Everyone keeps bringing up the kardashev scale. Grew up reading up on the man. But i wonder if its a bit crude and oversimplified.

On a basic level it ranks civilizations by how much energy they control or consume. Their planet. Their sun. Their galaxy.
But wouldn't an advanced civilization become more efficient. Not less. Every leap in human history has been about doing more with less.
Vacuum tubes to transistors. Copper to fiber. Global GDP has grown 10x since 1970. Energy consumption only 2.5x. US per capita energy use peaked in 1979 and has gone down since.
And consuming a sun. You capture the full energy output of a star you just killed the habitable zone for everything orbiting it.
Feynman's most famous essay was literally called "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom."
About nanotechnology. Manipulating matter at the atomic level. Go small not big.
But maybe he's measuring advancement with scale/growth (byproduct of intelligence). In which case, more people more infrastructure more computation more territory.
Energy WILL scale with that. Thermodynamics.
But the guy wrote this in 1964. Before the internet.
Maybe it should be about manipulating space/time/matter or quantum. Not how much energy you can burn.