Look: I love reading sci-fi and thinking about the future. I love imagining what it means to be a civilization on the Kardashev Scale: the theoretical scale of civilizational advancement that says that after we use all the energy from our planet, we’ll use all the energy from our star, and then all the energy from our galaxy…

And this exact concept is invoked on Musk’s Terafab website, with a nifty graphic, too. Because it’s surely aspirational for humanity to one day absorb ALL the energy from our entire GALAXY!?

The Kardashev Scale isn’t about us “being an interplanetary species”. It’s specifically about consuming massive amounts of energy.

Most of us cannot even begin to fathom how large our solar system is. And our galaxy is so comically, absurdly, laughably large as to defy any serious inquiry into its nature.

But what could be a better business message? “Here’s a way for us to achieve infinite growth! We’ll keep gobbling up more resources, more stars, more planets, using them all up one by one, and then we’ll truly understand the nature of our place within the universe."

Imagine two trillion factories, plugging away, where each planet becomes another warehouse! Non-stop consumption from star to shining star!

Since we’ll not reach the scale of absorbing our galaxy’s energy in any of the next many many many many many many-to-the-nth lifetimes (if we even survive the next 100 years), I’m going to go out on a limb and say there’s nothing waiting for us with ten galaxies’ worth of energy that isn’t available to us right here on a walk in a forest today.

But boy, that graphic must make investors salivate!