Wednesday, December 23, 2015

13 Worldbuilding Questions: Numbers 7 & 8

Culture
  7.  What's the predominant culture?
  8.  What's the current form of societal normalcy?

What is the predominant culture in the universe?  I suppose that depends on your definition of predominant.  Obviously the most dominant is the Originator Race.  On the other hand, they are so powerful and intelligent that they don't normally interact with humans, at least not in a way that is understandable to humans.


There are several other very powerful species and some are even in our galactic neighborhood.


Before I do it would be best if I introduce several methods of measuring intelligence.

The first is the Sentience Quotient (SQ).  This describes just how quickly information is gathered, interpreted and a decision can be made on.   Per Wikipedia, it is, "the relationship between the information processing rate (bit/s) of each individual processing unit (neuron), the weight/size of a single unit and the total number of processing units (expressed as mass)."  Homo sapiens SQ is +13.  All earth animals are within a few points of this while earth plants are around -2.

The next measure of the civilizations in my universe is the Cognizance Level (CL).  This is how the civilization interacts with its environment.  Each level is divided into four letter levels:
a.  Awareness of the environment at that level
b.  Being able to respond at an individual level
c.  Manipulating the environment
d.  Understanding the environment fully

The overall levels are based on the description, scope of the environment:

  1. Immediate Environment
  2. Extended Environment (outside of senses)
  3. Community
  4. Self
  5. Time
  6. Cosmos
  7. Physical Ability
  8. Meta-Cosmos
Humans are probably a 4c.

The last measure of the civilizations is the well known Kardashev scale (KS).  Simply:
0.  (Carl Sagan addition) A civilization capable of using a mega watt
I.  A civilization capable of using all the available energy of their planet
II.  Using all the energy of the home star
III.  Using all the energy of the home galaxy
IV.  (questionable addition) Using all the energy of the universe
V.  (even more questionable, but probably necessary for my universe) capable of using all the energy of several universes

Humans are at about 0.724.

I think I should break it here and talk about the individual civilizations, or races in a second post for these questions.

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