Wouldn't this bias development towards humanlike civilizations?
For example, if you measure income inequality, that presupposes a currency-driven labor market (as opposed to societies organized like ants and bees, or clonal organisms like some plants or siphonophores).
If you measure energy consumption or net primary productivity, it presupposes earth-like metabolism and industrial processes that derive useful work from stellar output. It's possible to imagine fusion-based civilizations, or highly efficient ones that have learned to manipulate gnomes and geological processes to suit their needs, but those wouldn't really be fairly captured by a crude measure of watts or calories.
Same with FLOPs, which is already a vague enough number even for human computing usages (with different outcomes / use cases requiring many different types and numbers of calculations), and makes things like analog or quantum computing harder to measure.
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I wonder if there's something more basic, like the ratio of information output (some unit of abstraction over various kinds of outputs, not only bytes but things like genomes and writing and music and art and other useful arrangements of energy and matter) divided by the energy available in a certain radius (a solar system? galaxy?) over time.
That lets you measure both ecological and technological outputs, allowing comparisons between humanlike societies, robot ones, fungal ones, maybe even geological ones (sentient volcanoes?), etc.
For example, if you measure income inequality, that presupposes a currency-driven labor market (as opposed to societies organized like ants and bees, or clonal organisms like some plants or siphonophores).
If you measure energy consumption or net primary productivity, it presupposes earth-like metabolism and industrial processes that derive useful work from stellar output. It's possible to imagine fusion-based civilizations, or highly efficient ones that have learned to manipulate gnomes and geological processes to suit their needs, but those wouldn't really be fairly captured by a crude measure of watts or calories.
Same with FLOPs, which is already a vague enough number even for human computing usages (with different outcomes / use cases requiring many different types and numbers of calculations), and makes things like analog or quantum computing harder to measure.
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I wonder if there's something more basic, like the ratio of information output (some unit of abstraction over various kinds of outputs, not only bytes but things like genomes and writing and music and art and other useful arrangements of energy and matter) divided by the energy available in a certain radius (a solar system? galaxy?) over time.
That lets you measure both ecological and technological outputs, allowing comparisons between humanlike societies, robot ones, fungal ones, maybe even geological ones (sentient volcanoes?), etc.