Colonizing the Multiverse: Beyond the Kardashev Scale Into Infinite Universes

Introduction to the Multiverse

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0:31The Kardashev scale measures civilizations so vast they might span an entire galaxy. But an Omega-class civilization spreading across the multiverse might need entire galaxies just to store its address book of worlds.

0:49We imagine humanity spreading to the cosmos. We usually picture the journey outward, think of colonies on the moon and Mars, then settlements around distant stars, and eventually great civilizations spread across entire galaxies. That vision is vast, but still assumes something very simple. That expansion happens in only one direction. Outward. But the universe may offer another direction to grow. Sideways. If the multiverse exists, and modern physics gives us several reasons to suspect that it might, or that some version of it might, anyway, then reality may not consist of just one universe, but many.

1:30Perhaps infinitely many. Some might be nearly identical to our own, while others could differ in subtle ways, or even operate under entirely different physical laws. That raises a pretty obvious question for any ambitious civilization. Why limit expansion of the stars if you can expand into alternate versions of the same cosmos? Why spend centuries terraforming a barren world, when somewhere in the multiverse there might already be a perfectly habitable Earth where humanity never evolved?

2:01In that scenario, colonization would no longer be measured in light years. Instead, it might be measured in variations of reality itself, alternate Earths, alternate histories, and entire universes waiting to be explored. Today, we're going to ask what would actually mean to colonize the multiverse. How you'd reach it, how you'd navigate it, what kind of world you'd settle, and what kind of civilization you'd become once one universe stopped being enough. And ultimately, we'll look at what happens when civilizations outgrow the Karsha scale entirely, when expansion is no longer measured in planets, stars, or galaxies, but in entire universes, on what we call the Omega scale.

2:44Because if that path is possible, then the ultimate frontier may not lie somewhere across the stars. It may lie just one reality away.

The Geography of Reality

2:55The Geography of Reality Before we even talk about colonizing the multiverse, we first need to ask a simple question. What exactly do we mean by the multiverse? Because not all universes are the same, and more importantly, not all of them are necessarily reachable. Some multiverse concepts are actually just extensions of our own cosmos. The observable universe is only about 90 billion light years across, but the full universe beyond that horizon may be vastly larger, possibly infinite.

3:25If so, there are regions so distant that light from them has never had time to reach us, and, due to Hubble expansion, never will. Those regions might contain galaxies, stars, planets, and perhaps even civilizations identical to our own, but they are still part of the same underlying universe. Other multiverse models imagine something far stranger, separate cosmic bubbles. In these scenarios, our universe formed as one expanding pocket of space-time inside a much larger inflationary structure.

3:57Each bubble universe could have slightly different physical constants, different particle masses, or even entirely different laws of physics. Still others arise from quantum mechanics itself, and those are probably the versions most familiar to folks from science fiction. In many interpretations of quantum theory, every time an event could have multiple outcomes, reality branches. Each possible outcome continues forward as its own history. That produces an ever-branching tree of timelines, each internally consistent, but slightly different from the others.

4:29Physicist Max Tegmark famously grouped these possibilities in what we call the Levels of Multiverse. Level 1 corresponds to distant regions of our own infinite universe. Level 2 refers to separate inflationary bubble universes with different physical parameters. Level 3 represents the branching worlds of quantum mechanics. And Level 4 goes even further, erosing entirely different mathematical structures who produce wholly different kinds of reality. We have a few other groupings that include even more multiverse types,

4:59and have episodes dedicated to explaining them, or exploring them. But for colonization, the classification itself is less important than a single, practical question. Which of these places can we actually reach? And perhaps just as important, which could we actually live in? A universe that cannot exchange information, energy, or matter with ours, might exist in theory, but is not a destination. It's simply another layer of reality forever beyond our influence. This is mostly also true for one where we could reach it,

5:29but cannot either move matter or energy between it and ours, or where nothing like our normal chemistry and atoms could exist. Though these also might turn out to be insanely valuable, if not for classic colonization, and we'll return to that point in a bit. For colonization purposes, geography matters. The multiverse might contain infinite worlds, but only those connected to us in some physical way, through quantum pathways, wormholes, cosmic tunneling, or other yet unknown mechanisms, would be accessible to exploration, settlement, or some other usage.

Why Colonize the Multiverse

6:02Why colonize the multiverse? If interstellar colonization is already possible, why bother with parallel universes at all? After all our own galaxy contains hundreds of billions of stars, and the observable universe holds hundreds of billions of galaxies. That already seems like more than enough room for any civilization to expand. But even those immense numbers are still finite. The multiverse, by contrast, in most of its major theories, would contain vastly more habitable worlds than our entire cosmos combined.

6:35And when I say vastly more, it's hard to overstate just how extreme that difference might be. Imagine there was a grain of sand on Earth for every planet in our observable universe. That gives you a sense of the scale we're dealing with already in our universe. Now imagine there are more universes than there are grains of sand, and not just on Earth, but on every planet orbiting every star in every galaxy of our entire universe. And even that analogy falls short. In the classic quantum multiverse of branching timelines,

7:06the numbers escalate to the point where you could not count them with all the atoms in our universe. There simply wouldn't be enough matter available to write down all the possibilities. Because in that picture, history itself unfolds differently in countless other universes. Imagine a version of Earth where humanity never evolved. Or a world where the asteroid that entered the dinosaur was missed entirely. We don't have to jump to dramatic changes. There could be a universe where everything happened exactly the same as here. Except one atom of uranium in Earth's core decayed one second later,

7:37or one second earlier, or one billion years later, or a billionth of a second sooner. Now multiply the possibilities across the countless trillions of atoms in Earth's core, in the oceans, in the atmosphere, each with its own chance to behave just a little differently. Then consider combinations, where not just one atom differs, but two, or a million, or ten trillion, each shifting at slightly different times. There are versions of Earth where those tiny differences ripple outward into entirely new histories, and there are versions where they don't.

8:09There could be a copy of you, made of trillions upon trillions of atoms yourself, where just one atom in your body sits one nanometer to the left, another where it sits to the right, another where that shift happened a second ago, or a year ago, or will happen tomorrow. Layer enough of those tiny differences together, and eventually you get worlds though profoundly different. Worlds where the continents form differently, reshaping oceans and climates, worlds where civilization collapsed centuries ago, leaving cities empty, and ecosystems reclaiming the land. To a multiversal civilization,

8:39these are not just curiosities, they are potential colony worlds. Instead of terraforming a planet over thousands of years, you might simply step sideways into a version of Earth where the work is already done. A world with breathwear, familiar gravity, and thriving ecosystems, waiting only for settlers. Even small differences in history could produce radically different opportunities. One timeline might contain rich mineral deposits never discovered, another might host alien life that evolved in humanity's place,

9:09yet another might be nearly identical to our own world, differing only by a few centuries of technological progress. Effectively time travel, each branch of history becomes a frontier, and once a civilization gains the ability to move between those branches, the scale of expansion changes completely. Interstellar colonization spreads across space. Multiversal colonization spreads across possibility itself. It could be they are not 10 trillion miles away or unreachable, but just a single step with the right technology.

9:41Instead of exploring a single cosmic timeline, civilizations navigating an ocean of alternate histories, each one a new world, a new experiment, perhaps a new home. No century spent to reach a barren ruin of a planet that would never be truly like Earth, but a single heartbeat to carry you to a place that is entirely terraformed and just like home.

The First Beachhead

10:01The First Beachhead Reaching another universe would likely begin with something very small. Before you can colonize another reality, you first have to confirm it exists in a way that matters, not just as a theory, but as something you can interact with. In physics, that means exchange. If no information, energy, or matter can pass between universes, and for all practical purposes, they are unreachable. With the moment even a trickle of information can cross that boundary, the door is no longer closed.

10:33Because if information can pass, then in principle, so can matter. I might not be able to put a device through a gateway, but I might be able to rearrange existing matter and energy there to form that same device. Fundamentally though, for other realities, if we can see one, we shape one. But what would we see? Probably not a simple portal to an Earth-like environment. Even if there was some congruity that caused you to open up to relatively similar universes. Your first portal equivalent might be one atom wide.

11:04So that first contact might be incredibly subtle. A faint signal. A statistical anomaly. A particle behaving a way that suggests it came from somewhere else. From there, the goal would not be immediate colonization. A control. Finding a way to stabilize and widen that connection. And when that happens, you don't send people first. You send machines. Microscopic probes. Perhaps no larger than a virus. Capable of analyzing local conditions. Self-replicating nanomachines that create assembling infrastructure on the other side.

11:35Or even compressed digital minds. Able to wake, observe, and report back without risking biological lives. In many cases, the first colony would not be a settlement at all, but a construction site. A tiny foothold expanding outward, building the equivalent of a gateway. Something stable enough to allow large transfers of matter and energy. Only once that bridge exists, and its destination is understood, would larger systems follow. And what those probes find might not always be familiar. Some destinations would be close cousins of our own universe.

12:08With the same physics, the same chemistry, and environments we could survive in with minimal adaptation. But others could be profoundly alien. And indeed should be. Unless there was a bias to opening portals to parallel places. Worlds where Earth is half the mass it is now. Or closer to our sun. Or different universal constants where gravity is stronger or weaker. Or, where stars burn differently. Where chemistry produces materials and structures we've never seen. Places that might still be habitable, but only to modified life, synthetic organisms, or entirely digital minds.

12:42And beyond even those, there may be universes that could never have formed naturally under our own laws of physics. Reality where your constants are tuned so differently that matter itself behaves in unfamiliar ways. Or where stable atoms as we know them might not even exist. In four or more large physical dimensions, you don't get stable orbits the way we do here. The geometry just works against you too much. So you may get stars or black holes, but not the sort of comfortable long-lived planets or normal atoms we rely on. See our higher dimensional aliens episode for more discussion.

13:15But these are not just strange new worlds. They are fundamentally different kinds of existence. To a sufficiently advanced civilization though, even those might not be off limits. Not places to settle in the traditional sense, but as environments to study, exploit, or adapt to, in ways that redefine what colonization even means. You could do some impressive things in the universe where gravity was so weak, no star or planet ever formed. Even if you had to import all your matter from other multiverses into it, and you would find ones that were gushing matter and energy to borrow.

13:46But even a universe that's totally hostile to life has one thing we're always running out of. Cold. To a civilization pushing the limits of computation, a dead universe with stars never formed is the ultimate radiator. You could vent the waste heat of a quadrillion Dyson spheres in that empty void, effectively cheating these second-line thermodynamics and keeping your home universe's entropy at bay for a few more eons. But to contemplate such things, you have to find them first and see what they offer. So the first beachhead is not just about reaching the universe, it's about learning what kind of universes you have reached, and what kind of presence you can build there.

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The Navigation Problem

14:57The Navigation Problem Finding another universe might turn out to be easier than finding the right one. Once access is possible, the challenge shifts from opening doors to choosing which door to open. And in a multiverse that may contain unimaginably many realities, that becomes a problem of staggering complexity. Because how do you specify a destination, a space, that may not even have conventional coordinates? In our universe, we navigate using position and motion, distances, angles, velocities.

15:27But in a multiverse, the distance between two universes might not correspond to space at all. Instead, it could represent differences in physical constants, quantum histories, or initial conditions. The address of a universe might be defined not by where it is, but by how it differs. And that difference could be extraordinarily detailed. To specify a universe identical to our own, except for one small change, a single delayed radioactive decay, or a slightly different arrangement of continents, you might need to encode an enormous amount of information, potentially more than any conventional computer could store.

15:59And again, these universes should be more numerous than there are atoms in our universe, so keeping a total archive of all the possible interesting and useful universes is likely to require many universes all of its own. And even then, instead of precise addresses, a civilization might rely on approximations, relative coordinates where the universes are defined by how far they diverge from a known baseline, search algorithms that explore nearby branches of reality, scanning for conditions that match desired criteria, or beacon systems, signals placed in previously visited universes, allowing travelers to find their way back.

16:34And that raises another complication. In a space this vast, you don't just find habitable worlds. You find everything. Every variation of Earth, from pristine wilderness to post-apocalyptic ruins. Every possible evolutionary path, including ones that produce life far stranger than anything in our own biosphere. Entire universes where conditions give rise to exotic structures, unfamiliar chemistry, or forms of matter that could never arise here. Some of these might be treasures, others might be traps.

17:04A world that appears habitable at first glance might conceal subtle differences, trace toxins in the atmosphere, unstable isotopes of the crust, or biological systems that are incompatible with alone. Or worse, very incompatible with alone. Horrible plagues that would decimate us. And in stranger universes, the hazards might not even be recognizable until it's too late. It might turn out everything is normal here except one relatively uncommon isotope of mundane matter, with a reasonable half-life in our reality, but there had one measured in mere hours, and you get radiation poisoning from the potassium in your own bones, while camping overnight in an otherwise idyllic parallel Earth.

17:43So this is likely to be a fairly cautious process, especially as we don't know that you might not get leakage in physical behavior near portals. Over time, this would likely evolve into entire discipline, multiversal cartography, a science of it not just to mapping reality, but to classifying which realities are safe, useful, or worth exploring further. There is also the issue of timing and position. Sideways does not necessarily mean same place. Even if you find a perfect twin of Earth, it may not line up with our present coordinates in space, or even with our present moment in time.

18:16A world orbiting a slightly heavier sun, or a universe that started a little earlier or later, might put its version of Earth millions of miles from what you expected. Given that most of space is empty, it might be about opening your doorway exactly where and when that reality is safe to step into. Because in a multiverse of near infinite options, the real challenge is not reaching new worlds, it is choosing wisely among them.

18:40Settlement Strategies

Settlement Strategies

18:42The first time I encountered the idea of colonizing parallel worlds was in a short story by my namesake, Isaac Asimov, called Living Space, where humanity solved overcrowding not by spreading across the stars, but by stepping sideways into endless copies of Earth. He wrote that back in 1956. I didn't come across it until the early 1990s. The guy was about 12 or 13. And I actually heard it as an audiobook. It stuck with me. Around the same time, I was also getting into Roger Zelazzy's The Chronicles of Amber, which plays with a similar idea.

19:16An infinite set of shadow realities branching off from a few prime worlds. Not long after that, we got the show Sliders, where characters jump between alternate Earths every episode. I think that's where a lot of folks first encountered a detailed look at multiverses of the timeline variety. Good show, but didn't really deep dive it in a practical way. But by that point, I'd already started thinking through some of the implications, and a lot of the common portrayals we still see today were already feeling a bit simplified. But the core idea stuck. In that vision Asimov gives us in Living Space, every family might have its own world.

19:51Not a cramped apartment or even a rural homestead, but an entire planet, empty, untouched, and theirs alone. You might live on your own version of Earth, with your own house, your own land, your own sky, and simply commute back to the original world for work, trade, or social life. It is a charming idea, and once multiversal access becomes possible, it may not be entirely unrealistic. Indeed, there must be an actual universe, in fact trillions of them, where there's an otherwise empty Earth with your ideal house set up on it by freak occurrence,

20:23just waiting for you to move into it, even with the right pictures on the wall and food at the fridge. There would be billions of otherwise identical ones like that, except the paintings were moved over one millimeter, or the food in the fridge was slightly different, which might also include being poisonous rather than your favorite recipes. But in a more mundane context, you'd have a reality where all that differed was that you had the same optimal groceries, but there were seven sticks of butter or not eight, or they were an inch to the left. There really is a finite number of them in this particular type of multiverse, the branching timelines,

20:55but so insanely huge that contemplating running out of space is very hard, especially as the timelines should be branching out faster than you could double your own numbers. We needed a generation or more to do that, but universes would double in a fraction of a nanosecond. Things could fill, though, because colonization and multiverses would not follow a single path. It would branch, just like the realities it explores, it's just that there should always be a new fresh reality where some planet did get filled up, and then everyone fell over dead. There would also be countless worlds where humans already existed, or human cousins evolved,

21:27sliders played with that idea in later seasons, the cromags, or maybe intelligent dinosaurs arose instead, or alien invaders had already arrived. It is very unlikely you would have some reliable way to tell, at a glance, whether a planet that looks exactly like ours, complete with buildings but no visible population, actually is empty, or why it appears that way. While there is always some finite chance, under quantum mechanics, for a system to jump into an extremely unlikely state, like one where everyone simply vanished or turned to stone,

21:58it is overwhelmingly more probable that a world full of empty buildings exists because something killed everyone, and may still be there, or that only one region was depopulated and when you arrived, the locals assumed you were responsible. I'm not really sure how you would scan an apparently depopulated planet from a portal in any quick fashion that would tell you if anyone was still alive. Even radio signals are kind of iffy, and that's assuming you can basically dial in like the Ambrides from Roger Zelazzy's setting, where they picture a change and shift to the

22:28reality that's present at, so you might call up a world that had houses in our style and billboards in your language of choice and hope that was not a bizarre coincidence. Thus, it is probably a good idea to resist the temptation to settle worlds that come pre-equipped with infrastructure. There are reasons you might still take that risk. You might be looking to rapidly acquire something they had, stockpiles of weapons, industrial goods, or reserves of valuable materials. You might be trying to revisit or undo some moment of your own life by finding a world where events played out differently.

22:58Or you might be tempted to set yourself up as a god-king on a more primitive version of Earth, where you can have pyramids built in your honor. For the redoing of past mess-ups, multiversal travel like this allows effective time travel. It's the method in Michael Crichton's timeline, the novel at least. It's essentially a near-identical universe except everything took a little longer. There's a number of ways that could proceed, up to the Big Bang being slightly delayed. And time isn't exactly on perfectly linear clocks in multiverse scenarios anyway. Plus, no causality violation occurs in travel between two similar universes anyway.

23:32So you can go to a place where an event you wish to change hasn't quite happened yet, and either dispose of your doppelganger, dump them into another universe, or just find one where he vanished in an improbable puff of smoke right before that. The options are many, and mostly limited by your own ethics. And, given how crazy people would tend to be when trying to rewrite time, especially in this fashion, I can bet many unethical options would be considered. Science fiction shows us folks fighting their own doppelgangers for some sort of supremacy, and while we did contemplate that on our episode Multiversal Warfare and Quantum Mania,

24:05I can't really see why anyone would be racing around the wider reality trying to kill off their infinite doppelgangers, even if I enjoyed that concept with Kang in the Marvel TV show Loki. But rating a different universe for ammo, gold bars, patents, or advanced technology is a fairly plausible motivation, especially since you only need to get lucky a finite number of times, not conjure up 10 trillion perfect copies of Modern Earth, where a bizarrely well-targeted meteor storm killed every human but somehow left the infrastructure intact. But most of these motivations have safer alternatives.

24:38If you have the ability to travel the multiverse, you almost certainly have the ability to build extremely advanced virtual environments, a place where you can simulate alternate lives, explore different histories, or construct entire civilizations without exposing yourself to unknown and potentially hostile realities. As a result, I think the primary approach would focus on what we might call Virgin Earths, worlds where humanity never evolved at all. These offer familiar environments with no competing civilization, no political complications, and ecosystems that, while potentially slightly different,

25:09would be ultra-compatible with human life. Even if you wanted to go live on a dino planet, you're still at least on a world as habitable as the typical space opera planet. These are in many ways the ideal colonies, and again they outnumber not just the stars themselves, but all the atoms in those stars. But they are not the only option. After all, you have access to basically every option. Besides the obvious ones, like a planet made out of solid gold, another strategy would target what we might call corpse worlds, planets where humanity, or some other civilization, once existed,

25:41but it's since vanished and not recently, implying there's nothing actively going on there anymore, and any invasion or rebuilding effort hasn't been very fast or effective. You have a lot of rebuilding to do, but you probably need to redo a lot of things anyway, as it is improbable that a civilization on par with our world happens to have identical plugs, railroads, transformers, and so on. To a colonist, they represent an incredible opportunity. Entire industrial bases already built, power grids waiting to be restarted, databases, archives, and machines left behind by vanished people.

26:14But all of that hinges on one critical question. What happened there? And more importantly, could it happen again? The nastier version of this we might call a murder world, where you open a portal to a civilization, dump targeted viruses and chemical munitions on it, that you have protections for, and come back a month later to harvest this planet and its quadrillion minor variations that are all unpopulated now. The horrifying thing about this sort of multiverse is that it is guaranteed that they do exist,

26:45untold trillions of civilizations utilize this approach, and more have been their victims. As an upside, there is probably even more benevolent or at least modestly friendly civilizations. It is not possible to actually wipe out everyone or take over every other multiverse. There's always going to be tons of branching timelines where you failed. And beyond those familiar categories, there are even stranger possibilities. There may be worlds where life evolved along entirely different paths, ecosystems with no shared ancestry to Earth life, built on unfamiliar biochemistries and environmental conditions.

27:18Some might be comparable with human presence, others toxic or outright hostile. Any alien world that could exist anywhere in our own universe could just as easily lie on the other side of that portal. We should not assume these gateways are fixed to Earth's present location in space and time, or tied to gravitational congruence points, but even if they were, nothing stops us from stepping onto a super-Earth analog, one where the sun is 10% more massive, or slightly dimmer, and everything else has shifted accordingly. And then there are universes where the very rules of physics differ,

27:50places where human bodies could not survive at all, but where machines, modified organisms, or post-biological minds might flourish. These could still be branching timelines, where the moment of cosmic inflation played out just a bit differently, as symmetries broke and set up forces and constants we know. That's also the case in bubble universe models of the multiverse, though the range of possibilities there is vastly broader, like you can see our parallel universes and alternate realities episode for a deeper dive. And even in those environments, you could likely engineer yourself a body,

28:21or an entire ecosystem, that could function there, especially if you're willing to import matter and energy to bootstrap the process. Fundamentally, multiversal colonization is not just about finding new land, it's about choosing what kind of worlds you want to inhabit, and what kind of beings you are willing to become in order to inhabit them. Because in a multiverse full of possibilities, there is no single frontier. There are as many frontiers as there are realities, and as many of those as there are horizons, because every step you take toward the horizon merely moves it.

28:52Once you start thinking in those terms, you realize this is no longer just colonization in the normal sense. It is not just a bigger frontier, in a way a galaxy is bigger than a star system, it is a different category of frontier entirely. A civilization spread across a million worlds in one universe is still fundamentally local compared to one spread across a million universes, because in the latter case, the real challenge is no longer just energy or transit time, but coordination, selection, and information. And that is where the Kardashev scale starts to break down.

29:23We spend a lot of time on SFA asking whether strange ideas from science fiction could actually work. Sometimes, though, it is just as much fun to watch a movie where worrying about whether the science works is very much not the point. Rift Tracks, from the same folks behind Mystery Science Theater 3000, has a huge collection on Nebula, including the newly added Prisoners of the Lost Universe, where an experiment sends our heroes into a parallel universe full of warlords, monsters, and wonderfully dubious science. You'd also check out recent editions,

29:55like The X from Outer Space, and The Magnetic Monster. Nebula is also where every SFI episode premieres early and ad-free, along with years of my monthly exclusives and collections of Nebula exclusives and extended editions like Space Industry. Use my link or the QR code on screen to get 50% off an annual plan. Just $30 for the whole year.

30:18Beyond the Kardashev Scale, Omega-Class Civilizations

Omega-Class Civilizations

30:22The Kardashev Scale measures civilizations by the energy they control. Type 1 harnessed as a planet, Type 2 a star, Type 3 a galaxy, but all those share a hidden assumption, that civilization expands within a single universe. Once you can move between universes, that assumption breaks. An Omega-Class civilization is not defined by how much energy it uses, by how many realities it can access, navigate, and meaningfully utilize. Its learning factor is no longer power, it's information.

30:53Because you care of each other universes, and even something as simple as keeping track of them becomes a monumental task, you're no longer mapping stars, your cataloging existence itself. Let's take the most primitive possible Omega civilization, call it Omega-1, not especially efficient, not especially advanced in data storage, just scaling up in the simplest way imaginable. Suppose they record each accessible universe with a short written entry. Coordinates, basic conditions, maybe a few notes. Call it a page of texts,

31:24something like a kilobyte of information. A large modern book holds a few hundred kilobytes. A massive library, say a whole planet covered in skyscraper scale archives, might hold something on the order of 10 to the 18th or 19th bytes of information, if you did it with paper and conventional storage methods. That's enough to catalog roughly a quadrillion universes. Quadrillions of worlds, and their own wider star systems, which you might still colonize and turn into Dyson swarms, and a wider cosmos beyond them each, though I suspect those get left alone.

31:56Even if each of those universes hosts a civilization of 10 billion people, you're now talking about a total population on the order of 10 to 25 individuals, all indexed in what is, by cosmic standards, a very inefficient filing system. And that's the low end. Replace paper with dense digital storage, and a single planet could hold vastly more, perhaps 10 to 24 to 10 to 26 entries, depending on encoding efficiency. A Dyson swarm devoted entirely to computation and storage, pushed that further still,

32:27into ranges where you're cataloging orders of magnitude more universes than there are stars in the observable cosmos. Scale that up to a galactic infrastructure, an Omega-3 civilization in this framework, and even if each universe entry is compressed down to something like a million atoms of storage, you're now tracking numbers so large they stop being meaningfully comparable to anything in our familiar universe. Entire galaxies are not power plants. They are filing systems. Those might be interesting worlds too, and we explored some of their stranger nature at such incredible scales in our Cosmic Capitals episode.

33:01And yet, even that does not represent a hard limit. Because unlike the Kardashev scale, Omega civilizations are not constrained to a single resource pool. If they ever began to run out of accessible universes, unlikely as that might be, they would still have the full capacity of each individual universe to expand into. Every world they catalog is itself a gateway to billions of stars, trillions of planets, and potentially entirely new branches of expansion. In practice, they would almost certainly still develop each universe they touch. Building up to Type 1,

33:32Type 2, even Type 3 status locally, not because they must, but because it is efficient. Energy, infrastructure, and computation still matter. It simply seems to be the ultimate bottleneck. What stays scarce is not raw matter, but good addresses, safe routes, trusted maps, and realities worth the trouble of settling. Bandwidth between realities might also be a limiting factor. How many portals can you set up on each world, and how to network them? Which is a real bottleneck, as we found out in our episode Stargates. Civilizations on the other end of portals can't probably break said bottlenecks.

34:04You end up redialing a nearer clone of them, and while paradoxically, the divergence of civilizations might not be as bad as interstellar timeline, given the sheer scale, one that embraces near infinite varying realities, it is likely to verge far more than even normal galactic empires would. But I think the frontier shifts, from energy to access, from territory to possibility, from expansion to selection. An Omega civilization does not ask, how much can we build? It asks, which realities are worth building in?

34:36And that may be the most profound shift of all, because in a multiverse full of infinite options, the challenge is no longer survival, or even growth. It's choice. And so we see, multiversal colonization is not just the next step beyond the stars. One that changes the Fermi Paradox quite a bit, because if sideways expansion is easier than outward expansion, then a civilization may have far less reason to spread visibly across its native galaxy, or spend much effort sharing the hypothetical aliens 10,000 light years away.

35:08We explore that more in our Fermi Paradox multiverse episode. No longer confined to a single timeline, a single cosmos, or a single fate, civilization becomes something far stranger, a network of realities, a branching tapestry of worlds, a structure not just in a space, but in possibility itself. There is no longer a final frontier, because there is no longer just one frontier. The question is no longer how far civilization can spread, but how many realities can learn to inhabit and stay connected to.

35:38And in the end, multiversal colonization may not be about finding one more world to live on, but deciding what kind of worlds, and what kind of people, we want to become.

36:01Thank you.

36:11Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.