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Favorite scifi concept? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/sciencefiction@lemmy.world
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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?

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[–] 4 points 3 months ago (1 child)

This is indeed Hyperion by Dan Simmons. Hamilton had really cool use of portals in the Salvation series, though. Among other things, they could:

  • Make people travel (and indeed have distributed houses as well),
  • Source of free energy by placing one end of the portal close to the sun,
  • Solution for garbage by placing one end of the portal into outer space,
  • Geoengineering, for example, by placing one end of the portal above the Australian desert, and feeding it icebergs from the other end.

My favourite use was a protagonist placing one end of a portal on Earth, and smuggling the other onto a penal colony to rescue a prisoner.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago

    For me the wildest aspect of the Hyperion portals was that there was essentially only one portal. Hyperdimensional godlike artificial super-intelligences swept the portal across each doorway like some sort of cosmic lighthouse, mimicking the theory that there only exists a single electron in the universe that travels backwards and forwards in time to be every electron for everything everywhere all and once. Also, those articlfical intelligences shared their environs with other older beings referred to as "Lions and tigers and bears."

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