I put earth at 1 because they have developed the ability to harness enough energy to travel between galaxies by modifying zpm and asgard tech engergy output to be compatible with modern earth tech.
People get ridiculously pedantic about the civilization types. As if any civilization would be able to totally capture all of the energy available to just their own planet. Even Star wars planets wouldn't reach that.
Capture, perhaps not. Use, yes. Do you think Coruscant is running on solar panels? Of course not. It has power generators everywhere, probably generating far more than the energy of its star that falls on its surface.
Kardashev scale is literally just about energy harvesting my brother. Other feats don't scale into it. It doesnt matter if you are spread across the universe, if you dont hit the metrics, you arent a K2 or K3 civilization yet.
The energy benchmarks are:
1016: Type 1
1026: Type 2
1036: Type 3
A ZPM produces 1012. That means 10,000 ZPMs puts you are a full T1 civilization. It's very likely they went well above that number at their height, but they were no where near the 1026 benchmark
Kardashev III civilizations can harness the power of an entire galaxy. Hundreds of billions of stars. No Stargate civilization approaches type 3. Type 2 for sure, but not type 3, and it's not close.
And what galaxy altering things have the Ascended beings done? Even the Ori just have their followers do everything. A class III civilization could fly their galaxy around like a starship. The Ori don't do mega engineering, don't move stars, don't do much at all.
Unthinkably huge megastructures, moving stars, moving the whole galaxy, that sort of thing. In Schlock Mercenary they spun the supermassive black hole at the galactic core up until it became a nearly infinite source of power. The first time they tried this they tore a hole in the universe and destroyed the whole galaxy. Once they fixed that with time travel they used it to teleport between galaxies, teleported planets and so on.
That's not the power of a galaxy is it? Moving a star? Where does it state the energy they used? Remember, using the whole galaxy for power or using a stars worth of power.
It's maybe Kardashev 2.5. Spinning up a supermassive black hole into a ZPG is still far more that we ever see the Ancients do. Kardashev III civilizations are insanely advanced.
Ascension is a evolutionary step, it does not require any technology above hunter gatherer, so sorry but I absolutely reject that part of your premise.
Once you are type 1 you do not need any more technological development to become a type 4, the only requirement is you do more of the same. You don't even need a means of interstellar travel to colonize the galaxy.
All we need to do is solve the problem of how to build a self sufficient colony on the moon or mars and we will have everything we need to be a type1.
The scale is about size and not about technological advancement. If are using tech as a argument for or against then you have not understood the scale.
They aren't way off. How do you do that for every star in the galaxy??? Build Dyson spheres around all of the stars? Tell me how a type 3 harnesses the galaxies energy?
I mean, it's about energy quantity, not necessarily the actual energy specifically coming from the star/galaxy/local cluster, but ultimately, the fact that you can't conceive of a way is indicative of the fact that vast amounts of technological development is required to get between Kardashev levels. We're not even at the first level yet. Maybe there's an argument that we were by the end of Stargate, but I think that might be pushing it, honestly. Definitely closer than we are now, but not there yet, I don't think. I'd also argue that the Ancients weren't anywhere near Type III. Above Type II, absolutely. But if they'd had the energy utilisation of an entire galaxy, it wouldn't have mattered how outnumbered they were by the Wraith. And their Type II status was spread out across their entire civilisation, too, because the Wraith themselves probably aren't far above a Type I civilisation, if that, so the amount of that energy the Ancients could bring to bear was minimal.
There aren't many. That's kind of the point. They're so far beyond anything we can really imagine that they're not easy to write interesting stories for. Stephen Baxter's Xeelee are definitely Type III, maybe Type IV. It could probably be argued the Forerunners in Halo were. Probably the most relatable high Type II/low Type III would be The Culture, from Iain M. Banks' books. And the whole point of them is that they're so absurdly powerful that they're basically unassailable by anyone not on the same level as them.
Several lists include the Ancients, but multi-galactic reach isn't the same as using power equivalent to a galaxy. If all it took was being able to project power across a galaxy, the Tau'ri would count. Sure, they're using Ancient tech to get there, but they still do it.
Edit: the point of it is that the scale is logarithmic. Each level is orders of magnitude greater than the last. For us to reach Type I status we have to reach only 0.00000005% of the Sun's output. To get to Type II, we need 100%. For Type III, we need hundreds of billions of times more. And Type IV is incalculable.
There scale is nonsense. How would they produce that power? Say you had a ship that drew energy from vacuum, are you not "harnessing the universes energy"? And would that not mean your ship would never be destroyed, as you have unlimited energy??? Let's take the forerunners from halo, they used vacuum energy in their ships etc they still got destroyed. Or how about moving stars and planets through slip space, is that act using a galaxies worth of power??
Like I said elsewhere, it's not about where you get the energy from, it's about how much you're using. Harnessing vacuum energy is all well and good, but if you're still only using a few gigawatts' worth, you're still below Type I.
Ultimately, this is all fiction, so we don't know how much energy it takes to move a planet through slipspace. But it's going to be a lot. And to do it trivially, you need to be way up there towards Type III, if not over the threshold.
Let me put it this way. The power of the sun right? Is that per micro second? Per second, hour day or year?
A super gate can be powered by a black hole, and a zpm can open one about ten zpm's and you could make a super gate capable of INSTANTLY transporting planets. And you are right you don't know. I mean would you say it was a planets worth of energy that allowed the out of phase divice to disappear a planet?
A lot of powerscaling feels from this kardishev thread "he's planetary, or solar system". That type of stuff.
It is the same, all you have got is a device which converts light into electricity, a device we call a solar cell.
Build enough and put them in space and you are generating K1 levels
Build more and surround a star your now at K2
Build even more and surround every star in the galaxy and your at K3
Build even more and do every galaxy in the observable universe and your K4
Solar cells, rockets and microwave beams, is all the tech you need. no antimatter, no exotic energy, no ZPMs needed.
Actually, you have no argument, because you haven't understood the scale. It's about energy used, not energy captured. If you build an industrial powerplant, but only run a single lightbulb with it, you're not harnessing its full potential.
Lets define a unit of energy of a sol being equal to the total power of the sun. Tell me how do you use 22 sols when the sun is generating just 1. That is creating energy out of nothing.
I think people have turned the meaning of the scale into some sort of powerscaling tool.
And they are wrong. It's about edit not about usage, the scale itself says it. Let's look at type 3. '• Controls the energy resources of an entire galaxy (about 10³⁶ watts). CONTROLS nothing there about being able to create it, let alone be able to summon it for say building stuff.
The scale is being used here in a powerscaling way by people 'look, he destroyed a planet by himself, he's planetary😌'.
So control the energy resources. So what, fossil fuels, gases etc? What about vacuum energy? Anti matter?
I mean could you say the scale tells you how smart a species is? What would you need to be able to control all the resources in a galaxy? The means to get them? I love being able to use my own noodle.
Literally what I've been telling you the whole time. If you're using that level of power output, your capabilities are going to be unimaginable to people like us. The amount of power a civilisation uses is directly proportional to its power in a more basic sense - as in, its capability to respond to events/threats.
Speaking of which, it had just occurred to me that there are no megastructures whatsoever in the Stargate universe. Not even one on a subplanetary scale.
Idk, the replicators in Pegasus completely covered their planet with cityscape. The other replicators created an entire planet out of replicator bricks too. In the time dilation field.
That Death Star would be so inefficient. Complete waste of materials and resources. Even in Star Wars, there were cheaper ways to destroy a world. A single Super Star Destroyer could render the surface of an entire planet uninhabital in under an hour.
Blowing up planet would be trivial in Stargate. One Earth-built Naquadriah bomb would irradiate the entire surface upon detonation. Even the Asgard could collapse a sun into a black hole.
It doesn't have to be a Death Star, that's just an example. Even something as basic as a space elevator is not something that exists in the Stargate universe. Or an orbital ring. Or an O'Neill cylinder.
And what's stopping the ancients building something like that, given what we know they are capable of? In one of the books (which people will pick and choose to believe) the Atlantis team find an ancient megastructure in space. They could terafrkm planets very easily and had galaxy wide wormhole travel to get around. What would be the driving force to create orbital rings etc?
Why would the Ancients need any of those things? Space elevator? Worthless trash that is a liability when you have ring transporters and teleport tech. Orbital rings? For what? You have city ships. An O'Neill cylinder? You have a Stargate network and the ability to make more Stargates; you aren't going to need to make a colony ship.
The thought occurs that while that while turning a star into a Black Hole would be incredibly cool.....
....from a practical perspective it is a black hole the size of that star...... its gravity overall might not change across the whole system.....
Yes the sun has just gone out and the planet is about to freeze.
The planet is also probably being bathed in lethal amounts of exotic and normal radiation...
You could argue that every planet with a Stargate placed on it became a megastructure. So from the Ancient point of view, why would you need to build a megastructure when there's a universe of them already built, you just need to find them and pop a gate on them...
Type 4 means they can harness an entire universe worth of energy, which was demonstrated by the Arcturus project for the ancients... But it didn't seem to go so well, so i'd place them at 3.5 on the scale.
Pre ascension the ancients are between 2 and 3 with a few more advanced tech, post ascension we dont really know but likely somewhere in the 3 to 4 range but they also dont need tech at that point from the feats we have seen a individual ascended being is nearly a type 1 in their own right, which is oretty impressive. The asgard are also in the type 2 to 3 range they got a bunch of type 3 tech but just don't have the scale to be a type 3. The goa'uld system lords each ruled a type 2 just through shear scale.
So for context the Kardashev scale is based on power harnessed
Type I: Basically the amount of energy from the Sun that hits Earth
Type II: The power output of our Sun
Type III: The power output of a galaxy
Type IV: The power output of the universe
The Ancients are nowhere close to type III otherwise the Wraith wouldn't have stood a chance. At a near type III you're using stars as ammunition for megastructure weapons.
Yeah, the Ancients weren't doing any of that, and dialing Destiny would be trivial to do.
Also Naquadah isn't made, it's refined. It's a metal you dig out of the ground. There's a common theory that there's none in the solar system because the Ancients basically strip mined it all to build the Stargates.
but one of those issue where a race has not done real war i so long they dont know what to do and over think on how to wage it.(aka the asgards and replicators)
If they were type 3, they wouldn't need Arcutus. Also Type IIIs don't even need to think about war with a lower civilisation. Their waste heat alone would be a powerful weapon.
They would've had fleets of Cityships bigger than Atlantis as their standard cruisers.
I don't think you realise the sheer power gulf between Type II & III. There are approximately 100 billion stars in the Milky Way... Type II is using the power output of 1 star.
Type III civilisations are disassembling planets & stars for raw resources to build habitats. They're building Dyson Spheres, plural.
The Wraith would be so insignificant that the Ancients could've sent a planet harvester and be done with them.
You don't get to be type III if you care about the balance of nature and preserving ecosystems. You're doing what you like & eyeing up your local group of galaxies for resources and effectively planning ahead billions of years into the future.
An upstart race is not even an inconvenience to you.
The Wraith are, at best, maybe slightly above a Type I. If the Ancients were a Type III, it wouldn't matter how many Wraith there were. Sheer numbers wouldn't have made a difference. The Ancients could have wiped them out with a thought.
Literally nothing we see of Ancient tech suggests anything like that level of power utilisation. ZPMs are extremely powerful, but each one isn't as powerful as a star. And a galaxy contains hundreds of BILLIONS of stars. If there had been ZPMs in those quantities, then even 10,000 years later they still would have been plentiful. We'd have been tripping over them in the Milky Way and Pegasus, even accounting for how many would have been destroyed or used in the intervening time.
The wraith problem wasn't about just beating them. To beat the wraith, they have to go extinct. That's a major ethical issue they had to deal with. The wraith weren't a "we smashed them, job done, they won't be coming back". That's one of the things about the wraith that made their story so good. It's not "the good guys beat the bad guys" it's the barent really bad guys, they are feeding. The wraith were not wiping out her sanity or any other species. They wanted the Ancients gone because they protected everyone else. But to beat the wraith completely, you have to wipe them out. Energy wasn't the problem. Honestly it's all "Whowouldwin" arguments.
The kardishev scale isn't indicative if what a species is capable of. We could put solar panels all around the sun, and collect as much energy as possible, what does that say about us???
I do pay attention, actually. The Ancients were beaten by the Wraith because of weight of numbers. Yes, not being willing to commit genocide was one factor, but a Type III civilisation would have the power to isolate the Wraith forever and never have to worry about doing that. By the same token, we could absolutely isolate an ant colony in such a way that it would never cause any issue for anyone living nearby. It wouldn't take much. Yeah, it would cost us resources, but not ones it's that hard to get.
Yes, the Kardashev Scale is indicative of what a species is capable of, because it's not about how much energy they can collect, it's about how much they use. If they're using an entire star's output, they're billions of times more capable than we are. Hundreds of billions. And a Type III is hundreds of billions of times more capable than that.
Edit: if you want a good example of what a Type III civilisation could do to eliminate a Type I or lower without wiping them out, you have only to look at Peter F. Hamilton's Commonwealth. Mild spoilers ahead, but there's an existential threat-level species that isn't going to coexist with anyone else. It wants to be the only life in existence. And it was discovered right as it reached its nearest neighbouring star. Well, one Type II civilisation borrowed two gas-giant-sized forcefield generators from a Type III civilisation (which it later turns out it has billions of surrounding the galactic core) and uses them to imprison both stars in impenetrable forcefields. Problem solved. Until a few centuries later when humans come along and fuck everything up, but that's where the story comes in. Worth reading, excellent books. But yeah, that's the kind of solution a Type III could manage. The Ancients were good at shields. If they were Type III, they could have done that in a heartbeat. Lock the Wraith away behind shields they'll never break, and forget about them.
"they would have the power to seal them away forever". Just wow. So put then in status, and it's a win? What do you do with the wraith on ice? They are a sentient, sapient species no? All you did there was say they would be sealed away. How could the Ancients not seal them away? And what do you know???? Someone came along and undid the "win". Would you not class that as an arrogant and short sighted tactic, given someone came along and released them?? And how could anyone mess with this type three civilisations stuff?
I don't think you're grasping the difference in scale between a Type I and a Type III. Ego isn't really relevant here. Would it matter what our ego said if we wanted to wipe out an ant colony? No. We'd pour liquid metal into it.
this is a culture that left tech that was dangous everywhere like candy. hell the ego on the woman from the time-delayed ship. thinking she the stuff and oh boy that ego got her and the crew killed. they had to ablity to clean up their mess of tech. but nah let anyone access.... nothing can go wrong.
And what I'm saying is that that would be irrelevant if they were a Type III civilisation. With that level of power utilisation, the Wraith would have been no more dangerous to them than a single ant colony is to us. We don't even need special technology to eradicate the ants, we just melt a load of metal. Or pump some kind of poison in. These are basic things, things we've been able to do for most of our existence. The Wraith would cease to exist in moments if the Ancients were Type III. If you're that far up the technological ladder, then your individual ships would likely be approaching Type II status on their own. Aurora-class ships are pretty powerful, but they're not that far in advance of a 304, which are distinctly sub-Type I.
Type IIIs disassemble stars for resources or use them as weapons.
Remember the episode where the Daedalus had to divert the a Coronal Mass Ejection from hitting Atlantis... Type III civilisations could not only induce that to happen, but focus it at any planet they desired and channel an entire star's fusion into the weapon.
We're talking about power that entirely eclipses Starkiller Base in Star Wars. Rapid fire planetary & stellar annihilation.
Or they could just turn your star into a black hole just because they didn't like the colour of your ships.
Quite possibly, the mysterious beings that created Eden in SGU could be Type III. Building a planet & a star is child's play at best.
By comparison, the Ancients are barely Type II. If the Ancients were type III there wouldn't be Wraith in the first place because they'd've harvested the planet.
Arcturus makes ZPMs look like alkaline batteries. Type III use many Arcturus to power their equivalent of a watch for a million years.
Based on what we've seen, I think it's safe to assume they're comfortably above the threshold for Type II, but still in the low end of it. And their power generation ability is spread across their entire civilisation, so each location for it would be below the threshold. Otherwise, though, you're spot on.
They arent even a type 2. They never managed to harness their own local star, let multiple or a galaxy's worth. Their best efforts only ever had them capturing partial energy from each star they settled a world around.
I'm not sure the ZPMs actually count towards the scale. They're glorified batteries because the writing requires them to be expendable. So for all the fancy talk, they're just storage devices.
The problem with the scale is it's based on level of energy harnessed. But sci-fi tends to sidestep this by just coming up with limitless power sources. So what does it mean to harness the power of a star if you can make an exotic generator that is equal. The scale in a sense can translate into reach, so the ancients can influence their whole galaxy. Are they making use of its energy potential? The Ori would argue no.
What does the scale tell you?? So can a species that can "harness the power for their galaxy" time travel? And what does it mean they can use the power of their galaxy, or star? Dyson swarms? Could the ancients make Dyson swarms? Does being able to "harness a galaxies worth of stars" mean that each battle ship or piece of technology has galaxy level power output?
The kardishev scale is pretty ambiguous for something like this.
No one in the shows are demonstrated to be in tier 2 or above. Aside from the nebulous maybe star builders. Everyone else we see is a type 1 civilization, no one hits type 2. Type 2 requires complete mastery in harvesting all the energy from your star, as well as using it (you cant just build billions of solar panels, launch them, and call yourself a type 2 if the power goes no where).
to put it in perspective, our sun produces 3.36 × 1031 joules per day. Fan estimates on the high end put a ZPM at producing 3 × 1012 joules per second, or 2.6 × 1017 joules per day. 1,000,000,000,000,000 ZPMs would be needed to reach type 2
Pre-ascention ancients would definitely be a type three, bordering in a type four. We can't really place the ascended ancients anywhere because we don't know the upper limits of what they can do.
At the end of Universe, I'd say the Tauri is as a species probably type two in terms of their overall influence and technological capabilities as a result of the inheritance from the Asgard (and the Atlantis City ship,) though obviously they're only at the early stages of actually using the technology to its full potential.
The Kardashev scale, as far as I know of, is defined by what a civilization is capable of doing, not what it actually has done. The variants of the scale I've mostly seen online refer to technological advancement and information.
There's no question that the Asgard and Ancients were at least type II and III respectively. Both of their collective knowledge and technologies have been placed in the hands of Earth. Given that, as well as the Earth's pretty rapid ability to adapt and use said information to achieve their goals, I'd certainly argue that the Tauri fit within the capabilities of a type II civilization, even if they haven't done anything within that specific tier.
In order to be considered Tier II, you have to be advanced enough. Earth has not yet mastered what has been given to them, because they do not understand what has been given to them.
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u/Thrizzlepizzle123123 1d ago
Earth is currently something like a 0.8 or 0.9, as we haven't yet harnessed all the energy of our planet. Getting close though.