There are several quantitative ways to measure a civilization, how much energy it can produce, how much unique data has it recorded and can manipulate, all well and good, but how does one indicate how hard a civilization, or species for that matter is too exterminate? What I would like to suggest is a new qualitative scale indicating how hard it is to cause a complex system to shut down. One means of describing this scale could be what major group didn't survive an extinction level event. Species that are in a rather precarious position could be compared to the dinosaurs, civilizations that have spread out to multiple planets in their solar system would be cockroaches, and those groups that have colonized a large swath of the galaxy would be the microbes. This scale is currently just an outline and more useful for sci-fi authors putting things into a scale, but who knows maybe we will start designating the aliens we meet throughout the galaxy by an index similar to this.
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