Abusing the Kardashev Scale For Fun and Profit: Difference between revisions

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Note that the Kardashev number of a civilization indicates only its power use: it is at best just a proxy for the scale of technological capabilities at play, and it can become less proximate the [[Mohs Scale of Sci Fi Hardness|softer]] the Sci-Fi gets, which also makes it harder to evaluate where a civilization rates on the Kardashev scale [[All There in the Manual|if no hard numbers are given]]. As an example, consider the human civilizations of ''[[Avatar (film)|Avatar]]'' and ''[[Ender's Game]]''. Both use relativistic craft and travel between fairly local systems. Though there are world-destroying weapons and much larger scale space travel in ''Ender's Game'' and its sequels, the [[Applied Phlebotinum|phlebotinum]] involved is specifically said to use enormously less energy than normal physics would suggest for accomplishing those tasks. In ''Avatar'', the necessity of brute-forcing relativistic travel may put that civilization higher on the Kardashev scale, despite the largely inferior technology and scale of development. Keep this in mind when placing examples, and try to include some explanation. After all, a hallmark of improving technology is increased efficiency, which would actually ''lower'' a civilization's Kardashev rating, all else equal.

 

 

A bit on numbering. Kardashev himself only outlined discrete numbers for levels I, II, and III, with power values corresponding to 1964 humanity, the Sun, and the Milky Way respectively. Later discussions of the topic have generally fixed the value of a Type I power level as that of the Earth's insolation. [[Carl Sagan]] [[wikipedia:Kardashev scale#Current status of human civilization|proposed a revised scale based on a logarithmic formula]] rather than the specific values of celestial objects. It might be less intuitive, but it allows easy interpolation and extrapolation, with a .1 difference representing a 10x difference in power. Extensions to the scale above Type III are not universally agreed upon, so Sagan's formula is used for the purposes of categorizing things in this article, with various real phenomena listed for scale in the appropriate subcategories. Don't expect references to the Kardashev Scale in fiction to necessarily correspond to this formulation, as the page quote implies.

* Earth receives about 1.74 x 10¹⁷W from the Sun.

* [[Ender's Game|Ender's Saga]]. As the typical interstellar travel time is tens of years at close to light speed, we can assume humanity still inhabits a relatively small patch of Galaxy after thousands of years. The shown planets have smaller civilizations than our current one, but they are numerous. It is hinted that nearly all of them were conquered in the Third Invasion, and that means no more than a few a day during a few years. Some of the more impressive technology, like interstellar travel, is noted to take relatively little power. So probably less than 1.5 x 10¹⁷W.

* ''[[Cowboy Bebop]]'' displays a multi-planetary civilization that has gotten banged up quite a bit. Populations are small by today's standards, but interplanetary travel is fairly common. Probably somewhere around this level.

* ''Triplanetary'', the prequel([[Dolled-Up Installment|-ish]]) [[Lensman]] novel, covers humanity going from a Type 0 to a Type 1. At the end, relatively easy interstellar travel has been achieved, and power is generated through (almost) completely efficient matter-to-energy conversion.

* ''[[Farscape]]'' seems to have dozens of civilizations at around this level, depending on just how much power the phlebotinum uses.

* In ''[[A Miracle of Science]]'', most of the people live on incompletely utilized planets. However, Mars is completely harnessed and the Martians are doing some interesting things with all that power, though Mars gets quite a bit less sunlight than Earth. All told, probably about Type I.

* The ''major'' races in ''[[Mass Effect]]'' (the turians, the asari, the salarians and arguably mankind) are probably meager Type Is, with highly developed homeworlds and numerous yet sparsely populated colonies. The remaining races inhabiting Citadel Space are somewhat less, maybe high Type 0.

== Solid Type II: Clearly more power than a single star, but less than a galaxy. ==

* The unseen aliens in [[The Space Odyssey Series]] have the ability to make stars. This might indicate midlevel Type II power use, depending on just how they go about it.

** It is probable that Petey is not yet at Type III. A mid-high Type II, maybe, but it isn't clear that he has harnessed the power equivalent of a whole galaxy from just the core. While the core of an active galaxy can outshine the rest, the Milky Way's core emits only a tiny percentage of the overall energy output, so the Fleetmind is probably here unless they're force-feeding the black hole.

** Whether the Andromedan Darkmatter Entities are classifiable as Class III, Class IV, or even classifiable at all, is another matter entirely... but for their sake, you'd better hope they're pretty high, seeing as Petey is dedicating most of his available forces to fighting them.

** That's their expeditionary force though, the combined 'power' of their population in Andromeda...

* The Galactic Republic/Empire of [[Star Wars]], a galaxy-spanning society with very fast FTL and at least a million heavily developed planets, is a very high Type II, possibly a Type III (at least when the guy with the underbite helmet pulls the lever).

** The first Death Star charged up for a planet-buster in about a day, which would give its power core a sustained output of around ''3 million of our Suns''. And the second one charged in a couple ''hours''.

** The Executor-class Star Dreadnought has a power core that puts out the same energy as class G star. Regular old Star Destroyers are said to exceed the total energy consumption of some planetary civilizations over their entire history (potentially hundreds of thousands of years in [[Star Wars]]) when they jump to hyperspace.

* [[The Culture]] is an interstellar civilization that draws most of its power from the "[[Applied Phlebotinum|hyperspace Grid]]" rather than from the visible universe, and its ''demiliatarised diplomatic ships'' are capable of destroying whole planets. Their theoretical power level might be even higher; they are stated to be a "post scarcity" society and could have the capability to harness energy that might possibly qualify them as a Type IV, but if so they deliberately choose not to.

** A star puts out a lot more energy from fusion than a black hole of the same mass would from Hawking radiation. Also, the more massive the hole, the lower its effective temperature. This might be more of a Type II or borderline Type III, depending on exactly how many "multiple" is.

* Though the details are a bit sketchy, some remarks in [[H.P. Lovecraft|HP Lovecraft]]'s ''Whispers in the Dark'' suggest that the Mi-go could be here, since they've mastered interdimensional travel and apparently rule entire galaxies in their native dimensions.

* The Danannians from L.E. Modesitt's The Eternity Artifact were at least Type III, but it's entirely possible they were a borderline type IV+.

* Established powers in ''[[Orion's Arm]]'' do things like suck entire stars through wormholes called grazers (over a period of many decades) and convert their mass directly to energy. A star's mass is in the 10³⁰ kg, just under 10¹⁷ J per kg, "decades" is around 10⁹seconds... you do the math.

* In ''[[Sluggy Freelance]]'', the aliens seen [http://sluggy.com/daily.php?date=010826 at the end] of the "GOFOTRON Champion of the Universe" arc are able to contain hundreds of exploding stars within a sphere the size of a soccer ball. And this device was created by a ''waffle company''.

* The [[The Culture|Overarch Bedeckants]], the civilisation that built the probe in ''Excession'' travel between universes so as to avoid extinction by being trapped in one when it undergoes heat death. Their lone probe brushed off the most powerful weapon the Culture wielded without any apparent effort. However, most of the information about the Excession comes from Intelligence report suppositions and a single largely incoherent rambling rant from the Excession itself.

* For the denizens of the [[Futurama]] universe, traveling to the ''edge of the universe and back'' is a trivially easy task. As is killing everything everywhere. They also posses the ability to alter universal constants and other physics across the whole universe (scientists changed the speed of light in 2208), which can also be used to power technology (changing the properties of dark matter, 200% efficient engines <ref>which the writers should know would require breaking time symmetry of the laws of physics, i.e. changing them and exploiting that to extract more power than was put in</ref>). Planet exploding weapons are operated by single person demolition companies, the use of which is considered mundane. Multiple universes can be created by a lone inventor on the budget of a small delivery company (said delivery company having made only 100 deliveries in 10 years, as of 'The Mutants are Revolting'). In said delivery company, interstellar/intergalactic spaceships are as mundane as small pieces of wire.

** And consider that in the Futurama universe, Earth/humanity is a pathetic third-rate wannabe power, only able to bully the very smallest and weakest other cultures- comparable to fascist 1930's-era Italy.

== Other: Unconventional or hard to quantify in watts. ==

* The Tar-Aiym and Hur'rikku from the ''[[Humanx Commonwealth]]'' series developed superweapons that, respectively, could annihilate an entire star system by broadcasting gravity waves through [[Subspace or Hyperspace|subspace]], and could punch a hole into [[Another Dimension]] to release an anticollapsar (or "white hole") as massive as an entire galaxy. While that sounds awfully impressive, there isn't enough real physics there to get them into a ballpark. The Xunca have them beat hands-down, however, at one point in their existence being capable of transporting an entire galactic civilization to an alternate dimension and turning a galactic supercluster ''into a superweapon''.

** Also from Niven's [[Known Space]], it's not clear where Outsiders fit. They seem to have a nearly unlimited range of technology at their disposal, at least up to inertialess spacecraft engines, which would imply being able to manipulate the (known) laws of physics. However even asking questions about the kind of technology they may have access to is prohibitively expensive, much less getting access to any of it. Despite the availability of super-advanced technology, they enjoy taking their time, travelling from the core to the rim of the galaxy at sublight speed.

* The Ancients from ''[[Stargate SG-1]]'' invented a machine to harness all the power of this universe and other universes, by using Zero-point energy. Unfortunately it never worked properly. Also there was that whole Ascension thing. Of course they will not lift a finger to help anyone now, and their activities aren't very quantifiable.

* The Beyonder from ''[[Secret Wars]]'' is probably unmeasurable. In his first appearance, he effortlessly ''destroyed a galaxy'' [[Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale|to provide an empty corner of the universe]] for the various metabeings to battle each other.

** That was more or less retconned away later.

** The Necrons and their masters the C'tan are also hard to pin down. The C'tan feed off stars, so might individually approach Type II, though they're not usually very active. The Necrons have the goal of separating the Warp from physical reality, a universe scale goal, though they seem to confine their efforts to one galaxy for now. They have the most advanced technology in the setting, and have fought on galactic scales in the distant past, but virtually all now lie dormant in buried tombs. Though their technology is very potent, they may be low on the Kardashev scale of the major factions of WH40K in the present setting due to their extremely small active numbers. Like the Tyranids, all bets are off if they become active en masse, particularly since they are known to possess at least one Dyson Sphere.

* Magratheans from ''[[The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy]]''. They constructed entire planets in hyperspace, as well as the biggest and most advanced computer in all existence. The blueprints were given to them by a hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional race, i.e. those whose "protrusions" in our dimension are mice. The blueprints were in turn the output of the ''second'' most advanced computer in all existence: Deep Thought. As for the construction zone, the Guide says it's a spherical/spheroidal "fold" in space-time with a radius of around 13 light seconds. Assuming hyperspace construction zones in a folded space-time and that planetary engineering was a fun hobby, you get a really powerful civilization, albeit one that's hard to classify.

** In ''Master of Orion 2'' the weapon ''Stellar Converter'' is capable of destroying planets in matter of seconds (debatable as it takes a turn to do so), meaning their energy output has to be in order of 10³⁰J - give or take few magnitudes - in order to overcome the gravitational binding energy of a planet sized object. Also, you can also construct Earth-like planets from asteroid belts and gas giants. This would suggest mid to high Type II power use.

* Civilization in the ''[[Lensman]]'' novels progresses from what's probably a low Type II (a significant portion of the Milky Way colonized, FTL travel, 'super-atomic' and energy weapons) at the beginning of ''Galactic Patrol'' to a probable Type III (two galaxies colonized, travel between parallel universes, faster-than-light planets used as weapons powerful enough to cause supernovas) by the end of ''Children of the Lens''. The Children of the Lens themselves are near-godlike beings.

* [[Isaac Asimov]]'s stories, in chronological order, begin with mankind as a type 0 or a borderline type I. Then they establish Spacer colonies, invent faster-than-light travel and eventually colonize almost an entire galaxy, having reached a Solid II level.

* [[wikipedia:The Millennial Project|The Millennial Project]] is a [[Speculative Documentary]] / [["Faux To" Guide]] to reaching Type I, Type II, and Type III.

** TL 8 -- Microscience (c2001-2050?): Gengineering, longevity, micromachines, early fusion technology. Beginnings of AI.

** TL 9 -- Nanoscience: Environmental engineering, nanomachines, intelligent AI, mature fusion technology. "Ultra-Tech" begins.

* GURPS is also notable among RPGs because it gives rules for mismatched tech levels. An enlightened and peaceful civilization might have figured out bodily immortality (TL 11) yet have no weapons more advanced than "mere" 20th-century nukes (TL 7).

** GURPS also allows fantasy/alternative technology forms, For example, a Steampunk world like ''[[Girl Genius]]'' would be [[TL 5]]+4 (Steam engine/victorian with flight, death rays, and mechanical AI), while ''[[The Flintstones]]'' would be [[TL 0]]+6 (Stone age with TV and cars! )