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The Best Fictional Doomsday Devices
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.'"
It's a Wired slideshow, on 8 separate pages. If you value your time, don't even bother to RTFA. If you don't value your time, please try to find an "all on one page" version for the rest of us.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
ice-9: Maybe not intended to be a doomsday device, but it sure turned out to be one!
mega maid/spaceball one has to be the single most potent weapon in the universe.
it is literally breathtaking.
liqbase
The History Eraser Button from Ren and Stimpy, Hands Down.
Don't Touch It!!
You Fool.
There should be a moderation category "Dumbest Comment EVER"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doomsday_Machine_(TOS_episode) Overview: The starship Enterprise plays a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with an alien planet-killing machine. Come on if you cannot list a Star Trek episode where is the geek cred?
ACK
/. had for long been one of the last holdouts against this type of "journalistic" garbage.
glad to see you lasted so long, guys. sad to see you give in and publicize this useless junk.
articles like this with absolutely no substance at all don't belong here. i may as well just go look at reddit or fark for this type of stuff.
You missed the funniest joke in the world!!!!
Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
P-36 Explosive Space Modulator.
3 Taco Bell burritos and a six-pack of Old Milwaukee. Devastation on a cosmological scale.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
In Babylon-5 Harlan Ellison came up with mass drivers 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.
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. ;)
...behind Dr Fred Edison's mansion.
"I feel like I could... like I could... 'Take on the world!'"
If you're going to post these silly lists, at least point out the glaring omission of Skynet.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
You don't need more coffee, you need less Haskell.
The Ultimate Weapon, designed by Hactar, the computer built by the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax.
How could you forget the Krikkit Wars?
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
Global Warming.
Wasn't Vista engineered to be a doomsday device ?
No Happy Fun Ball?
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
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.
Has everyone forgottten the Dalek Reality Bomb which was designed to destroy the entire Universe?
Smivs on the intertubes!
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.
www.wavefront-av.com
Don't forget the professor's Universe-in-a-box, which ended up containing our own universe at the conclusion of the episode. Imagine that - a simple cardboard box that could destroy reality as we know it, simply by being tossed into the recycling bin. Seems like the practice meant to save the environment is going to doom us all in the end!
"We have solid everdense that Eye-rack, heh heh heh, uh, 'scuse me, Eye-rack possesses a, er, Helo, er, Halo, Hello, er, sumthinerother. Halo my baby, Halo my darling, halo my, er, gonna bomb their asses. Gonna bomb their asses back to the, um, bombed age. Cuz' that's what happens when you threaten 'muricans with Hellos of Mass Destruction."
Anyone actually watch the Extended Director's Cut (DVD) of James Cameron's "The Abyss"?
(Mental Note: Do not piss off the deep sea dwelling aliens... Check!)
The best doomsday device, is not necessarily the one you have, but the one your enemy THINKS you have.
http://home.jps.net/~lsnyder/12_tick.html
Infinity Ball, The: The Infinity Ball is a fearsome device used by the Hey Empire. It resembles a sideways 8 ball and doesn't look menacing at all. It is powerful though. The ball has telekinetic powers, is extremely fast, and squeaks when it moves. It even has hyperspace technology built in. The Whats are extremely afraid of the Infinity Ball. They were chased across the universe by the little engine of destruction. When The Tick destroyed the Hey's attempts of bringing forth a universe ending cataclysm, he was attacked by the Infinity Ball. The ball crashed into the heroes chest, falling to the ground after impact. The most devastating weapon in the Hey's arsenal proved to be less devastating then it was once believed to be. In fact, it was pretty lame.
in the book Deep Storm. the weapon is not named per-say, but the idea is, you have two black holes. one composed entirely of anti mater, and the other, of its opposite normal mater. these two black holes. through means not understood by humans in the book, are locked in orbit around one another. it is learned by the end of the book, that these black holes are weapons, and whatever it is that keeps them orbiting each other can be turned off, allowing them to merge. the results of this of course, are on the order of the destruction of solar systems at minimum. this is the best one i've ever heard of.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
Period. Best doomsday device ... if you're a webmaster who's website contains a page that's featured on /.
This is the War-Room!"
"I drank what?" -Socrates
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." -Mark Twain
What about Unicron? He would eat the death star for breakfast. And shit it out by lunch.
I like planet eaters!
Peak Oil, Global Warming, New World Order, 9/11 Conspiracy Theories. :)
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Maybe this is the wrong crowd for this, but in the Marvel Comics universe there is a character who is an elemental force of death who calmly goes through the universe devouring planets. His name is Galactus, and the Silver Surfer is one of his "heralds". Both characters of epic amounts of cool. Osh
what about the descolada from Enders Saga?
thats right, I rarely use capitals. deal with it. but don't mistake my laziness for stupidity
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?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
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.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
Funny, I read it as:
doomsday turbulent danger cynicism world-ending disasters apocalyptic
opening of Quantum of Solace on Friday catastrophic fear doomsday extinction-bringing
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
The Large Hadron Collider, but no one believes me!
The MD Device, also known as the Little Doctor
I wouldn't mind you in my head, if you weren't so clearly mad -Lews Therin Telamon
What about the Genesis Device?
Well if you're gonna go for sheer exotic exuberant overkill... "negaspheres of planetary anti-mass" come to mind.
Although where the Galactic Patrol found entire planets made of organized antimatter*, I'll never figure out. That's one of those little things that "Doc" didn't even bother to hand-wave. You need to suspend disbelief with a Bergenholm inertialess drive to buy the entire hurried ending of the series.
*Not our conception of antimatter, but the older "Dirac sea" vacuum anti-energy. But I still liked them.
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