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You're listening to episode 348 of Jimmy Eakin's mysterious world.

We'll look at mysteries from the twin perspectives of faith and reason.

In this episode, we're talking about the Kardashev scale.

I'm Don Betanelli, and joining me today is Jimmy Eakin. Hey, Jimmy. Howdy, Dom? Humanity has come a long way in the last few thousand years,

but we may still have a long way to go. In science fiction, authors have dreamed up future

civilizations with different levels of development.

Some of them have colonized the solar system, like in the series The Expanse.

Some stretch across multiple star systems like the Federation in Star Trek.

And some cover whole galaxies like the Galactic Empire of Star Wars.

All those are fiction, but is there any way of

classifying such civilizations? Is there a way of making reasonable predictions about them?

And could we use these predictions to find them? That's what we'll be talking about on this

episode of Jimmy Ickin's mysterious world. Jimmy, where does our mystery start today?

It begins in Moscow in 1932 with a married couple, a man named Simeon and his wife, Nina.

They were patriotic Soviets. In fact, they were professional revolutionaries.

Simeon was an important member of the Communist Party, and Nina had joined even before the October

Revolution of 1917 that brought the communist to power in Russia.

In 1932, Nina was pregnant with a son, and that son was born on April 25th, and they named him Nikolai. So a happy event

for Simeon and Nina. And Nikolai's boyhood named, by the way, was Kolia. Unfortunately, some not so

...