Keeping Up With the Kardashevs

I...I think this may be my favorite post title ever.

That discussion in the last post, about the energy-usage of the civilizations of Star Wars and Star Trek, got me to thinking. Now, plainly, the Empire is approximately a Type I civilization. No, I know, the Death Star's main superlaser outputs in the million yottawatt range, but...modern humanity can produce lasers in the couple-dozen petawatt range, that doesn't affect our status as a Kardashev .72 civilization, because it's only a slight increase in our total energy capacity.

It was, I admit, unfair of me to bring up the real projected energy costs of warp drive, to demonstrate that Star Trek is, in fact, a much higher-energy civilization. No SF FTL is directly based on Alcubierre warp, the thing is almost certainly not workable without a near-total overhaul. But nevertheless nobody, but nobody, screws with anybody who has routine teleportation.

Of course, the fact is, Star Wars is more realistic (except for fighter craft with ion engines, at which I just can't stop laughing). Star Trek's writers had no conception of the economic and technological implications of routine teleportation, nor of what commonplace realtime FTL would entail. They're even worse than Whedon not knowing that a civilization that could terraform on the Alliance's scale A) wouldn't have to terraform, certainly not any other planets, and B) would never even have to fight a war. Star Trek's Federation is, quite probably, capable of moving stars. And not on an ad hoc, throw-everything-into-it basis, like the Death Star or the UNSC blowing up one star, I mean routinely. These guys are basically Pierson's Puppeteers, there's no reason (other than that the writers are stupid) that they don't just turn homeworlds into spaceships. Anyone who doesn't think the Kzinti would eat the Empire from Star Wars has never read any Niven—the Jotoki were approximately the equal of the Old Republic/Empire, and they made the mistake of hiring Kzin auxiliaries. But the Puppeteers are so much more powerful than Kzinti that Speaker-to-Animals decides to keep the Puppeteers' screwing with Kzin evolution a secret.

It's laughable on the face of it, anyway, to pretend you can really measure Star Wars or Star Trek energy levels, or compare either to the real world; might as well ask what aerodynamic qualities of the Kusanagi no Tsurugi allow it to flatten grass. Those are fairy-tales, albeit ones that misappropriate the trappings of science. Absolutely nobody involved in either even paused to ask the question "Wait, what else must be true of their civilization, if it can do these things?"

That is a question very largely left to real science fiction, which means written—although Halo comes close. It is just barely conceivable that something we would recognize as "civilization" (rather than "gods" or even "impersonal natural forces") could induce one star to go nova, convert their home system into a fleet, or build a Ringworld (Halo gets props from me for its Ringworlds being so small). It is not conceivable that any such civilization would be 23rd- or 24th-century humanity. While Star Wars' civilization has probably had enough time to justify the Death Star, it's a moot point—because Star Wars, again, isn't science fiction, it's sword-and-sorcery that happens to be set in a bad facsimile of space. Asking if those people could beat the Federation is like asking "Who would win, Conan the Barbarian or Juan Rico?" Except Starship Troopers is halfway decent science fiction, and Star Trek is bad science fiction.

Personally, I say megastructures are out of bounds; you won't find any of them in my books. Sorry, but people who built the actual world they're standing on are a matter for myths, not romances, and they may always be—come back in about 6000 years and we'll see if that's not still the case. I don't know about you, but I don't give a crap what happens to the people in post-/trans-human SF. I generally despise class-warfare BS, but there's being born with a silver spoon, and then there's being born with an immortal body made of silver. Whatever his egalitarian posturings, the only effect of Iain M. Banks' "Culture" stories, on me, is to make me hear the tumbrils of Germinal and yearn to water the furrows with their impure blood.

Aside from the fact it's difficult to create conflict for people like that—remember how I asked why the Alliance in Firefly even bothers to fight the Independents?—I'm not certain megastructures are even possible. Seriously, think of any space-structure much larger than an orbit elevator or O'Neill Island colony. Now tell me, what's it made out of?

Yeah, I don't know either. (You get half-credit if you said "skrith".) While I posit all kinds of freaky materials tech in my books, all of it well beyond our current capabilities, I'm still pretty sure there's quite a gap from "reinforces the sword-blade's structure with an electric charge" to "can withstand the stresses of being a ring 2 AU in diameter". If they can make megastructures, they can probably use the same material in armor, and, well, there goes interesting fight scenes.

I have a practical reason aside from the difficulty of writing conflict for people like that, and the fact megastructures are either impossible, or render danger impossible. Namely, the fact a story like that often lacks an interesting human element. The first Ringworld managed all right, the second kept it up for the most part, but after that, uh, no. Stories of exploration are hard enough to make interesting—they're one of the worst offenders in the annals of "cardboard SF characters"—without the thing being explored being 940 million km in circumference.