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technological singularity 876 million years ago. Such a civilization would be capable of interstellar and possibly local intergalactic travel, as well as stellarforming projects such as Dyson spheres, Dyson swarms, and star mining.
    Type 3: The Milky Way galaxy has a total luminosity of about 4 × 10 37 watts. While capturing the totality of a galaxy’s radiation output is problematic, a civilization generating and utilizing energy on this scale would be considered to be Type 3. The ancient civilization or civilizations variously known as the Builders, the Starborn, or the Stargods, who are believed to have been capable of time travel and of large-scale stellarforming, are almost certainly at least Type 3.0. Such cultures would be capable of extragalactic travel and to perform stellar engineering on a galactic scale.
    Type 4: This is the designation for a purely speculative category of cultures able to use energies on the scale of galactic superclusters, or approximately 10 42 watts.
    Type 5: Also speculative, a K-5 civilization would utilize energy equivalent to the output of the visible universe, or very roughly 10 49 watts.
    Type 6: Even more speculative. Type 6 civilizations would span a number of parallel universes, and might engage in “ ’brane forming” activities such as creating or manipulating entire universes. Since this scale clearly surpasses concepts based on current scientific understanding, no data on energy usage or predictions as to a Type 6 culture’s technological capabilities are possible.
    When the Kardashev scale was first introduced, the underlying concept suggested that galactic civilizations might literally use all of the energy available from their local star or galaxy. The Dyson sphere, proposed by Freeman Dyson four years earlier, might represent an attempt to trap all available stellar energy, allowing Earth to detect a K-2 civilization by modifications to its light output, or by recognizing the radiated infrared emissions of that civilization’s industrial processes. The development of zero-point energy obviates the need to efficiently trap the star’s light, however, since the energy drawn from hard vacuum represents a far more abundant source of power than stellar fusion. Nevertheless, the overall amount of energy utilized by the civilization, can still be quantified as the amount available from a world, a star, or a galaxy, no matter what the actual source of that energy might be.
    Obviously, the breakdown presented here is extremely rough—a guide only—and can make no predictions of the specifics of a given advanced culture’s technologies, or of its motivations, philosophies, or attitudes toward other species.
    Where, Gray wondered as he finished the download and closed the channel, did the modern Sh’daar fall on this scale? The data specifically mentioned the ur-Sh’daar, the empire or collective of mutually alien species that had inhabited a small, irregular galaxy devoured by the Milky Way 876 million years ago. At that time, shortly before the smaller galaxy had been torn apart by intergalactic tidal forces and the empire disrupted, the ur-Sh’daar had entered its version of what was commonly called the Technological Singularity. Also known as the Vinge Singularity, after the mathematician and author Vernor Vinge, who first popularized the idea in the late twentieth century, the singularity was broadly seen as that point in a civilization’s development where organic intelligence merged with artificial intelligence in ways that utterly transformed the meanings of words like life and intelligence . For humans, the so-called GRIN technologies were seen as the drivers of this change: Genetics, Robotics, Information systems, and Nanotechnology.
    Twenty years ago, Gray and America ’s battlegroup, under the command of Admiral Alexander Koenig, had used one of the enigmatic TRGA cylinders to cross a very great deal of both space and time to reach the doomed galaxy—known to