Is energy consumption a good way to measure a civilization? The Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev thought so, using it as the basis for his famous classification scheme. A Type I civilization could harness the energy resources of its home world, while a Type II could use its own star's entire energy output. A Type III, the most exotic of all, could tap the energy of an entire galaxy, making it a plausible SETI target if we assume we can identify its exotic activities for what they were. But some are questioning whether energy consumption is the best marker for looking at possible extraterrestrial cultures. Zoltan Galantai (Technical University of Budapest) notes that expecting vast energy use may simply be the marker of an adolescent technology, one that assumes all possible futures will look something like our own present extrapolated forward. He points out as well that there is no fast correlation between energy consumption and the spatial growth of a civilization. If that one...