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

** Level 9 is essentially, the Q Continuum. If they aren't Omnipotent and Omniscient, they're close to it, and can fairly safely be considered living gods.

** Still, one funny thing. Functional immortality is probably enormously easier to achieve scientifically than FTL travel, as it likely hinges on a mixture of nano, cyber and/or biotechnology already theoretical by our science (just tricky to achieve) as opposed to nudging the laws of physics in ways that we don't even have any idea how for FTL travel.

* ''[[GURPS]]'' also has its own Tech Level scale, and may have been one of the earlier games to quantify progress thus. (The game's designers have credited a similar scale in ''[[Traveller]]'' as an inspiration.) [https://web.archive.org/web/20131030055309/http://www.omnology.com/gurps-levels.html This list] is from the Third Edition, but later editions don't change it much, other than the addition of "superscience" for things that blatantly break the laws of physics. Present-day (early 21st century) Earth is TL8.

** In 2000, Steve Jackson Games [http://www.sjgames.com/pyramid/sample.html?id=1861 officially announced] that we had reached TL8 and that they were forced to rewrite the old Tech Level scale from the 1985 rulebook because science had progressed faster in some fields (like biotech) than expected and slower in others, which affects the Tech Level descriptions in the current 4th Edition rulebook. [http://www.sjgames.com/ill/a/2006-03-21 This article] from March 2006 lists another example that modern bio-science is close to breaking through to TL9.

*** TL 12 — Age of Miracles. Near total control of time and space. People can buy pocket universes.

** ''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).

* Human civilization in ''[[Warhammer 40,000]]'' merits mention here. Humanity's technology level is ''ridiculously'' schizophrenic thanks to tens of millenia of war and upheaval. At its height, humanity had true AI, rapid interstellar travel, controlled the vast majority of the galaxy, is implied to have mastered matter-energy conversion, and bent the laws of the universe to its whim. Twenty thousand years of devastating galactic war later, scraps of technology from that era are worth destroying star systems over. Though the Imperium of Man and Adeptus Mechanicus don't understand how much of their most advanced technology works anymore, they still show hallmarks of a borderline Type III civilization, notably whenever the technologies of war come into question. Meanwhile, any given Imperial planet can range from the Stone Age to high type II. [[Schizo-Tech]] at its finest, folks.