# Planck's units

1. Apr 13, 2005

### Starship

How did Max Planck arrive at the constant h = 6.626196 x 10-34 J s? Will we ever reach Planck's temperatures?

Last edited: Apr 13, 2005
2. Apr 13, 2005

### rainbowings

he arrived at it by looking blackbody radiation data. for an excellent discussion about this, you may want to look at the first chapter of the text by Resnick-Eisberg on Quantum Mechanics

3. Apr 14, 2005

### James R

What do you mean by "Planck's temperatures"?

4. Apr 14, 2005

### dextercioby

I think it's $$T_{Planck}=\frac{E_{Planck}}{k_{Boltzmann}}$$...But i'm not sure.

Daniel.

5. Apr 14, 2005

### Mk

By Planck Temperture, he means the Planck Heat, about 1042˚K. That's the temperture where space itself boils like water, and bubbles come up - holes in spacetime - wormholes in spacetime. Type III civilizations could be able to get to Planck tempertures, and Type IV civilizations must, in order to fit the requirements

Physicists measure development of a civilization by looking at how much energy they use.

Type I Civilization: They have mastered the use of all of a planet's resources, they can control weather, geothermic events, wind and water currents. Possibly in the process have almost exhausted the planet's resources.

Type II Civilization: They need the full output energy of a star, and may used Freeman Dyson's proposed Dyson sphere, a sphere surounding the star, to more efficiently and capture energies given off by the star. Soon they will colonize star systems, with Van Neumann Probes possibly. Van Neumann Probes theoretical robots that are used to colonize the galaxy, and reproduce by at least the thousands, by landing on asteriods and moons, building probe factories, and harvesting minerals and materials found on them for new ones. The hundreds of thousands of probes all go out and make new ones. This isn't just for fun though. They relay back data to their mother civilization from their trips, so that the mother civilization can find more stars to use.

Type III Civilization: They need energies of entire galaxies, clusters, and superclusters, and rely on Van Neumann Probes, possibly even Van Neumann Nanoprobes to colonize galaxies, and find more and more hospitable enviroments for the mother civilization. They can manipulate black holes as they please, create wormholes where ever they want, and play pinball with stars (not literally), but heck, they can do whatever they want! Hmmm... supernova bombs? That would be the ultamite nuke wouldn't it? They have or used to have black hole computers until they turned obsolete. No known natural catastrophe can kill off a Type III Civilization.

Type IV: This is an almost if not a speculative ranking. According to multiverse theories, there is more than one "universe," in the "universe" - the multiverse. The Type IV Civilization of course uses the energies of entire universes. They by definition can reach the Planck Heat, and travel through time if it is possible.

We are between Type 0.3 and Type 0.8.

Last edited: Apr 14, 2005
6. Apr 14, 2005

### Starship

Thanks for the cool replies guys. Planck temperature is

$$T_P = \frac{m_P c^2}{k} = \sqrt{\frac{\hbar c^5}{G k^2}} = 1.41679 x 10^{32} K$$

Planck's temperature is basically the big-bang temperature. I don't believe we'll ever reach it (our universe will never run out of energy), maybe only in 100 billion years.

Last edited: Apr 14, 2005
7. Apr 14, 2005

### setAI

Kaku is always talking out-of-his-field about the power of computers/robotics/AI/biotech yet he came up with that naive civilization type scheme that completely ignores the acceleartion of the acceleration of our technology toward a "Singularity"-

based on the exponentiation of technology toward nanotechnology/quantum computing/ genetic/biotech engineering/etc the human race will go from sub type-I to typeI III-IV within just a few decades- type I/II/and III civilizations are like absurd star trek/star wars societies where technology and cultural development has stagnated at post-industrial levels- like a secondary dark age-

due to the extreme parallel and plural technologies yielding accelerating returns- if one line of research starts to slow down- a dozen other more scalable approaches will take it's place- eg long before Moore's Law putters out we already have aggresive development of quantum computing/ nanocomputing/ biocomputing [using DNA]/ distributed computing which all dwarf the processing power predicted by Moore's Law and approach the theoretical limits of computation

if humankind doesn't achiev type-IV status before 2050- it will only be because we somehow went extinct- there is simply no time for type I/II/III civilizations to exist- they progress to the next stage almost instantly