Big Dumb Object: Difference between revisions
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[[File:monolith2001.jpg|link=2001: A Space Odyssey|frame|Behold [[The Monolith]]!]]
Such is the '''Big Dumb Object'''. It's really, really big and really, really powerful. It could be a weapon or a habitat. The Big Dumb Object is always technologically more incredible than anything the discoverers have ever seen before, but, if it's dangerous, it probably has a silly weakness like [[Logic Bomb|logic]], antimatter, or a well placed [[Attack Its Weak Point|torpedo]] in the right air shaft. Sometimes it's disguised as a natural phenomenon. See also [[That's No Moon]].
Its makers may be alive in a far-off, remote region. They may have [[Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence|Ascended to
Since Big Dumb Objects are so old and filled with advanced technology they are often the target of a race by several parties to unlock their secrets. In this case many Big Dumb Objects double as a [[MacGuffin]].
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Compare [[That's No Moon]], [[Standard Sci-Fi Fleet]], [[Dyson Sphere]].
{{examples}}▼
▲{{examples}}
== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==
* The Bell in ''[[Magic Users Club]]'', a giant alien ''something'', invades
* ''[[Outlaw Star]]''{{'}}s "Galactic Leyline" is a massive library left behind by an ancient and now dead race. Several different factions spend the entire series theorizing about it and looking for it, and the titular [[Cool Spaceship]] and accompanying [[Spaceship Girl]] were created for the purpose of finding it.
== [[Comic Books]] ==
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** His ship, Taa II, fits the bill being the size of our solar system and so complex that Reed Richards is unable to even guess at most of its functions.
* The first ''New Mutants'' annual featured an abandoned spacecraft the size of the inner solar system. It was also programmed to self-destruct. In a [[This Looks Like a Job For Aquaman]] moment, the only hope of averting the self-destruction was Cypher, a kid whose mutant power consisted entirely of [[What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?|the ability to learn new languages quickly]].
* ''[[Planetary]]'' features a giant starship that mysteriously enters the solar system, just in time for Elijah Snow to use against one of the Four. Like nearly everything in ''Planetary'', it is a [[Shout
== [[Film]] ==
* The ''[[Star Trek]]'' movies have a few Big Dumb Objects for the Enterprise crew to contend with:
** ''[[Star Trek: The
** ''[[Star Trek IV: The
* ''[[2001: A Space Odyssey]]'' pits a single human up against a giant monolith in orbit around Jupiter. The Monolith serves as an alien teleportation device.
** Well, you can argue that it also serves as a gigantic computer, an accelerator of human evolution and more or less (at least in the end sequence of the movie) as a total [[Mind Screw
*** The monolith is best described as a "cosmic Swiss Army knife." It's capable of doing essentially anything required of it.
*** And there are more than just one...
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* The titular object in Arthur C. Clarke's ''[[Rendezvous With Rama]]'' is an alien ship fifty kilometers long which comes zipping into the Sol System. It is {{spoiler|seemingly abandoned}} but eventually {{spoiler|slingshots around the Sun and disappears back into space, basically using the sun as a refueling stop}}.
** In the sequels it's revealed that the Rama spacecraft {{spoiler|is part of a vast intergalactic network tasked with collecting samples of intelligent life, which was made (essentially) by God}}. [[Negative Continuity|Nobody likes the sequels though]]...
* [[Stephen Baxter
** Also, the "Sugar Lump" from the same series - a perfect cube the size (and mass) of a small moon. One character walking across one notes the strange gravity field: as you walk toward one of the corners, the flat "ground" under you increasingly seems to tilt until it seems like you're walking up a 45
* Lots of these in [[Iain M Banks
** The ''[[The Culture/Excession|Excession]]'' from the novel of the same name is probably the purest example of this trope in Banks' work.
** In ''Look To Windward'' we see Airspheres, planet-sized bubble-like artificial habitats with no internal gravity and filled with air (and bizarre airborne lifeforms) built by a long-vanished race for reasons unknown.
** Much of ''Matter'' is set on a Shellworld, which is an artificial planet consisting of multiple hollow concentric spheres. Each internal sphere consists of a different discrete planetary habitat. We are told that there are thousands of Shellworlds and that they were built by a long-vanished race for possibly nefarious purposes. {{spoiler|They also have a nasty habit of killing their inhabitants, though nobody has worked out what triggers them to do this.}} We also see a Nestworld, a vast [[wikipedia:Topopolis|Topopolis]]-like structure surrounding a star built by a contemporary neighbouring race of the Culture; we are told just this one Nestworld is home to ''40 trillion'' beings, which is more than the entire Culture combined.
* in Simon Ing's ''Hot Head'' a cluster of Von Neumann machines mining the Jupiter system go cancerous. The result is the Massive: it's growing exponentially and heading for the richer pickings of Earth. This is a classic Dumb Object: a gigantic mouth on the move. Ironically it's also anything but dumb: behind the mouth is a lump of computing substrate the size of a small moon. It's got so much virtual reality real-estate that the real world it is gobbling up is simply being overlooked.
* ''The Dragon Rises'' by Adrienne Martine-Barnes mentions [[Precursors]] who'd become known as "Gamesters" because among their artifacts was a scattering, on many worlds, of huge cubes, purpose and makeup unknown, which resembled dice right down to having dots marked on the sides. The Gamesters '''also''' built warships -- some of which, despite being millennia old, were still capable of wiping out substantial battle fleets all by their lonesome.
* The titular cube in Risto Isomäki's ''Xanadu-kuutio'' ("The Xanadu Cube") is a strange hollow cubical device that is [[Bigger on the Inside]] - so big, in fact, that its internal volume is apparently several times that of the rest of the universe.
* Most artefacts and monuments left behind by already extinct alien civilizations in [[Alastair Reynolds]]' works (particularly the ''Revelation Space'' series).
* The sphere in ''[[Sphere]]''. Most of the book is spent figuring out what is does. {{spoiler|It makes things you imagine real.}}
* [[Robert Reed]]'s Great Ship universe has the... [[Cool Starship|Great Ship]]. It is a ship the size of Jupiter, made of the highest grade [[Made of Iron|hyperfiber]]. Discovered streaking towards the Milky Way at a third the speed of light by a human
== [[Live
* Various ''[[Star Trek]]'' series featured Big Dumb Objects:
** ''[[Star Trek: The Original Series|The Original Series]]'':
*** The Doomsday Machine, from the episode of the same name, can chop planets into rubble with an anti-proton beam and use the chunks as fuel. Its hull material is derived from neutron stars [[You Fail Physics Forever|somehow]].
*** The ''Fesarius'' is a sphere ship a mile in diameter that contains a crew of only one and is used primarily as a bluff ("The Corbomite Maneuver").
*** The generational ship ''Yonada'' is disguised as a giant asteroid. Its crew doesn't know they are on a ship and would not be told until they disembark on their destination planet ("For the World is Hollow and I Must Touch the Sky").
** ''[[Star Trek: The Next Generation|The Next Generation]]'':
*** Scotty is found by the ''Enterprise D'' marooned on the surface of an abandoned [[Dyson Sphere]] that is still programmed to draw ships into its docking bay with a powerful tractor beam. {{spoiler|The [[Dyson Sphere]] is abandoned because conditions inside have become very dangerous.}} ("Relics").
*** Tin Man is a sentient biological ship that's been stranded for thousands of years without a crew. Both the Federation and Romulans want access to it, but only a powerful telepath can operate it. {{spoiler|It is attempting suicide by supernova due to loneliness, having not had a crew in forever. A rather terrifying sort of existence, if you think about it.}}
*** The original Borg Cube is a semi-mindless killing machine looking for technology to assimilate with itself.
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*** Delphic Expanse spheres were moon-sized devices that could create spatial anomalies when networked together.
* ''[[Blake's 7]]'' featured not one, not two, but three Artificial Planets: Crandor, home of the Thaarn; Ultraworld; and Terminal (first called an "artificial planet," later called an "artificially modified planet").
* The ''[[Babylon 5]]'' [[Made for TV Movie]] ''Thirdspace'' revolves around a Big Dumb Object found in hyperspace and towed back to the station, where it causes no end of trouble.
== [[Tabletop
* ''[[Warhammer
** And, on one occasion, the tattered remnants [[Defector From Decadence|of a renegade Space Marine chapter]].
* The title ship in ''[[Alternity]]'''s ''[[Star*Drive]]'' setting adventure "The Last Warhulk".
* in the Immortal level module ''The Immortal Storm'' for ''[[Dungeons & Dragons]]'', the eponymous storm is a maelstrom of destructive energy that threatens all of existence. Even the most powerful Immortals can't stand up to it, and no explanation is ever given to its origins.
== [[Video Games]] ==
* The HUB in the ''[[X (video game)|X]]-Universe''. A hollow sphere
** In a rare example of a human
* The Halo rings in ''[[Halo]]'' are superweapons capable of destroying all sentient life in the galaxy; they were built to stop [[The Virus]] (Flood) from spreading.
** ''Halo 3'' introduces "The Ark", an even bigger, even dumber object that can build Halo rings inside of itself very rapidly by a completely automated process and then supposedly teleport them directly wherever they're supposed to go. It's also built outside of the Milky Way so that people could hide out there while the Halos kill all life in the galaxy.
* [[Infocom]]'s [[Interactive Fiction]] game ''Starcross'' is about the player discovering and exploring one of these.
* ''[[Mass Effect]]'' has the Mass Relays, giant space constructs believed to be left behind by the [[Precursors]]. While they are the definite means of interstellar travel for the humans and other races, they are also {{spoiler|part of the [[Abusive Precursors]]' omnicidal plans}}. The Citadel station applies as well.
* The ''[[Star Trek: The
* The entire ''[[Xenosaga]]'' trilogy's main plot is driven by the Zohar.
* ''[[Shores of Hazeron]]'' has the Ringworlds, massive ringworlds left behind by unknown objects. These are fully colonizable and can have multiple cities.
== [[Web Comics]] ==
* ''[[
** "Zoojack" - a prison of an unknown owner for species previously unknown, yet mysteriously speaking Galstandard.
** "Oisri" - the nearly Moon-sized "asteroid" made of superdense alloys with total of 1.
** "Eina-Afa" - ancient space station that goes beyond "[[That's No Moon]]", because 8100 km across is more like ''"[
** [https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2019-03-10 Then] there was a discussion of Galaxy scale telescopes. It's an array, however — individual nodes are pocket sized (until unrolled), there's "just over a trillion" of them spread that wide.
** Extragalactic worldships, comparable to gas giants.
** Pa'anuri warships. Since the Pa'anuri size and mass are comparable to a planet, those things are big. 130000 km wide<ref>rather high in gas giant range (Jupiter is about 143000)</ref>. Mostly empty, but the individual "narrow" decks are still several times larger than the entire Earth surface. And it's a warship, not just a mobile habitat.
** There are several [[Dyson Sphere]]s, from thin shells with modules stuck on them to solid and many-layered.
== [[Web Original]] ==
* ''[[Orion's Arm]]'' has a number of variations. Ranging from the more mundane [[Dyson Sphere]] and [[Ringworld Planet|Banks Orbital]], up to unique examples like the Leviathan which is 10 lightyears across, has a mass of over a billion suns, and is on a collision course with the Triangulum Galaxy.
== [[Western Animation]] ==
* In ''[[Transformers]]'', Cybertron could be considered a Big Dumb Object, as it is artificial and no one knows who made it or its inhabitants.
** ''[[Transformers: The Movie]]''{{'}}s [[Big Bad]], Unicron, spends the first half of the movie as a Big Dumb Object swallowing planets. He shows he is otherwise after transforming into a moon
** In the original [[Comic Book]] series, Cybertron was described as a natural planet where [[Mechanical Evolution|naturally-occurring gears and pulleys evolved into sentient mechanical forms]]. This was later revoked by [[Retcon]], however.
** Cybertron itself was ultimately revealed to be [[Genius Loci|no ordinary planet]]...
* The ''[[Star Trek: The
** The same ship (or a very similar one) is a level in the ''[[Star Trek: 25th Anniversary (video game)|Star Trek: 25th Anniversary]]'' point-and-click adventure game. Instead of the invader it is occupied only by the trader called Mudd, who has legally established salvage rights. The cause of its destruction is not discovered, but there are plenty of pirates in the area.
* ''[[Superman: The Animated Series]]'' featured a tremendously old alien colossus that landed on Earth and was fed by heat. Its original purpose was as a construction tool.
* The Black Mass (as it's called) from the ''[[Samurai Jack]]'' episode "Birth of Evil" is a huge, amorphous, likely mindless mass of [[Pure Evil]] drifting through the cosmos. Eventually, the three deities Odin, Ra, and Rama destroy it through a cooperative effort, but they miss a single small piece of it that crashes into the Earth. This small piece eventually grows into [[Big Bad|Aku.]]
== [[Real Life]] ==
* There's a [[Sinister Geometry|hexagon]] on Saturn.
** To comfort the paranoid, the shape has been shown to be a [https://web.archive.org/web/20121112170726/http://news.discovery.com/space/saturns-north-pole-hexagon-mystery-solved.html natural phenomenon that is rather common in fluid dynamics.]
* [[wikipedia:Dyson sphere|Dyson Spheres]], if
**
*** Assuming the Oort cloud
**** It isn't. Dyson clouds by nature intercept the light from the enclosed star. If that were the case, we wouldn't be able to see the stars.
** By constructing nested Matryoshka Dyson spheres, each one would capture the energy emitted by the one closer to the sun, making an almost perfect system for capturing all the energy of the sun and with the outermost having roughly the same energy as the background radiation of the universe, making the whole system virtually invisible to observers...
* There is a 600
* On Earth, we have many examples stemming from the architectural achievements of ancient civilizations. These objects and the mysteries that have surrounded them might have been the original inspiration for all the other examples of this trope.
** The pyramids of [[Ancient Egypt]] and [[Mayincatec|Mesoamerica]].
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{{reflist}}
[[Category:Speculative Fiction Tropes]]
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