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?
Warhammer 40k, more or less with cogitators and servitors - no automation is allowed after an AI uprising tens of thousands of years ago. All processing is done by lobotomized and heavily modified humans. Many of these cybernetics are built into ships.
Ork FTL ships are built around the brain of an ork ‘weirdboy’ or psyker (sometimes).
That’s RIGHT! I knew there would be something 40k related but I completely mind blanked the cogitators. Did the Mechanicus ever put one of those in charge of driving an entire ship?
I’m not too knowledgeable, but there are lots of edge cases. The machine spirits of the largest mechas (Titans) are known to have some autonomy and individual personalities, which is to say, they probably have some illicit AI or a less disabled human consciousness (-es) at their core.
https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Titan