I’d love to hear about your favorite concept or idea you’ve read about or seen in scifi media.

My personal favorite is the Conjoiner Drive out of the Revelation Space series. These ship drives are dual drives on either side of a lighthugger and have a living being inside the drives to act as a supercomputer, which holds a wormhole open inside the drives. The wormhole links far in the past to the big-bang and uses the energy from the big-bang for propulsion.

In most scifi I’ve come across wormholes are used for FTL travel, and I thought this was such a unique and creative use of a wormhole it has stuck with me for years after reading about it.

So what are your favorite devices or ideas that have come out of scifi media?

  • Monte_Crisco@thelemmy.club
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    23 hours ago

    I don’t know if this is the same or at least similar, but I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of a generation starship that is moving toward the universe either toward another planet, in search of another planet, or simply as an indefinitely mobile home. It’s wild to imagine generations being born and living on the starship without having any real understanding of the place that humans came from. Stories of Earth would start to seem like wild folklore and mythology rather than actual human history.

    Eventually, some generations may become angry that the decision to live on this starship was made by other people many generations before them, and now everyone on the starship is cursed to live under that decision. Was the starship navigation designed so that people may one day change the course? Or perhaps enormous safeguards were put into place to ensure that the ship kept going toward the initial objective because all other options were decidedly much much worse for everyone.

    • 🔍🦘🛎@lemmy.world
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      12 hours ago

      Eventually, some generations may become angry that the decision to live on this starship was made by other people many generations before them, and now everyone on the starship is cursed to live under that decision.

      In Genshin Impact, it’s not known by the vast population that the planet they’re on isn’t a normal world. But it’s expansive enough that I think most people wouldn’t have much opinion either way. It would be like telling you that you’re trapped on a chunk of rock suspended in space. Well, yeah and?

    • Hasherm0n@lemmy.world
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      19 hours ago

      If you haven’t read his books, Stephen Baxter has at least a couple of good explorations of long journey ships.