Discussion JustForFun / AbusingTheKardashevScaleForFunAndProfit

n/m

Edited by 70.36.176.245

Actually we're somewhere in 0.72 actually based on power consumption.

Details?

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

The Tsar Bomba had a yield of 50 megatons, or 2.1e17 joules. According to http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Library/Teller.html (and I make no attestations as to its veracity), the output duration of a Teller-Uram fusion bomb is 20-40 nanoseconds. Assuming the longest possible explosion, that's (2.1e17)J/(4e-8)sec, or 5.3e24 watts.

Edited by Etherjammer

There is an issue with blowing up stars (and perhaps hydrogen/helium rich gas giants). Unlike planets, which take some doing to upset the natural order, stars are big piles of fusion fuel, and blowing one up doesn't say a whole lot about the power use of whatever technology set it off  ^*

. After all, most stars will disperse themselves anyway if given time. It's like tossing a match and starting a forest fire: the match only puts out a few hundred Watts tops, and you can't really take credit for the gigawatts the burning forest puts out... unless you use it to power something with a reasonable efficiency  ^*

^{E.g. if you blow up a star to attack an Earthlike planet in orbit, only a ten billionth or so of the star's explosion would be put to a useful purpose, while blowing up a star to overclock a Dyson sphere might result in much more useful power.}

. Or you could use a super-match with sufficient heat output to burn the trees directly without relying on the wood for fuel, but that requires a separate GW scale power source. A litmus test I'd use would be something like "would technology X perform task Y against object Z if Z were made of an inert substance instead of explodium?" Does anyone know how these examples are supposed to work?  ^*

^{* Shivans of Freespace have the technology to destroy stars (by making them go supernova). While very little is known about their civilization, their evident ability to militarily steamroll the GTVA (an alliance of two Type I's) would mark them as a vanilla Type II. I'd put them more at low-mid Type I, stellar destruction notwithstanding. Military steamrolling or not, it doesn't look like ten orders of magnitude difference.}

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^{* In Quentyn Quinn Space Ranger, the Empire of the Seven Systems is known to have FTL travel, zero-point energy, (obviously) seven inhabited star systems with the associated interplanetary and interstellar infrastructure, and is known to have at least ONE superweapon capable of detonating stars and is implied to have several more—- essentially a fleet of what the Death Star wants to be when it grows up. Conservative estimates have them at low to mid level II. Same issue. Sounds more like a low-mid Type I, especially given the relative hardness of the setting.}

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^{* The Corellian Architects of the Star Wars Extended Universe built an artifact that could drag planets through hyperspace, and also cause suns to go supernova. High Type 1 at least. The star thing is hard to pin, but comparison with other Star Wars hyperdrives would probably put them into Type II, though that depends heavily on how fast the travel was. However, the station that does that is supposedly powered largely by tapping the rotational energy of a double planet system, and sustained Type II power use would seriously mess that up in short order. I'd put it in Schitzo, but I'm not very familiar with some parts of the EU that mention it, so there may be a more cohesive explanation.}

Some entries gave no real evidence for where it should go, and I'm not familiar enough/didn't have enough time to research to place them myself.  ^*

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^{* The Solarian Combine from Alan Dean Foster's Design For Great-Day is described as a galaxy-spanning supermind composed of thousands of intelligent species. Their level of technology is not described in sufficient detail to calculate an exact energy output, but based on the fact that they construct spaceships capable of casual intergalactic travel, they must certainly be well beyond Type II.}

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^{* The Pierson's Puppeteers from Larry Niven's Known Space books are capable of accelerating five Earth-sized planets to near-lightspeed, a feat which takes on the order of 1E48 Joules, over maybe a thousand years (perhaps less). — ~ 3E37 Watts would allow for a thousand years of acceleration, although the inertialess drives they purchased may reduce that figure considerably. That's an awful big if, especially since reducing the energy needed is the entire point of such an inertialess drive, and what little I know of their other activities doesn't put them near this range.}

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^{* If you want to know anything about the Outsiders' full technological capabilities, it'll cost you at least a trillion stars per question. (These are the guys who sold the technology for the intertialess drive to the Puppeteers that they used to accelerate their Fleet of Worlds.) For those who aren't Known Space geeks, it should be pointed out that "star" in this context is a monetary unit, and for comparison purposes mailing a wallet-sized object to someone costs about a tenth of a star. The Outsider's price for knowing their tech level may as well be "a million-bajillion dollars."}

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^{* It should be noted that the Outsiders did not sell the tech, they sold the engines (With an agreement that the engines could not be transferred to other parties). This is roughly the difference between buying a fish vs being taught how to catch fish; Puppeteers cannot build new interialess engines, and are too terrified of the engines to try reverse engineering them. Aside from the Outsider's interialess engines, they are closer to a Tech II civilization.}

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^{* The Daleks of Doctor Who — Calculations based on using at any given time one-trillionth the amount of energy needed to blow up the universe by reversing the weak nuclear force, and then punching a bridge to the next universe to repeat the process. Remember they don't do this all at once. — ~10E46 Watts Is that figure from anything canonical? Because I don't think that the physics described are close enough to reality to evaluate.}

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^{* The Precursors in the Halo universe (yeah, Bungie went double time with old alien races) are so advanced they left the galaxy so beings didn't stagnate. They were said to be so advanced that they could literally do anything. How much of this is Forerunner Folklore and how much is true is unknown, but they are very advanced.}

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^{* The Danaanian aliens in L. E. Modesitt, Jr's novel The Eternity Artifact had a solid Type III civilization. Six to ten billion years ago, they created another universe, and moved their entire galaxy into it. The human civilization investigating Danaan, on the other hand, was a low-to-middling Type II.}

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^{* Dairine from the Young Wizards series managed to stop the Universe's expansion to harness Olbers' paradox to scare off the Big Bad/Devil, who doesn't like light. In the same context, she was in perfect communion with a global race of centrally controlled robots who seriously discussed halting the passage of time to get rid of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In 'machine time', the name that (presumably) completely describes the Universe (part of the Olbers spell) took almost four seconds to say.}

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^{* The "gods from Terry Pratchet's Strata created the universe as a colony for their children and the Jokers from The Dark Side Of The Sun rebuilt the universe to mask that they were ever there}

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^{* The Cosmocrats and Chaotarchs from the German Sci-Fi series Perry Rhodan are both cosmic powers with the knowledge how to create stars and planets or destroy whole galaxies. The Cosmocrats are transcendent, ascended entities (born from the psychic merging of the minds of one or several galaxies worth of sentient races) who inhabit a plane of pure information outside of time and space and outside the multiverse. The Chaotarchs on the other hand typically inhabit regions of Chaos inside the multiverse where the cosmic laws and constants are broken and do not apply anymore, so-called Negaspheres. If these beings chose to manifest bodily in the normal space-time-continuum, however, they often use Type III or Type IV civilizations as servants or slaves to build technological devices for them.}

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^{* Macrolife is the story of a spacecraft that houses an entire (sub-Type I) civilization. It is suggested that over a billion years into the future, their descendants reach type III, a civilization capable of manufacturing fleets of millions of hundred-mile-long ships. Doing the math, even just creating them directly from energy, you get 10E38 Watts spread over several hundred years. — Barely 10E36 Watts Why would they be created from energy when there's a galaxy of matter around?}

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^{* The Guardians probably belong here. Though they use Applied Phlebotinum in the form of seeming magic that is supposedly the product of 5 billion years of science, they don't typically operate on the scale of a type four. They could be type 4 if they wanted to as evidenced when Hal Jordan became Parallax and used the combined power and knowledge of the Guardians to destroy the universe with plans to remake it the way he wanted it.}

Some others I'm not sure of:  ^*

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^{* Therians from Rackham's AT-43. They are actually highly advanced Humans that have learned to make multiple Dyson Spheres. Their MO is to drop genetic material on a planet that will evolve into Humanoid life, this life will then wildly depleat the resources of said planet, mining it til it nearly falls apart. The Therians swoop in, kill their planted species, and break the planet up in order to create a new Dyson Sphere. This is an ongoing agenda to prevent the collapse of the universe itself. The Thearians have only had one failure in this plan: the Karmans who found a balance with nature and technology. The Therians have only run across one world that was able to stop "Therinization", Ava with the Forces of the Red Blok, and the U.N.A. Seems schitzo to me, but I haven't looked into it much. Leaving aside the fridge logic, they seem to have a Type IV scale goal, but use (how many?) Type II constructs over less than a single galaxy, and the emphasis on planetary conquest suggests Type 0 resources, at least locally.}

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^{* Evgeni Filenko's Galactic Brotherhood is a galaxy-wide confederation of sentient races, which takes a rather peculiar position on this scale. While most of its members are Type I or low-Type II civilisations, the Brotherhood as a whole is a high-Type III and it's heavily hinted that it could easily be Type IV, but chose not to — mainly because they simply couldn't be bothered. They routinely practice large-scale astroingeneering as a form of art and their Information Council borders on omniscience, but overall it is a pretty laid-back organisation mostly concentrated on being Big Brother Mentors for its junior members. This suggests an overall mid Type II to me, only going off "large-scale astroengineering" being routine but apparently not remotely universal. Does anything here even approach Type III+?}

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^{* Alan Dean Foster's Humanx Commonwealth universe features the Xunca, an ancient civilization who rose to the height of their power some billion or so years before humanity. By the time of their "departure" to an alternate dimension, they had moved well beyond the planetary engineering stage to the galactic level, designing (among other things) a superweapon capable of utilizing the combined energy of several million galaxies to rip a hole in the fabric of spacetime to destroy an oncoming Ultimate Evil. They're only rescued from Class IV by the question of whether said gravitational phenomenon had already existed prior to their arrival, but they certainly have the ability to manipulate/create alternate dimensions, modify physical laws such as gravity, and leave behind fully functioning structures half a billion years old. A lot of this seems to be speculation relying on the Xunca taking credit for things that might not have actually done. And what does it mean to "use the energy of" several million galaxies?}

Also, some explanation for where I put certain planet busters. The Death Star blew up Alderaan with debris shooting out at a significant percentage of light speed, meaning it overcame the gravitational binding energy by a factor of millions or so, requiring power well into Type III territory. The two-stage cyclonic torpedos of WH 40 K can also blow up planets, but are noted to just "usually" blow them apart, indicating that their yield is on about the same scale as the planet's binding energy, which puts them into Type II as they detonate.

On the topic of destroying stars, I respectfully disagree. Stars are hardly made of explodium and it is not at all easy to disrupt a star until it brews up on its own. If you want a "forest fire" comparison, try setting fire to a dripping-wet freshly-cut log in the midst of a torrential downpour. Sure it'll be flammable some day, but meh... Imho civilizations which are capable of blowing up stars fully deserve the Type II designation.

Edited by socom

But why do most stars blow up on their own? Because they really are big piles of fusion fuel (i.e. hydrogen and helium) kept on the edge of fusing by temperature and pressure. That is, after all, why main sequence stars shine as they support themselves against gravitational collapse. When stars are shocked such that temperature and pressure increase where they are already high, the resulting fusion can increase temperature and pressure further, resulting in a runaway (rather explosive) fusion reaction. This is what happens in supernovas; what prevents it from happening in sunlike stars is not the fuel present but the lack of sufficient pressure in the core to cause a sudden collapse that shocks the already hot and dense plasma of the core. Rather than a dripping wet fresh log, a star is more like a dry and already smoldering log.

Why does this matter for Kardashev Scale rankings? Because setting up such a disturbance would reasonably take several orders of magnitude less energy than actually expending the energy to dismantle a star yourself, especially if phlebotinum is involved. The gravitational binding energy of a sunlike star is about 7E41J, and a weapon that can expend that represents, not a Type II power use, but transient mid Type III or a borderline Type III that can divert several hours of an entire galaxy's output to a single target. The other activities of the civilizations mentioned to destroy stars in my above post do not remotely approach that. Compare with the Sun Crusher of Star Wars, where the established technological capabilities of the Empire are already within a few orders of magnitude, but that doesn't matter, because the Sun Crusher is explicitly said to use the star's own mass to power the explosion via a self-sustaining chain reaction that doesn't work on things that aren't stars.

And so I proposed the test of "would this star destroying weapon work against something that's not a big pile of fusion fuel?" Does this seem reasonable?

On the inconsistency of the Transformers (particularly in the films):

Firstly, the humans are making them look bad. Humans manage to be a significant factor in the combat between Decipticons and Autobots, despite using tech which is only marginal in fighting Transformers. If they were involved in overwhelming numbers this would make sense, but there are few human combatants. Their most effective units (the jet fighters) spend most of their time trying to not get shredded by Starscream.

Secondly, the may not really be very good at combat. Here they are, most of them have spent more time in combat than humans have existed, and humans are a real threat to them, even with marginal tech.

Thirdly, while they might once have had the equipment to do Class II or Class III level operations, there is the small matter of that multi-million-year inconclusive civil war. The first rule of warfare is that stuff gets damaged. In a prolonged war, the deciding factor is not your ability to kill enemy soldiers, but your ability to prevent them being resupplied with critical resources needed to fight. For Transformers, this includes the energy needed to fight and to create replacement soldiers, so high on the list of priority targets would be the power collection hardware needed to do Class II or Class III power collection.