Figure out how to harness renewable energy to explore the stars or risk humanity's destruction, stark new paper warns.

But, the new paper argues, if we can achieve the former and avoid the latter, then we might just become a truly interplanetary species in as little as 200 years.

To leave our planet for good, humans need to drastically ramp up the use of nuclear and renewable energy, and simultaneously safeguard those energy sources from being used for malicious purposes.

A Kardashev Type I civilization, for example, can use all the energy available on the species’ home planet, including all the sources of energy in the ground (such as fossil fuels and materials that can be used for nuclear fission) and all the energy falling onto that planet from its parent star.

Type III species can go even further and use most of the energy in an entire galaxy.

Needless to say, the human species is well below the Type I threshold, but our energy consumption grows with every passing year.

The danger posed by the increased consumption of energy may explain why scientists have found no evidence of advanced alien civilizations.

Most of these so-called "great filters" are different forms of species self-destruction.

The trick is to avoid self-destruction while we ramp up our energy use to the point where we can reliably exist on multiple worlds at once, even if it's just in the solar system, Jiang said.

But to achieve multi-planetary status requires an enormous amount of energy, not just for establishing short-term colonies, but for maintaining full-fledged, self-sustaining cities.

In short, unless humanity rapidly switches energy supplies to nuclear and renewable options, we will do too much damage to our biosphere to continue climbing the Kardashev scale.

The study also assumed an annual 2.5% growth in the use of renewable and nuclear energy, and found that in the next 20 to 30 years, those forms of energy use will steadily displace fossil fuels.

Nuclear and renewable energy sources have the potential capability to keep on growing in output without putting further strain on the biosphere, and if we continue at our current rate of consumption we will reach Type I status in the year 2371, the team found.

The calculations had to assume that we would identify safe ways to handle nuclear waste, and that the increased ability to harness energy wouldn't lead to disaster