The Best Fictional Doomsday Devices 340
Ostracus writes to tell us that Wired has an interesting summary of some of the best fictional doomsday devices. These devices have featured heavily in movies, television, and fiction; their list includes favorites from Dr. Strangelove to Futurama. What devices have they missed? "By the time Futurama's sci-fi satire hit the scene, creator Matt Groening had the doomsday-device shtick down. Case in point: the Spheroboom. This highly explosive space/time-bending device isn't just the prized jewel of the show's mad scientist, Professor Farnsworth. It also destroys anyone/anything not wearing a 'Doom-proof Platinum Vest.'"
Lexx (Score:1, Interesting)
Lexx, The most powerful spaceship in the two universes.
Simply known as 'Lexx's weapon' that is powerful enough to be a planet killer.
The Lexx is a bio-engineered, Manhattan-sized, planet-destroying, bioship in the shape of a giant wingless dragonfly, or to the remotely Freudian eye, a phallus. It was grown by ingesting organ collections from the protein bank on the Cluster, the seat of the Divine Order, for use by His Divine Shadow. The Lexx was originally intended as the ultimate deterrent: the threat of a weapon that could instantly obliterate any planet would keep the remaining "Heretic" worlds of the Light Universe in line, and those that refused to capitulate would be summarily destroyed to reinforce the point. This plan was foiled when the crew commandeered it to escape from the Cluster.
The most important function of the Lexx is its ability to destroy entire planets with a single, high-powered blast. Its primary â" and only â" weapon is initiated by command from the captain only, followed by a highly dramatic sequence when the Ocular Parabola found on the surface of its eye tissue flips from a smooth surfaced dome into a complex array of satellite dish-like structures. Huge amounts of yellowish-orange particles are released en masse from the array and focused by Lexx's nervous system to a point just above its mouth. Once focused, the particles burst into a massive, forward-moving, planar wave which expands ahead of the Lexx exponentially until colliding with an object of sufficient mass to disperse it, usually a planet. The wave instantly vaporizes smaller ships without losing momentum. Though the Lexx is designed to destroy entire planets, it can fire less intense blasts to hit smaller targets; however, the smallest area it seems capable of destroying is roughly the size of an entire city.
A special living energy being known as the "key" is required to control the Lexx, and it will usually only respond to the one who has it. A special holographic hand-scanner on the bridge confirms that the captain of the ship possesses the key, but after this point the captain can control the Lexx through voice commands.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexx [wikipedia.org]
Mass Driver (Score:4, Interesting)
In Babylon-5 Harlan Ellison came up with mass drivers [wikia.com] as an immoral weapon of mass-destruction on a planet-wide scale. The idea is that you grab nearby asteroids and bombard a habitated planet with them at very high speed. Not only does it indiscriminately kill the population, but the dust kicked up prevents proper plant growth over the entire planet for years, perhaps decades.
Shadow planet killer... (Score:2, Interesting)
The best doomsday device has to be the Shadow planet killer. Why? Because jms forecast cloud computing could destroy the world *years* before RMS came out with the idea. ;)
Tom Clancy: "Shiva" virus (Score:4, Interesting)
In his novel, Rainbow Six, eco-terrorists design a virus which will wipe out all of humanity and plan to release it by spreading it at the Olympics. The athletes will take it back home to the host country, where it will multiply and kill everyone (except for the ecoterrorists, of course, who will live in a biosphere).
It's a nasty concept, made all the worse because it's not unachievable.
Exterminate! (Score:4, Interesting)
Has everyone forgottten the Dalek Reality Bomb [wikia.com] which was designed to destroy the entire Universe?
Osterhagen Key (Score:3, Interesting)
From the end of the fourth season of the revived Doctor Who . . . The Osterhagen keys, when enough are presented at disparate sites, unlock the detonator to a set of nuclear devices implanted in the Earth's crust. Its purpose is to terminate the entire planet if the suffering of humankind is a fate worse than death.
Mile-High global Tidal Waves from "The Abyss"? (Score:4, Interesting)
(Mental Note: Do not piss off the deep sea dwelling aliens... Check!)
Lincoln Child (Score:2, Interesting)
Unicron? (Score:3, Interesting)
I like planet eaters!
Galactus (Score:2, Interesting)
no enders saga? (Score:3, Interesting)
Not only that but... (Score:5, Interesting)
It is a thinly veiled Quantum of Solace promo. Because, there are not enough of those already.
From TFA:
Love affair-turbulent-popular-James Bond-love-feel safe-exhilarating.
PAUSE
The opening of Quantum of Solace on Friday-nostalgic-fun.
Subliminal much?
Re:Tom Clancy: "Shiva" virus (Score:3, Interesting)
If you'll remember from "Rainbow Six", the bad guys solution to that was to drop their little "improved Ebola" off at the Olympics, then when people started dying from it all over the world, to announce that they'd been working on a vaccine for Ebola, and offer said vaccine to the world.
Alas, the "vaccine" was really just an Ebola virus culture intended to ensure that everyone got the disease....
Re:Doc Smith Lensman Weapons (Score:3, Interesting)
The ever more potent weapons of Doc Smith's Lensmen. First the Sunbeam, where the entire solar system is turned into a vacuum tube and the suns output is focused into a single beam. Then we have the Negasphere, a planetary sized chunk of anti-matter you toss at an enemy planet (with a tractor beam, because it's antimatter, see). The Nutcracker, two planets from another dimension, travelling in opposite directions, both exceeding the speed of light and then collided with the enemy planet in between. His ultimate weapon is so cool, I won't give it away, just in case you haven't read the books. You should read the books, if only to see who was playing with these ideas about 50 years before Lucas did Star Wars.
Look, if you're going to do a post about Lensman, you gotta do it right. You need more exclamation marks, you've got to gush constantly about how amazing it all is - and if you can work in a few words in all caps, all the better. Be sure to reiterate at every opportunity:
Re:ICE-9 (Score:1, Interesting)
Note that Against a Dark Background isn't part of the Culture series. Well, it might be set in the same universe, and there are fictional-technological similarities (but that could just be Banks positing convergent technical evolution.), there's no way to know (due to the dark background in question - it's set in a solar system that's been ejected from a galaxy (as does happen) and its inhabitants are therefore even more totally alone than us earth humans used to the pretty stars of an apparently relatively friendly galaxy can imagine. They're all quietly or loudly batshit insane. AIs somewhat similar to ones that stabilised the Culture were developed but suicided* 10000 years before the events of the book.
It is NOT a cheerful book. It is best read if you have read his culture novels I guess owing to the contrasts and technological background.
(* or maybe hyperspace jumped out of the system, the lazy guns, effective and sarcastic killing machines, are actually, sadly, a thin ray of hope as they suggest hyperspatial transfer/teleportation exists in their outlandish workings)
The Little Doctor (Score:2, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:knew it had to happen (Score:3, Interesting)
You make it sound like reddit is way worse than here. I don't really see it. Anything that makes it on slashdot, I usually saw on reddit two days before. Of the other stuff on reddit that doesn't make it on slashdot, sure, some of it is drivel, but some of it is interesting and frankly should make it on slashdot. And you should be able to skim over the drivel easily enough, no? I like the idea of editors for quality control in theory, but let's face it: the editors here don't do even the most rudimentary quality control anyway. Glaring typos in headlines, same-day dupes, factually incorrect/flamebaity headlines/summaries, etc.
Which leaves only the old stalwart, "ah, but the magic of slashdot is in the comments". Yeah. Used to be true. Not so sure any more. I remember when I first started reading slashdot, there'd be a story about space exploration, and up would pop a bona fide rocket scientist. Story about maths - here's a comment from a mathematician working in that field. Now, it's just an endless cycle of the same old topics and the same old groupthinky comments. Oh look, yet another story about the RIAA, yet another +5 insightful for someone calling them the MAFIAA, hilarious. Frankly I think the mod system has bred a certain kind of pomposity here, many of the insightful/informative comments reek of holier than thou / comic book guy, so most of the comments I really enjoy here these days are the funnies. And reddit has equally funny, if not funnier, funnies.
Frankly since I discovered reddit it's become my first choice, and I no longer check slashdot every day, as I have done for the last 7 or 8 years...