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When describing my alien civilisations, I frequently see the necessity to define a particular civilisation's technology level.

How can I do it?

The alien civilisation I'm currently working on is spacefaring and has first outposts in a few of the neighbouring star systems. At the same time, humans have a few permanent settlements on Mars and a research outpost on Europa.

One idea that now came to my mind is to compare spacefaring civilisations of my universe by how fast they can travel through space. Another idea I have considered is how much work has been invested in attaining particular technology and how much work it saves.

*Faster-than-light (FTL) travel of any kind is not possible.

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    $\begingroup$ Have you done any research on your own? It's not like humans have never had the necessity to describe civilizations and their tech level. $\endgroup$
    – L.Dutch ♦
    Commented Feb 19, 2023 at 13:33
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    $\begingroup$ Five Letters: G U R P S. $\endgroup$
    – Trish
    Commented Feb 19, 2023 at 17:23
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    $\begingroup$ I'm a fan of the game Traveller and its Universal World Profile, which includes an index for technology level. Given @L.Dutch's perfectly true observation, I'd recommend you investigate it (and others) and come back if you have more specific questions. Cheers! $\endgroup$
    – JBH
    Commented Feb 19, 2023 at 22:18
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    $\begingroup$ I assume the Kardashev Scale is too large in scope for your purpose? $\endgroup$
    – Philipp
    Commented Feb 20, 2023 at 15:12
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    $\begingroup$ Note that if two societies are both spacefaring, then it's only a matter of a few years before the less-advanced of the two catches up with the other one. They're going to copy and learn. $\endgroup$
    – Stef
    Commented Feb 21, 2023 at 19:22

9 Answers 9

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The key thing here is not to define "a level" of technology. Doing that ties you to the sequence of discoveries we had in the real world, and one possible future sequence. Instead, there is a tree, with differing progress on differing branches. Just consider steam engines and gunpowder. Historically, gunpowder was first. How about a world where steam came earlier?

A society might value fast sublight ships, and spend much effort increasing the specific impulse. Or they try to increase the fuel ratio by making their environmental systems more efficient, and spend effort there. Or both, but nobody can do everything at once. So while the answers suggesting to look at RPGs like GURPS and Traveller have merit, for something like a novel you should definitely write a tree.

Some things like available power sources will influence others, of course. If they have solar arrays on a planet like Mercury, they might be able to produce industrial quantities of antimatter to power their ships, and that also affects the drives. If they have large, efficient lasers or masers, they can boost their ships that way. And so on.

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The go-to answer for how do you measure alien civilizations technology is the Kardashev Scale. The basic idea behind this scale is that since the purpose of technology is to do things and doing things requires energy, you can measure how technologically advanced a civilization is by measuring how much energy it uses. Your idea of measuring how fast a spaceship can travel would actually be included in this scale because velocity is related to kinetic energy.

It is hard to say if the Kardashev Scale is a good fit for you because it is not clear what you want your scale to do. If your scale is suppose to convey military threat, manufacturing ability, or resource consumption, then I think the Kardashev Scale would work. If you wanted to measure how intelligent a civilization is, then a scale based on the available computation power or information storage limits may be better.

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  • $\begingroup$ My problem with the Kardashev Scale is how massive the gap is between steps. The Roman Empire was categories more advanced than our cavemen ancestors. World War Era Europe would have appeared alien, far advanced from the old Romans. And then us today, flying through the sky with wirelessly connected global communication devices. And yet all of that, Cavemen and Us, are still below Type 1. $\endgroup$
    – Toddleson
    Commented Feb 21, 2023 at 21:51
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    $\begingroup$ The Kardashev Scale is a logarithmic scale, so the fact huge differences are represented by small changes in numbers is more of a feature than a bug. If you really don't like it, you could just use a linear scale instead. The most important part of the Kardashev Scale is the idea that how much energy a civilization uses is a good way of measuring how advanced that civilization is. $\endgroup$
    – E Tam
    Commented Feb 21, 2023 at 23:07
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Your best source on this will be role-playing games that handle a broad range of settings, or which are specialised for science fiction.

  • The first game to have a technology level system was Traveller, and its system is described on its wiki.

  • GURPS' technology levels are similar in concept, although the details differ. Again, see its fandom.com wiki.

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    $\begingroup$ It should be noted that there have been several efforts to define tech levels in Traveller with a bit more granularity, usually by breaking it up by category. The DGP supplement "World Builders' Handbook" was probably the best-known attempt, but a large number of other efforts have been made, both commercial publication and fanac. The Traveller wiki Tech Level Comparison Chart is sort of a consolidation and summarization of all of them. $\endgroup$
    – Jeff Zeitlin
    Commented Feb 21, 2023 at 17:59
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Define a civilisation's technology level by what they are capable of doing and what they are incapable of doing.

This can be broken down into subfields. For example space travel, medicine, biological engineering, artificial intelligence, and how well structured and utopian is their society.

For all subfields we can speak of depth. For example how smart is the smartest robot? Do they have self-aware robots? We can also talk of breadth. For example how widespread are these robots? Can every household afford one?

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Use a few scales

The first and biggest is the Kardashev scale. This measures the total amount of energy the civilizations has harnessed on a logarithmic level.

K-1 is "has harnessed all of the energy the sun would deposit on Earth".

K-2 is "has harnessed all of the energy the sun emits, period".

K-3 is "has harnessed all of the energy an entire galaxy of stars emits".

Each 0.1 on the Kardashev scale is a factor of 10 -- these steps are $10^{10}$ or a factor of 10,000,000,000x apart from each other.

Human civilization is currently around 0.72 on this scale, give or take a few 0.001.

With this scale you can measure "can they dismantle a moon"? "Can they launch a slower than light ship to a nearby star?" - both of these are fundamentally questions about energy budgets. The engineering may be tricky, but once you can deal with energy on the scales required, they aren't fundamentally difficult to do.

But energy isn't the only thing that a civilization technology can be measured on.

Two other ones I would suggest would be information or computation and the ability to manipulate and control small things (and how small they get).

For information, just a simple logarithm of the bits of information we have catalogued, stored and can manipulate. Humanity today is in the 10^15 bits range.

For small scale control, humans can futz around with stuff far smaller than they can control.

We have nearly full control over stuff at mm and above scales.

At nm (nanometer) scales our ability to control stuff is in clean room labs with limited materials. We can print computer chips at that scale, but we have limited control over DNA, for example, or biology at that scale.

So how about 3 numbers

  • Log base 10 of the Watts the civilization has access to. (Humanity is 7.2)
  • Negative log base 10 of the scale of things we can manufacture (computer chips are 8.5) in meters.
  • Log base 10 of the number of bits of information the civilization has access to. Humanity is currently about 15.

How do use these numbers

A human brain has $10^{11}$ neurons. If it takes 100 bits of data to describe its connections, that means a single human brain requires 1% of our current civilizations entire information storage to describe.

This would imply that human-level AI is at the edge of what we can possibly do. An Apollo-moonshot level of effort. This seems plausible.

If our civilization had $10^{20}$ bits, a human brain would be a trivial amount of information to process.

You can do the same for fine control -- at 9.5, Tailored DNA is possible; the information required to know what it does may not be around, but you can specify with DNA something has.

Being able to program DNA and make it do what you want is going to require 9.5 or better fine control, and enough information capacity to understand biology. There are a number of people who have worked out how much information there is to understand evolution; a single human has about 6 billion bits of information (9.5), not that high.

But decoding what it DOES could be harder. The information required to understand the evolutionary history of humanity, at ~100 generations per 1000 years, $10^{8}$ or so times larger; closer to $10^{18}$ bits to fully model the evolutionary history of humanity back to single celled organisms.

If that is what is required to create a custom species (make life do what you want without having to experiment), then a $10^{20}$ bit civilization would find custom-creating a lifeform to be an Apollo-scale task (requiring 1% of its entire civilizations information capabilities).

We don't know how hard it is to decode how biology works, but it is probably in that range.

Now, look at futurists.

Information, small scale control and energy are known ways for futurists to think about what human future capabilities look like.

So by using these 3 scales you can find futurists talking about this kind of thing and play around with what they can do.

What more, by having one civilization have advantages in one area and not another, you can have interesting differences in development that aren't "well, those aliens never noticed fire could be useful".

Growth

Exponential growth is not atypical in our technological development. On a log scale, exponential growth is linear.

So if we are at 14 on an exponential scale and get 3% better per year, $log_{10}(10^{14} * 1.03)$ is $14 + log_{10}(1.03)$ which is $14 + 0.013$. 3% growth means about 80 years to move up 1 unit on a $log_{10}$ scale.

This applies to all of information, fine control and energy.

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Their energy use

Energy is the ultimate currency of the universe, so an obvious way to measure how advanced a civilization's tech is can be done by measuring their energy. Earth is currently at 0.72, using a small fraction of the sunlight hitting the planet.

If the alien civilization has mastered fusion or mass solar power plants, or has the energy output of several worlds they are probably closer to 1, full mastery of a planet of sunlight. They probably have several orders of magnitude more power than Earth to throw at a problem.

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Mostly this makes me think of space strategy games, like Master of Orion. Not to say you should do it like video games do it, but it raises some things to consider, like how games like this create tech trees.

The fundamental point is that technology advances are not necessarily linear or relatable and therefore they are not easily measured against each other.

We humans have had great leaps and bounds in computer technology and electronics miniaturization. I think it can be said that this is due to our lack of any major discoveries in other areas, namely power generation and storage. Our current power schemes are very primitive and have improved only slightly in the last 100 years. Our computer advancements have been a necessity -- get more work out of less energy, because we suck at generating and storing energy.

Of course, you could take the view that these sorts of things are universal. Maybe there is no fundamental understanding we could have stumbled upon that would allow for batteries with 1000x the energy density of lithium ion. But for a sci-fi story, it's easy to imagine some other race did exactly that, and their advancements in other areas might have gone very differently because of this. Maybe they ended up never developing advanced computers, or any form of AI. They still aim all their guns by sight. But their tanks are powered by a Mr. Fusion reactor. How would they compare to us in terms of technology?

So I see two possibilities:

  1. There is no "technology level". Each race must be individually defined and can have radically different levels of advancement in different areas.
  2. The, er, Galactic Science Council has actually seen the same problem you do and has defined a comprehensive system of tech classification, based on an average of many different factors: maximum ship speed, maximum energy production from a single reactor, maximum energy storage, total civilization energy production, total manufacturing capability, etc, etc, all are given "points" and this creates sort of a rough estimate of where a civilization currently is overall but doesn't necessarily tell you if it's a good idea to go fight them. (The Cowpeople of Sirius III have a high score but it's actually all agriculture. SUPER advanced agriculture. Can grow a plant in 3 seconds with a single grain of sand. Something about "dimensional transitions" but no one else understands their science. For weapons, however, they have bronze spears.)
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Like others have said, a lot of games like GURPS and Stellaris have already answered this question.

When it comes to space empires, they are often ranked by how much territory they control. Empires can rank from interplanetary to interstellar to intergalactic to even multiversal. Generally speaking, an empire that is intergalactic has to be much more advanced than an empire that is merely interplanetary in order to build and maintain the empire in the first place. There can also be sub-ranks like a small interstellar empire and a large intergalactic empire.

For planet-bound civilizations, time periods and prehistory eras on Earth are often used. That would be from stone age to bronze age to iron age to antiquity to medieval era to Renaissance era to Enlightenment Era to Industrial Era to Diesel Era to Atomic Era to Information Era (which is modern times) and beyond to more futuristic eras.

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Pre-space cultures would be labelled by comparison to Earthly history; named for their kings or discovers, describers, inventors or technologies.

That would give Elizabethan/Tudor, Culumbian, Dickensian, Einsteinian, Victorian or Steam Age.

Beyond that, how could it be other than up to you?

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