written by a Level 6 civilization. We think we have free will, but perhaps every thought is just the execution of code.

And a Level 7 civilization is the end and the beginning of everything. They stand outside all universes. Energy, matter, space, and time—these concepts are meaningless to them because they created them all. In 2003, a philosopher at Oxford proposed a chilling hypothesis: if sufficiently advanced civilizations exist, they could simulate countless universes. Statistically, the probability that we live in a real universe becomes negligible. In other words, the videos you watch, your emotions, your life—might all be just lines of code running in a Level 7 civilization’s computer. And if they ever get bored of the simulation, they can just turn it off. The 13.8-billion-year history of the universe, countless galaxies, countless lives—there’s no save button for you. At this point, you might feel nihilistic—humanity is so tiny, and a Level 7 civilization so powerful, what’s the point of our efforts?

But I want to tell you from a different perspective: humans are currently only at 0.73, less than a fraction of Level 1. Yet, even this civilization, barely out of infancy, has already begun to look up at the stars, ponder the boundaries of the universe, and question whether we are just a piece of code. Perhaps true power isn’t about how high you stand, but whether you dare to look up. And what level do you think humanity can ultimately reach?

If one day you attain a Level 7 civilization, what would you do with it?