Founder and Executive Chair


​Hutan Ashrafian, BSc Hons, MBBS, MBA, PhD, MRCS is a surgeon, historian, systems biologist, biostatistician, economist and philosopher. He is currently a lecturer at Imperial College London and surgeon registrar at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London. His work on understanding civilisation spans from the clinical care of patients in modern medical systems, biomedical research to generate new therapies and health economics to enhance global well being. In parallel he works in the fields the ancient world ranging from the era of Alexander the Great and the classical world, epistemology and the earliest world literature from the Ancient Near East, art and science in the renaissance focusing on the work of Leonardo da Vinci. As an Egyptologist, he has offered the first pathological analysis of the Great Sphinx and his analysis of the death of Tutankhamun was featured in documentaries on the BBC and the Smithsonian Channel. He is the founding president of the Institute of Civilisation and the Institute of Polymaths.


[1] Ashrafian H, Civilisation, Surgical Philosophy. CRC Press. 2015 (https://www.crcpress.com/Surgical-Philosophy-Concepts-of-Modern-Surgery-Paralleled-to-Sun-Tzus/Ashrafian/p/book/9781498732772)

Our Aim


​Our aim is therefore to measure global civilisation translated through the economic value of GDP, utilising the Karadashev scale methodology. Our score named the Global Civilisation Index (GCI) offers a measure of civilisation in the present, but importantly for the future. Our mission is to utilise this score to asses how civilisation is changing based on the definable characteristics of GDP so that we can identify which areas of societal interaction are contributing most and least to changes to civilisation change. With this, we endeavour to achieve our goal of achieving a continually enriched global civilisation and accompanying wellbeing across humanity.

To Quantify, Innovate and Enrich Global Civilisation


​Civilisation can be defined as a social development within a population characterised by a sate of social complexity underpinned by (i) knowledge dissemination, (ii) symbolic communication, and (iii) centralisation of information (such as in urbanisation) that offers social stratification, political architecture and networking that contribute to the advancement of mankind.

The measurement of Civilisation however been complex to asses and has historically been based on qualitative personal perceptions or subjective phenomena.

In 1964 the radio-astronomer Nikolai Semenovich Kardashev (Никола́й Семёнович Кардашёв) offered a novel objective measure of civilisations based on the precept that as civilisations advance, they generate and utilise increasing amounts of energy. In 1964 he offered a measurable score for civilisation according to a new scale:

Type I Civilisation - whole planet energy utilisation, approximately 10^16 Watts
Type II Civilisation - central star (e.g. the Sun) energy utilisation potentially available through the Freeman Dyson sphere, approximately 10^26 Watts
Type III Civilisation – whole galaxy energy utilisation, approximately 10^36 Watts

The Kardashev scale offers an objective score of civilisation in the modern era as energy generaion and civilisation have so-far broadly mirroered  each other in a dose-response manner.

However as civilisation advances, the long-term applicability of the Kardashev methodology may be limited due to increased energy generation and utilisation efficiency. Both of these factors may then alter the ratio of civilisation growth for each factor of energy generation. For example the increased dissemination of digital information at the speed of light with modest energy needs compared to more traditional forms of information distribution.

We have introduced[1] a more objective measure of civilisation based on a readily measurable factor in society established through the total amounts of goods and services produced by a population; better known as the Gross Domestic Product or GDP. This well-known economic measure of societal and global production has historically been directly linked to energy production, but has the strength of remaining a well-established measure of all goods and services in a society, thereby reflecting the state of global civilisation.

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