Most Advanced Human Civilization

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User1657
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Most Advanced Human Civilization

Post by User1657 » Mon Dec 19, 2011 3:08 am

An idea that came to my mind recently. In discussing Sci-Fi, we usually end up discussing completely alien races and whatnot, but I was wondering: what is the most technologically advanced human civilization in Sci-Fi? It can be from any form of sci-fi; books, television, films etc.

Anyway, to start off I put forward the humanity from the Xeeleeverse (novels by Stephen Baxter).

To give a general overview of their capabilities:
-They make very casual use of time travel, and their FTL drive and time travel are linked. This is used most often in warfare, generally called FTL foreknowledge, where in a battle the humans observe enemy tactics and technology and travel back in time to inform their past selves of this, basically allowing them to foresee events before they happen perfectly.

-They built CTC (closed timelike curve) computers. Essentially a time traveling computer, which presents the data or result of a calculation before it even begins (basically meaning it was infinite processing power).

-They have absolutely massive industry, having fought a war across the entire galaxy for twenty-thousand years dedicating tens or hundreds of thousands of ships to each battle. Here are some quotes:
Exultant, Chapter 1 wrote:Far ahead, bathed in the light of the Galaxy’s center, the nightfighters were rising.

From his station, Pirius could see their black forms peeling off the walls of their Sugar Lump carriers. They spread graceful wings, so black they looked as if they had been cut out of the glowing background of the Core. Some of them were kilometers across. They were Xeelee nightfighters, but nobody in Strike Arm called them anything but flies.

They converged on the lead human ships, and Pirius saw cherry-red light flaring.

His fragile greenship hovered over the textured ground of a Rock. The Rock was an asteroid, a dozen kilometers across, charcoal gray. Trenches had been dug all over its surface, interconnecting and intersecting, so that the Rock looked like an exposed brain. Sparks of light crawled through those complex lines: soldiers, infantry, endlessly digging, digging, digging, preparing for their own collisions with destiny. It was a good hour yet before this Rock and Pirius’s own greenship would reach the battlefield, but already men and women were fighting and dying.
Exultant, Chapter 1 wrote:Everywhere Pirius looked, across this astrophysical diorama, he saw signs of war.

Pirius’s ship was one of a hundred green sparks, ten whole squadrons, assigned to escort this single Rock alone. When Pirius looked up he could see more Rocks, a whole stream of them hurled in from the giant human bases that had been established around the Mass. Each of them was accompanied by its own swarm of greenships. Upstream and down, the chain of Rocks receded until kilometers-wide worldlets were reduced to pebbles lost in the glare. Hundreds of Rocks, thousands perhaps, had been committed to this one assault. It was a titanic sight, a mighty projection of human power.
Resplendent wrote:Kard’s metallic Eyes gleamed in the complex starlight. ‘Lethe, I love it all. Is there any sight more beautiful than starbreaker light shining through the rubble of a planet?’

This was a globular cluster, orbiting far out of the Galaxy’s main disc. The sky was packed with stars, orange and yellow, layer upon layer of ancient lanterns that receded to infinity. But before those stars, paler lights moved purposefully. They were human-controlled ships. And Xera saw scattered pink sparks, silent detonations. Each of those remote explosions was the dismantling of a world.

The flitter’s hull was transparent because Rear Admiral Kard liked it that way. Even the controls were no more than ghostly rectangles written on the air. It was as if Xera, with Kard and Stub, their young pilot, was falling defenceless through this crowded sky, and she tried to ignore the churning of her stomach.

Xera said carefully, ‘I compliment you on the efficiency of your process.’

He waved that aside. ‘Forget efficiency. Forget process. Commissary, this cluster contains a million stars, crowded into a ball a hundred light years across. It’s only four decades since we first arrived here. And we will have processed them all, all those pretty lights in the sky, within another fifty to sixty years. What do you think of that?’

‘Admiral—’

‘This is the reality of Assimilation,’ he snapped. ‘Ten thousand ships, ten million human beings, in this fleet alone. And it’s the same all over the Expansion, across a great spherical front forty thousand light years across. I doubt you even dream of sights like this, back in the centre. Commissary, watch and learn ...’

Without warning, planets cannonballed out of the sky. She cowered.
-Standard ship-to-ship (and handheld) weaponry is the starbreaker beam; basically a beam of coherent gravity waves, it can cut through almost anything (in one of the novels, Flux I believe, it was used to cut through the crust of a Neutron star), and can also cause stars to go nova with single hits (though it takes shorter time with multiple shots)

-They also use monopole cannons, which basically fire spacetime defects. Not much else is known about them.

-Finally, by the end of the novel Exultant, Xeeleeverse Humanity ships were creating mini bubble universes around their ships for concealment alone.

That's all I have for now, and there are probably more feats. But anyone else?

User1657
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Re: Most Advanced Human Civilization

Post by User1657 » Tue Dec 27, 2011 8:28 pm

Nobody?

Mike DiCenso
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Re: Most Advanced Human Civilization

Post by Mike DiCenso » Thu Dec 29, 2011 1:22 am

Depending on how you define such things, the Downstreamers certainly would make either the Xelee or Exaulted Humans in that universe look downright primiitive by comparison. Furthermore, they don't simply travel back and forth through time at will, but have the ability as I recall of moving between timelines and could literally remake entire universes at a whim, and can survive Big Bang/Big Crunch events thousands of times over.

The next closest thing I can think of off handedly would be the 29th and 31st century Federation humanity from Star Trek, who possessed ships capable of traveling through time at will, had TARDIS-like abilities to have more room on the inside than the outside, had personel time-suits that could shield the wearer from time alteration incursions and much, much more. Furthermore the 29th century Federation had the ability to transport anyone, anywhere in the Milky Way galaxy in any time with just a transporter. They had temporal weapons that could be planted to destroy something without anyone being the wiser, unless they had assistance in looking for the weapon in the first place. On top of that, they also had a fighter-sized ship that was capable of "accidently" destroying the entire Solar System.

That's a short list right there.
-Mike

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Re: Most Advanced Human Civilization

Post by General Donner » Thu Dec 29, 2011 4:14 pm

If you just want really large numbers, you can look at a lot of old sci-fi. The early space operas were full of galactic empires with more or less "realistically" scaled populations and militaries that make ICS Star Wars look weaker than SDN thinks Trek should be. If you take something as obscure as A. E. van Vogt's "The Mixed Men" you get:
"Be careful!" the chairman urged anxiously. "This ship could destroy us, our planet, our sun in a single minute. We never dreamed that Earth could have gotten so far ahead of us and produced such a devastatingly powerful machine. [...]"
And:
"This whole matter," he said, "was threshed out three weeks ago, shortly after the Mixed Men seized power. In estimating the total number of warcraft available to Imperial Earth, we arrived at a figure that was almost meaningless, it was so large.

"It wouldn't be surprising," the officer continued earnestly, "if Earth could detach a warship for every man, woman and child in the Fifty Suns, and not perceptibly weaken the defenses of the main galaxy. [...]"
Fifty Suns (IIRC) had a population in the dozens of billions total.

This isn't nearly the most ridiculous stuff either. I'd say it's actually fairly mid-tier for that era. Somewhere around the most powerful would probably be the Skylark of Space series by E. E. Smith, which was quite bizarre by the end. The tech of that series is described somewhat accurately by an SDN poster in a really old thread here. Its raw power is surpassed only by its technobabblish superweapons.

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Re: Most Advanced Human Civilization

Post by User2005 » Tue Jan 10, 2012 4:50 pm

maybe they are not the most advanced human civilization yet but they seem to be using the most advanced technology is stargate. they travel between galaxies which i believe beats any single galaxy civilization plus they are a little bit harder sci-fi and modern physics places greater limits on time travel. i think it has something to do with quantum tunneling.

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