User:Wormulon/Types of civilisation

This page is a testing ground for a future SporeWiki article about classifying civilisations. It will supersede the Tier scale, based primarily on technological capability while Ghelæ's class scale works on size and energy consumption. Of course, the scale and advancement of technology generally works on how much energy can be supplied to that civilisation, that is the basic need of technology and would be a fundemental basis for all manipulative-type intelligences in the universe.

The new Tier scale (and others perhaps) will work on: For example, if we take in Truly Alien life into account (basically anything unlike carbon-based life on Earth), the locations for life to exist in the universe rapidally expands beyond what we know of the Goldilocks zone. For a long time, scientists within SETI have speculated that manipulative-type sentients (this is not taking other types of adaptive xenopsychology into account) can only create technology on the surface of planets with atmospheric chemistries that are remarkably unreactive; for example, with oxygen was present on Titan, fire, one of the most important sources of energy for early man, but be an impossibly dangerous exploit). Chlorine-dominant atmospheres would also be unsuitable for smelting iron and copper (leading whatever manipulative-type sentient to either find another metal).  In more recent times, hard science fiction writers and some astrobiologists have speculated that Aquatic civilisations, Atmospheric civilisations, stellar-based intelligences and so on can exist. They may all manipulate their environment for different uses to Earth-civilisation, but all share one thing in common, and that is energy.
 * Solving the issue of size vs. technology.
 * How the intelligent species makes leaps in technology.

In the "Star Maker", a world is mentioned who's sentient lifeforms are Swarm Intelligences. These were composite beings who lived on a world swepped by dramatic ocean tides, making flight important, however, its natives coudn't achieve lift with brains as big as human's. This, each flock of birds was a composite conciousness, they created a mental unity based on manipulation of strong electromagnetic fields, this was ultimatly biological, and comparable to the monkey paws of human beings which is the basis of technology for manipulative-sentients. Through this they were able to develop agriculture, and eventually wind-turbine power generation and achictecture based on their own manipulation of the atmosphere. Radio waves, not nuclear power, were the Weapons of Mass Destruction on their world, eventually only two flocks were left dominant, having absorbed the others. A great war occurred with the two flock-civilisation attemping to absorb the other using radio-wave bombardment.

So indeed, not all technological civilisations are the same. This is the basis of the Tier U on the previous scale, although now I feel like all a civilisation needs to do to reach higher tiers of technology is to find ever greater sources of energy and resources to use it; perhaps a star-civilisation exists out there, perhaps it can find ingenious ways to manipulate its environment, but without solid material, it cannot leave its home star, if this civilisation is spread right across it would rate Kardashev-II, yet at the same time, it could not (and probably would not want or need to) create solid objects let alone starships and the other usual tropes of science fiction.
 * Civilisations and Faster-Than-Light travel