Largest Megastructures in Sci-Fi

[BehattedWanderer]

Guys guys, the real answer here is your mother.

Damn it. Ninjas everywhere. Twenty-six minutes earlier (at time of writing), and I would have been good.

I'll chime in with the Hitchhiker's guide one, then. That's almost as big as your mom.

 

[Blobpie]

What about forge world from 40k? They are planets converted into giant factories, hell I'm pretty sure that there would be a forge world that was used to make other forge worlds in the dark age of technology....

 

[Darknacht]

What about the mechs at the very end of Gurren Lagann? Weren't they throwing galaxies at each other?

Yeah, I can't think of anything bigger.

 

[wintercoat]

Wouldn't it be a Dyson Sphere? I mean, stars are pretty big, and you'd have to build an enclosure around one...

We're already way beyond Dyson Sphere's my friend. Look at the above posts!

I don't know how big a Dyson Sphere would actually BE.

Also RE: the MiB pendant, Frank said it himself that it's very very small.

A Dyson Sphere for the Sun is about 1 AU, or the distance between the Earth and the Sun. However, a Dyson Sphere's size depends on the size of the star. A Dyson Sphere around, say VV Cephei, would probably be several light-years in diameter.

Spoiler: A size comparison for large stars

 

[Wintermoot]

Buster Machine 3 from Gunbuster

in short it,s a black hole bomb designed to destroy a star system it does this by imploding the planet Jupiter. I was going to say the Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann but that one wasn't constructed but created.
this thing is bigger then any planet in the solar system

 

[gideonkain]

Besides, silly a$$ things like Hitchhiker's or one-off episodes about Dyson Spheres, the largest mega structures I've seen was those Skyscraper-ships that would just land on top of the existing civilization in The Chronicles of Riddick

 

[Vigormortis]

I forget the name of the novel (I will look it up at some point), but within the story it is posited that the Milky Way itself was constructed by a race, or collective, of hyper-advanced beings.

So basically, it's a "structure" approximately one hundred thousand light years across containing billions of stars and countless other celestial bodies.

That may trump just about any other "structure" I can think of in any science fiction story I've ever come across.

 

[-Ezio-]

dunno if it's the largest. but i think it gets points for being mobile.

Magog World Ship from Andromeda.

 

[Ares Gandhi]

No doubt, Bolder's Ring (or the Ring) from Xeelee Sequence. It's basically a ring over 10 million light years across in intergalactic space. Its rotation affected the motion of galaxies and its gravitational forces generated a portal to another universe.

If constructs made of cosmic strings don't count, then the largest megastructure is probably a Dyson shell.

 

[OneCatch]

Wouldn't it be a Dyson Sphere? I mean, stars are pretty big, and you'd have to build an enclosure around one...

We're already way beyond Dyson Sphere's my friend. Look at the above posts!

I don't know how big a Dyson Sphere would actually BE.

Also RE: the MiB pendant, Frank said it himself that it's very very small.

A Dyson Sphere for the Sun is about 1 AU, or the distance between the Earth and the Sun. However, a Dyson Sphere's size depends on the size of the star. A Dyson Sphere around, say VV Cephei, would probably be several light-years in diameter.

Spoiler: A size comparison for large stars

I doubt it - Canis Majoris (biggest star) is still 'only' around 2000 solar diameters across - stars can't actually get that much bigger.

A dyson sphere around a sol sized star would need to be about 1 AU. Scale that up by a factor of a couple of thousand for a massive star (just for the sake of extra luminosity or whatever) and you get a number that's still a couple of orders of magnitude below a light year - we're probably talking 10's of light minutes or a few light hours across. Let's not forget that Voyager 1 is only about 15 light hours away from the sun - and that's at the goddam heliopause [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliopause#Heliopause]!

A light year is *really* big. Any stellar scale object just isn't going to cut it - which is why everyone (myself included) is now coming up with daft examples from horribly soft sci-fi and space opera

 

[OneCatch]

The place where they construct planets in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy is 13 light seconds across, or 3,897,301,954 metres. Which would be... 190,870,132,282,126,866,381.2 m[sup]2[/sup]. So, roughly 190.87 quintillion m[sup]2[/sup].

Your move.

I was going to go with the Corellian System [http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Corellian_system] in the Star Wars EU, but the Hitchhiker's Guide one utterly trumps that. Fuck.

Only the Culture or something is going to beat that.

EDIT: GOT ONE! The Galaxy pendant in Men in Black!!
That's got a whole galaxy in it, so approximately 4.1x10^48 m^3. That's:

4,100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000m^3

Your move

It clearly isn't that many meters at all. It is an entire galaxy in the size of a marble, so the galaxy is the size of the that marble.
I suppose that maybe the aliens playing with our galaxy at the end of the movie might count for something. Maybe the bag that they put it in?

It's that big if you're inside it - Ooooohh 'philosophising about perspective' time!

 

[GundamSentinel]

Alastair Reynolds' novel Pushing Ice features an alien structure several light hours in size. The size of an entire solar system. Makes Dyson Spheres seem like marbles.

For a more well-defined structure I'd go with the Ringworld. The surface area of Larry Niven's Ringworld is about 3 million times that of Earth.

Relevant [http://www.merzo.net]

 

[Bassik]

Not the largest I know, but certainly impressive is Earth from Warhammer 40000. It's one big building that covers the entire planet, and it mainly serves... administrative purposes.
Now that shit is scary!

And from the Foundation novels, Trantor the Imperial capitol. A world enclosed by steel were the word "surface" doesn't really have any meaning.

Also from Warhammer 40K, one of the last remaining Star Gods is trapped inside a Dyson sphere as large as a very big solar system.

Man science fiction is awesome!

 

[pffh]

No doubt, Bolder's Ring (or the Ring) from Xeelee Sequence. It's basically a ring over 10 million light years across in intergalactic space. Its rotation affected the motion of galaxies and its gravitational forces generated a portal to another universe.

If constructs made of cosmic strings don't count, then the largest megastructure is probably a Dyson shell.

Yeah the Bolder's ring is the one I was going to go with. I doubt there are structures larger then that except maybe something that the dark matter bird race that defeated the xeelee created.

 

[Bertylicious]

Mantrid drones from Lexx converted all the matter in the Light universe into mantrid drones and then formed a giant, constricting cage to git the Lexx.

As Mantrid sprung the trap the concentration of all the matter of the universe caused a Big Crunch so it wasn't a stable mega structure, but you didn't specify. I win.

What fabulous prizes do I get?

 

[DoPo]

Does Strata by Terry Pratchett count?

Spoiler

Our entire universe was artificially created.

 

[Giftfromme]

Wasn't the Dyson barrier (We are talking about Pandora's Star here right?) 30 AUs across, one one side of the barrier? One AU being the distance from here to the sun.

 

[Evil Smurf]

I don't care what you say, I keep thinking deathstar. The deathstar can BLOW UP PLANETS!

 

[Evil Smurf]

Wasn't the Dyson barrier (We are talking about Pandora's Star here right?) 30 AUs across, one one side of the barrier? One AU being the distance from here to the sun.

I thought Dyson was a vacuum cleaner?

 

[Some_weirdGuy]

I don't care what you say, I keep thinking deathstar. The deathstar can BLOW UP PLANETS!

and the ability to blow up planets is exactly proportional to how big a structure it is XD



((btw, Super Saiyan 3 Goku is the biggest megastructure ever guys cause he can blow up solar systems.)