Re:Stone Burner as sf/sci-fi über weapon??
Been away for some time, I’m back. 😀
Season 8’s weapon was once used by the ancients to wipe out and restart all life in the galaxy after it fell prey to the decease that killed the ancients (the ancients took the opportunity to ascend).
Another nice cosmic weapon consists of unwarpping a black hole, in short creating a naked singularity. It’s been years since I read the short story or novel that had this idea, but I think what happens is that the universe aboars naked singularities and would not look kindly at their presence, i.e. a lot of damage to spacetime would ensue such an unwrapping, or a bubble of changed reality would form around it and expand at the speed of light.
A race of aliens could also create quite some mayhem in our locale region of the universe by converting – over millenia – a stellar nursery gas cloud particularly devoid of heavy elements into megasuns: stars that normally formed only at the start of the universe when there were few or no heavy elements present, allowing suns to stay stable pass the barrier of the 100 solar masses. Those stars pump out 10 million times the light of the sun when they live.
When they die (after only 3 million years for them), two things are possible depending on weither or not they are just below 250 solar masses or nearer 300:
– 250: The nuclear energy released at their death, an event called a “hypernova” or “pair-instability supernova”, is so great that for a month the dying star shines brighter than a hundred present-day supernovae, or a hundred normal galaxies.
– 300: The star is so heavy that at the end of its nuclear cycle it entirely collapses on itself, producing a 30-solar-mass balck hole, briefly pumping out more energy than 10 billion galaxies. Furthermore, if such a 300 solar masses megasun could be created with nearly no spin, the solar matter falling into the newly created black hole would do so at the speed of 100 solar masses in 10 seconds (compared to today’s speeds of 10 solar masses a year in quasars), briefly shining brighter than all the galaxies in the universe combined.
Now if that doesn’t screw up some cosmic prime estate, I don’t know what can.