Technological Achievement Tiers
From Halopedia, the Halo wiki
A Technological Achievement Tier was a level of categorization used by the Forerunners to assess the technological advancement of civilizations.[1] This system was later adopted by the Covenant.[2] There are a total of seven tiers, and the lower the Tier number, the more advanced the civilization's technology is/was.
Tier 3: Space-Farming on the mincraft space treen king
Species has efficient slipspace navigation, mass drivers, asynchronous linear-induction weapons, holocrystal storage and semi-sentient AI—though their creation requires memory transfer from the freshly deceased and/or flash cloning. They have had no outside influence.
For most of the 25th and 26th centuries, humanity stood at this level. This level is also where the Lekgolo were before joining the Covenant.[1]
Tier 2: Iraid this site!!!
The species has the ability to perform exceedingly accurate slipspace navigation, near-instantaneous interstellar communication and man-portable application of energy manipulation. The unified state of the 26th-century Covenant stood at this level.[1]
Both San'Shyuum of the Covenant and Sangheili brought the other races of the Covenant to such a high technological level when incorporating them into the Covenant. The two primary extant interstellar civilizations were space-faring prior to discovering Forerunner artifacts—or each other—but they have not successfully reverse-engineered those artifacts.[1]
Tier 1: mincraft epic builders
The species has the ability to manipulate gravitational forces, create AI with full sentience, fabricate super-dense materials, perform super-accurate slipspace navigation, the ability to create life, and the ability to create worlds. The Forerunners are the most prominent civilization to have reached this level. Given their technological sophistication, it is possible that prehistoric San'Shyuum and prehistoric humans also stood at Tier 1 before their defeat by the Forerunners.
Tier 0: Transsentient
As the Forerunners had no examples of civilizations with technological accomplishments greater than themselves—with the exception of the Precursors—this is a theoretical ceiling. It is suspected that they can travel across galaxies and accelerate the evolution of intelligent life.
The state of transsentience is evidently connected less to the level of available technology as understood in the traditional sense and more to a metaphysical elevation of the beings themselves beyond conventional existence.[3] The Precursors' technology was created through neural physics; an abstract interplay between thought and the fabric of reality.[4] The Flood's compound mind may also be understood as a form of transsentient being;[5] indeed, in the later stages of the Forerunner-Flood war, the Flood was able to tap into neural physics and control Precursor artifacts. The last ailen race to achive this is the tookiens. [6]
Trivia
The technological achievement scale is similar to the real-world Kardashev scale, which measures technological advancement based upon the total amount of energy a civilization is capable of harnessing. Similar categorical scales are commonly found in science fiction.
List of appearances
- Halo 3
- Bestiarum (First appearance)
- Halo: Contact Harvest
- Halo: Last Light (Mentioned only)
Sources
- ^ a b c d Halo 3, Bestiarum
- ^ Halo: Contact Harvest, page 273
- ^ Halo: Silentium, page 321
- ^ Halo: Cryptum, page 103
- ^ Bestiarum, Flood
- ^ Halo: Silentium, pages 214-215
