Current Events > What's the most technologically advanced fictional setting?

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My immediate thoughts go to Xenosaga, which is so advanced that it has the technology to recreate sensory experiences (like going to a concert) 1:1 and the user is literally unable to tell the difference, on top of spaceships the size of planets being regular fare and entire cities and even countries existing entirely on spaceships.

Probably something where an advanced species has created and manipulated universes, including the one where the story takes place.

Sounds like the same level of advancement as Star Trek

IfGodCouldDie posted...

Sounds like the same level of advancement as Star Trek

It's a notch or two above Star Trek.

Xeelee in the Xeelee Sequence series -- They have demonstrated the ability to routinely construct Closed Timelike Curves and have engineered their own evolution and history as far back as 13 billion years ago (within two hundred million years of the Big Bang). Their abilities in the series far exceed that of a Type III Civilization on the Kardashev scale.
The Xeelee used primordial black holes as a habitat, construction tool, and computing devices because, at the time they emerged there wasn't nuclear fusion happening in the universe. However, as the primordial black holes evaporated over time the Xeelee eventually migrated to using the supermassive black holes around which Galaxies were forming. Although the galactic black holes were trillions of times more massive than their ancestral homes, the Xeelee proved to be quite adept at using the complex physics around the event horizon for their own purposes.

But as I typed this out, I realize we don't really "follow" the Xeelee in the Xeelee Sequence series by Stephen Baxter, they're more in the background having an effect -- compare that to The Culture in Iain M Bank's Culture series novels, where we're intimately introduced to The Culture, and how they work -- They are an advanced society and while a different vision of the future compared to Star Trek but still depicted as a more utopian than today's world -- it's all heavily backed by advanced technology and the changes this would bring, and especially through Minds.
The humans in the Xeelee sequence are very technologically advanced, but are not the utopian humans we know of from a lot of fiction, but are rather on a galaxy-wide extermination campaign against all alien races, with child soldiers and trench warfare in space despite having fully weaponized time travel, but are advanced enough to attempt to sieging the Xeelee in the Milky Ways central black hole for 15 thousand years at the cost of using child soldiers, and forcing the entire human race to live short, bad, lives.

Garioshi posted...

It's a notch or two above Star Trek.

How, Holodeck sounds more advanced than that and I'm not sure how the size of the ship means it would have to be more advanced.

IfGodCouldDie posted...

How, Holodeck sounds more advanced than that and I'm not sure how the size of the ship means it would have to be more advanced.

Larger absolutely means more advanced when building Upwards or in space.

When you get to the point of building into space or on planetary scale objects...the sheer resource demand for one would demand the ability to mine other planets or asteroids for one.

In addition we would need far better launch/transport/life support systems for the workers(or vastly better robotics then we have) and develop stronger and mass produceable alloys/materials

Even making buildings say...2-3 times higher then our current largest would likely require non trivial breakthrough.

coolguyjimmy posted...

Xeelee in the Xeelee Sequence series -- They have demonstrated the ability to routinely construct Closed Timelike Curves and have engineered their own evolution and history as far back as 13 billion years ago (within two hundred million years of the Big Bang). Their abilities in the series far exceed that of a Type III Civilization on the Kardashev scale.
The Xeelee used primordial black holes as a habitat, construction tool, and computing devices because, at the time they emerged, as the primordial black holes evaporated over time the Xeelee eventually migrated to using the supermassive black holes around which Galaxies were forming. Although the galactic black holes were trillions of times more massive than their ancestral homes, the Xeelee proved to be quite adept at using the complex physics around the event horizon for their own purposes.

okay yeah it's this one topic over

Unsuprised_Pika posted...

When you get to the point of building into space or on planetary scale objects...the sheer resource demand for one would demand the ability to mine other planets or asteroids for one.

I'm not convinced that humanity doesn't have that ability in Star Trek.

IfGodCouldDie posted...

I'm not convinced that humanity doesn't have that ability in Star Trek.

The Federation probably could do it, but they have matter/energy conversion so they probably don't need to. The only thing they'd really have to mine are things that can't be replicated like latinum and dilithium.

On the other hand, we do see in Voyager that they apparently mine dilithium by hand instead of using advanced machinery so.

Maybe Interstellar. They built a friggin tesseract.

The Culture from the Culture Series.

Or humanity in Isaac Asimov's short story The Final Question.

What kind of upper limits are we talking about?

Do things like Q and the ascended Ancients from SG count?

What about Time Lords which have manipulated time for their own?

Celestials?

HornyLevel posted...

Do things like Q and the ascended Ancients from SG count?

I don't think it's ever confirmed if the Q acquired their omnipotence through technology, so I don't know if they count.

HornyLevel posted...

What about Time Lords which have manipulated time for their own?

This is a pretty good shout though.

It was a while ago, but I remember reading through some post-singularity, post-scarcity setting, where currency is essentially reddit upvotes.

The Time Lords can do some neat stuff...

-They rewrote the laws of physics in the universe to eliminate magic.

-During the War in Heaven, the precursor to the Time War, they had weapons called N-Forms that infected living beings throughout the entire history of a planet from beginning to end. The infection turned a number of people each generation into planet busting bombs. When fully activated the N-Form would detonate every infected person at once blowing the planet up billions of times in history causing both it's physical destruction and an infinite paradox that would rip apart the space-time that the planet occupied. The victims were both killed multiple times at once and also thrown into chaotic time ("The Book Of The War")

-They recruited from the lesser races sharing the gift of bodily regeneration with their soldiers. When a soldier died in battle, he would immediately regenerate into a form immune to such a method of death. Repeated killings would result in hardened monstrous murderous creatures unstoppable to everyone other than the higher races. ("The Book of the War")

-During the War in Heaven, the time lords created at least nine duplicates of Gallifrey (their home planet) so that if one fell, more would be left to carry on the fight. Each duplicate thought it was the original. (The Book Of The War)

-When the Daleks blew up the Sephira galaxy (four times bigger than the Milky Way), the time lords were able to remotely project a force field around the entire galaxy to contain the
explosion. (The Apocalypse Element)

-through remote telepathic control, the Time Lords were able to quickly and easily erase a planet from history, causing all of it's inhabitants to be deleted (The War Games)

-Have ships that cam be outwardly and inwardly configured to any design, and travel instantly to any point in space and time. The very obsolete Type 40 trades as seen in Doctor Who can tractor whole planets across the universe with ease. During the War in Heaven the Time Lords wielded Type 102 War Tardises armed with a cavalcade of universe-scale weaponry.

-invented black holes (The Impossible Planet)

-handheld weapons that can erase victims from history (the invasion of time)

-were able to open and manage gateways to parallel universes (Rise of the Cybermen) and create/fix temporal paradoxes (Fathers Day)

-were able of destroying the entire universe and being the only surviving creatures (The End of Time)

-had weapons that killed civilisations , them resurrected then remurdered them in a more painful way in a process that repeated itself infinitely (The End Of Time)

-could transform traitors into living statues leaving them in a paralyser purgatory for ever (The Five Doctor)

-had tools that could travel to any star at any point in it's history and detonate it ( Rememberancr of the Daleks)

-had hand-held gauntlet weapons that could manipulate the biology of billions of people on any given planet (The End of Time)

-can build paradox machines allowing a nonsense scenario to happen. One such machine allowed the future human remnant at the end of the universe to travel back in time to murder their ancestors, with the paradox machine holding the contradiction together (Last of the Tine Lords)

-had crowns that allowed them to dominate the will of any bring in range (The Five Doctors)

-can move solar systems and planets across the universe with ease (Trial of a Time Lord)

There's loads more.

The Beyonders?

Major spoilers

Weren't they able to wipe out every cosmic being including all the Living Tribunals in every fucking universe in the multiverse with their technology? They also existed outside the multiverse. It's been a while since I read up on all that though.

pegusus123456 posted...

On the other hand, we do see in Voyager that they apparently mine dilithium by hand instead of using advanced machinery so.

One thing that always bothered me in DS9 is, why would anyone refine ore on an orbital station? Seems extremely inefficient, as well as expensive.

mustachedmystic posted...

One thing that always bothered me in DS9 is, why would anyone refine ore on an orbital station? Seems extremely inefficient, as well as expensive.

Raw Dilithium is not the most stable and can cause huge explosions. I would suspect they refine it in space to take advantage of zero gravity. Similar to how Gundarium/Gundanium can only be made in space as well.

pegusus123456 posted...

I don't think it's ever confirmed if the Q acquired their omnipotence through technology, so I don't know if they count.

I'm not sure if Q's got their powers through technology or not but they do have technology that is dramatically more advanced than anything else in the universe.

Regardless they're hoarding it to themselves so that's not really a fair pick..

The most technologically advanced civilization is probably Isaac Asimov's. In The Last Question the people build a computer that is literally God.