🎉 Celebrating 25 Years of GameDev.net! 🎉
Not many can claim 25 years on the Internet! Join us in celebrating this milestone. Learn more about our history, and thank you for being a part of our community!
Fleshing out an alien entity
Author
10 thousand years in the future mankind encounters an alien race, its world however is about to be consummed by another much larger enitity. this enitity goes from planet to planet absorbing organic life leaving the rest of the planet and its satilites to function as a form of neuron for the enitity.
Near the end of this ordeal, slightly before the destruction of this alien race's homeworld, one Dr. Yoshi Ishide creates some kind of biological agent that is for some reason safe guarded from this enitity's consumption.
i need a good semi realistic scientific explaination for what the alien does to consume organic matter and how this biochemical agent could counter act it. this agent also needs to be conductive enough to containing an AI program. this agent will be used to grow a fruit from a seed. Once eaten this fruit will guard against the enitity's consumption.
i am at a loss of knowledge to factualize this science fiction, any scifi compitent writers want to help?
There are possibly many solutions to this puzzle. I guess the first step is deciding upon the type of entity you would want this thing to be. I'm not really sure of any organism in actual existance that consumes other organisms in large mass and turns them into neurons. This infact would be impossible unless the the entity, as you put it, was infact just an ever expanding being that didn't leave planets and satelites behind to be neurons, but rather incorporated them somehow into it's brain activity. This of course would almost leave one to reason that it may need to be some kind of Big Giant Head, maybe like the one from 3rd Rock from the Sun?
The closes thing that comes to mind in nature would be an ameba, but a large cosmic ameba couldn't really exist as the laws of physics would prohibit this( no water in space, except for ice). It also doesn't have neurons.
Not sure if this helps you out at all, but comming from a scientific standpoint, as it seems your looking for, the idea is rather flawed. You'd have to go with fantasy on this one. But then again depending on your world, it could be a scifi/fantasy hybrid.
You may look into having the entity absorb the planets entirely, and instead of leaving the planets and satelites, instead incorporate them into the entity leaving nothing behind. The entity could then distribute the planets resources accordingly, like any consumer. Just a thought on it, hope it helps.
The closes thing that comes to mind in nature would be an ameba, but a large cosmic ameba couldn't really exist as the laws of physics would prohibit this( no water in space, except for ice). It also doesn't have neurons.
Not sure if this helps you out at all, but comming from a scientific standpoint, as it seems your looking for, the idea is rather flawed. You'd have to go with fantasy on this one. But then again depending on your world, it could be a scifi/fantasy hybrid.
You may look into having the entity absorb the planets entirely, and instead of leaving the planets and satelites, instead incorporate them into the entity leaving nothing behind. The entity could then distribute the planets resources accordingly, like any consumer. Just a thought on it, hope it helps.
The first thing that comes to mind is as follows:
The entity itself could be a nanotech construct utilizing wet-process carbon chemistry to meet all its interstellar needs. It has a means of FTL transmission which it uses to communicate with its neurons, which are formed by nanginereeing a planet into a sufficiently computational state (ie making the whole planet a big integrated circuit).
The biological agent on the other hand might, for example, be use a novel kind of nucleic structure, such as the old silicon-not-carbon standby, or simply use an exotic base-pairs arrangement. It might also have some form of energetic "booby trap" chemistry at work, which would enact nanoscale destruction on any molecular assembler foolish enough to probe it. Perhaps it has quantum dot lasers tied along its length, which short-focus high-intensity delivery patterns, sort of the immune system from hell if you will.
Of course, this would be an extremely high-energy configuration, so the organism would be have to be an extremophile and hence relatively simple in its composition. It will have to be resilient to damage from its own defences, so it will either have redundant parts, self-repair mechanisms, or both. It must be able to radiate a lot of energy, which means it must have a large surface area for its volume, maybe a fractal arrangement, which would probably further confuse the poor assemblers trying to take it apart, and if the active immunoresponse were arranged well, they'd be sitting ducks against them.
Given your idea to use the agent as an AI seed as well, I'd say go whole hog and simply make it a nanotechnological device, perhaps an assembler with nasty bits and a spore at the heart of it which contains the core computational functions. It would be a Swiss defense, not so much wanting to be able to counterattack as simply to make it impossible for attackers to gain any meaningful ground. So every angle, nook and cranny of the device would hold some nasty surprise, and when the invader finally overwhelmed the poor thing it would simply over heat and cascade into a fusion reaction. Not much ground to be gained there.
The entity itself could be a nanotech construct utilizing wet-process carbon chemistry to meet all its interstellar needs. It has a means of FTL transmission which it uses to communicate with its neurons, which are formed by nanginereeing a planet into a sufficiently computational state (ie making the whole planet a big integrated circuit).
The biological agent on the other hand might, for example, be use a novel kind of nucleic structure, such as the old silicon-not-carbon standby, or simply use an exotic base-pairs arrangement. It might also have some form of energetic "booby trap" chemistry at work, which would enact nanoscale destruction on any molecular assembler foolish enough to probe it. Perhaps it has quantum dot lasers tied along its length, which short-focus high-intensity delivery patterns, sort of the immune system from hell if you will.
Of course, this would be an extremely high-energy configuration, so the organism would be have to be an extremophile and hence relatively simple in its composition. It will have to be resilient to damage from its own defences, so it will either have redundant parts, self-repair mechanisms, or both. It must be able to radiate a lot of energy, which means it must have a large surface area for its volume, maybe a fractal arrangement, which would probably further confuse the poor assemblers trying to take it apart, and if the active immunoresponse were arranged well, they'd be sitting ducks against them.
Given your idea to use the agent as an AI seed as well, I'd say go whole hog and simply make it a nanotechnological device, perhaps an assembler with nasty bits and a spore at the heart of it which contains the core computational functions. It would be a Swiss defense, not so much wanting to be able to counterattack as simply to make it impossible for attackers to gain any meaningful ground. So every angle, nook and cranny of the device would hold some nasty surprise, and when the invader finally overwhelmed the poor thing it would simply over heat and cascade into a fusion reaction. Not much ground to be gained there.
This topic is closed to new replies.
Advertisement
Popular Topics
Advertisement
