Science Fiction

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Favorite scifi concept? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 week ago by ashenone@lemmy.ml 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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[–] Couldbealeotard@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

In Michael Crichton's Timeline, they send people back in time hundreds of years until they push a button to return, except they don't. The time travel has something to do with alternate timelines, so in theory there could be countless versions of them travelling back and forth in alternate universes or alternate realities or however you want to think of it.

The invention of time travel in our universe only got as far as figuring out how to send people back, but they never figured out how to return them to the present. Coincidentally a virtually identical alternate universe figured it out but they get sent to our universe on the way back to the present.

So every time we send someone back, we essentially kill them and in return we receive an alternate version of them that's so close to identical it's virtually the same as the original person. And for every person we get back, another universe loses that person forever. The organisation doing the time travel secretly know this is happening, but it works and it's cheaper then finishing the invention of time travel.