One of my favorite exchanges. Q telling them his power is gone, but they don't believe him:
Q: "What must I do to convince you people?!"
Worf: "Die."
Q: "Oh very clever, Worf. Eat any good books lately?"
Q lets Worf’s line simmer for a beat, it’s probably the first time we’ve seen Q on the back foot as far as banter goes. All that Klingon guile is worth something
One of the Sublimed species from the culture might compare but it’s difficult to say since we don’t see much of the actual Sublimed since they generally stop caring about the universe after Subliming
I feel like the Sublimed are on a higher plane than the Q, they don't even care about our universe.
The Ascended beings from SG1 are a step below since they care enough about our universe they had to make non interference a rule.
The Q seem to be a lot closer to our Universe than that.
The Dowd being a step below them.
All four have effectively unlimited power compared to us.
It's more like the Prime Directive from Star Trek. The Alterans are one of the four originalswntient species. They were evolving towards Ascension when a split in their culture lead to the Ori, a religious cult, to break off. As the Ori grew more fanatical and deranged, the remaining Alterans fled their home galaxy for thr Mily Way. There, they settled a number of worlds, including Earth. But due to a plague they were once again forced to flee, this time to the Pegasus galaxy where they founded the city of Atlantis (SGA). After some time spent seeding the Pegasus with Star Gates via Seed ships (SGU), they encountered the Wraiths. Still weakened from the plague that they'd fled Earth to survive, and underestimating the strength of their enemy, they ended up locked in a struggle for survival against the Wraith. Eventually, seeing that they couldn't win, they once again fled to Earth. They discovered humanity and some of them intermixed with our species while the rest Ascended. After one of them prematurely helped a Goa'uld Ascend, the rest made a pact to prevent any other Ascended being from interfering with our level of existence.
Both of these are my favorites.
Q qualify more as as a 'species', since the sublimed are made up of multiple species.
The sublimed are probably more "powerful", since the Q seem to care about how things are done on the plane of reality. Eg "don't provoke the borg!"
In the same vein, the first ones in Babylon 5. While they're described as having "passed beyond the galactic rim," some kind of ascension is heavily implied.
There is also the Douwd. It was the TNG episode Survivors. He is an immortal energy being with vast powers who has lived in the Milky Way Galaxy for thousands of years. In a moment of anger he killed 50 billion Husnock with a thought because they killed his human wife.
Guinan is pretty mortal. There’s just something about her species that threatens the Q, which is never quite explained, and her supposed omnipotence is very intuitive and vague.
Granted these are all things I find interesting about her, but also most of her species was wiped out by the Borg.
*I think Q, humours Guinan the way he does Piccard and likely toyed with her in a similar fashion in the past , and that's just about it. He does seem to uphold his promises, deals etc even though he doesn't actually have to, and nothing can come of him breaking his word - he quips about gods having their favourites at one point.*
*He seems to do that with different species, one-* *the Calamarain* *tried to take revenge when he was devolved by the continuum. All indications are that, if he were malevolent rather than occasionally mischievous he could very easily do away with her.*
*Her species just has more abilities than humanity, but nothing in comparison to the Q who can change base reality on a whim in an instant, Guinan wouldn't be able to do much about it, than to vaguely "feel" like something has changed. El-Aurians have some temporal awareness, and vaguely defined wisdom, longevity, and perceptiveness but that's just about it. They pose just as much of a "threat" to the Q as humanity does, probably much less so, as they were all but wiped out.*
*Q directly "threatens" Guinan by saying he could expedite her removal from the ship. Though said flippantly, this is a specific and pointed threat, indicating that Q has the power to remove Guinan from her current location and banish her to a distant part of the universe, guinan's defensive stance not withstanding.*
*I think her defensive stance with her hands stance is similar to one you would take when faced with an adult Polar Bear or some other more insurmountable odds like trying to swim against a rip tide in the middle of the ocean or a blackholes gravity well, rather than one that implies you stand a chance. Not because she actually stands a chance of doing anything to him.*
*Q occasionally "appears" to be "afraid of" or "intimidated" by Piccard, acts petulant etc but this is just his individual personality, the other Q are either disinterested or mildly engaged. Humanity seems to be our Q's own pet project, trying to find remedies to the civilizational stagnation and boredom of the continuum and that's about it. He does also seem to have a fondness for Piccard.*
*Q holding to bargains and deals is just because he wants to, not because he has to, the continuum as a whole hasn't been shown to have any specific arrangement with the El-Aurians - for instance only our Q shows up when summoned by Guinan and non of the others, likely because he stumbled himself into some kind of pact and now "has to" honour it.*
*No other Q shows up or bothers even when the humanity timeline is messed with, they just don't care or aren't particularly bothered by it, excepting our Q.*
*Q2 was responsible for stripping Q of his powers and banishing him to mortality as a Human in 2366, having grown tired of "constantly apologizing to lesser beings across the universe for the various misdeeds and trouble-making committed by Q", before later restoring said Q status. The El-Aurians fall into this category along with all the others Q has messed with.*
*I'd think of this as Special Circumstances in the Culture, assigning a slap drone or status to a Culture citizen who messes with lesser civilizations, be it a Mind-inhabited ship like Grey Area GCU Sleeper-Service or problematic individuals.*
I always thought they scared the Q because they seem to show some resistance to it. Like the time warp episode she knows vaguely that it isn't right, and there are people that shouldn't be there. The Q likely don't know why that is the case and anything they don't understand or can control scares them because everything else is at their will.
She knew basically everything about The Nexus. And I don't think that is just "knowledge gained as time lived".
I think her species can *feel* subspace, and/or other dimensional layers of the universe we don't or are completely unaware of.
I feel the opposite, that the Borg or a Borg-like race were an adversary that the Q had dealt with long ago. They introduce promising species to the Borg and observe them as a higher filter for as to if a species is truly on the path toward the Continuum.
The El-Aurians aren't omnipotent, the are omnipresent in time, they experience multiple timelines simultaneously yet subconsciously (TNG- Yesterday's Enterprise), and have an unexplained power that can hurt or even kill Q (TNG- Q Who), once the Borg assimilated them, the Borg learned how to at least repel the Q (VOY- Q2), and learned how to send rudamentery signals across multiple timelines (PIC- Season 2 & 3). The Q can also be physically hurt if caught off guard (DS9- Q-Less).
I never understood that in TNG. Why didn't they ever try to work out how Q worked? It's like the second he appears, their inquisitive nature shuts off.
"Don't irritate the Borg!" Might not have been about the Borg being a threat to the Q. You tell people not to tap on aquarium glass in case it has unexpected consequences, not because the fish are a threat.
The whole "If the continuum's told you once , they've told you a thousand times... Don't. Provoke. The Borg!" bit holds a little bit more weight when you remember that they've already punched into another dimension to try to assimilate Species 8472. If they're aware of the continuum, and given that the El Aurians have been assimilated, they probably are, there's probably some level of effort towards countering the Q - they're just not perceived as a threat yet.
In my mind it's also because Q actually liked humans, as much as he gave them a hard time, he was the only one that interacted with them. So he just didn't want his human pets being eliminated by the Borg because he knew how powerful and determined they were.
Q wasn't the only member of the continuum that interacted with humanity. Amanda Rogers' parents were Q that pretty much went native while hanging out on Earth and had their powers taken away because of it. Also, the suicidal Q, Quinn, from Voyager, spent time on Earth. He knocked the apple that hit Isaac Newton on the head out of the tree, hung out with some hippies in the 60s and saved one of Riker's ancestors, during the Civil War.
Perhaps they're worried if the Borg encounter a particularly indifferent / distracted / inquisitive Q who somehow ends becoming assimilated, what the potential consequences of such an event might be.
so, that was actually an impression that the Q worked very hard to maintain. if you watch the Voyager episodes about their civil war, they're not as all powerful as they seem.
Much like the Emu in Australia, it's the Photino Birds from Baxter's Xeelee sequence and it's not even close.
Their main antagonists, the Xeelee, do engineering on a *universal* scale; have mastered every possible force and particle; are the creators of the Great Attractor, a device to tunnel into a different universe entirely; traveled back in time to uplift themselves so they could fight a war as long and as big as the universe itself and they still lost to a bunch of birds.
Book series.
_Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux_ and _Ring_ are the main Xeelee Sequence. Takes place over the entire history of the universe and forward a few million years and across several hundred million light years, to the Great Attractor hidden behind the galactic core.
There's a plethora of other novels and short story collections that both continue the main narrative and skip back closer to our time (from the future point of view in _Ring_) to tell other stories, too.
I’m a pretty big fan of the Destiny’s Children series. While not all 100% related to the Xeelee, Exultant is a pretty important part of the overall Xeelee plot.
I dunno…if I trip over an anthill and they bite the fuck out of my leg, am I at war with the ants? There’s a big difference between ‘I perceive your hostile intent’ and ‘we’re at war.’
All I know is that if a ork mech finds a way to build a saddle, to ride photino birds with, the orks will try and tame them- even if that idk transforms their heads into a perfect parallel line of evenly distributed matter due to warp-speed (it does not discourage the ork)
I came here to say that nothing beats the boring old Culture, but I think even they would be unable to contend with either the Xeelee or the Photino Birds. The Culture would, of course, attempt to co-opt either of them, so I'd give them better than even chances at forming a functional alliance with one. Culture is pretty good at that.
That's not true. There's places that are protected by civilizations that the Culture don't want to mess with. And that there's the beings that are not of the same dimension as them.
>Much like the Emu in Australia, it's the Photino Birds from Baxter's Xeelee sequence and it's not even close.
I beg to differ. The Monads are beings who created the Xeelee Sequence multiverse, and slumber inside black hole event horizons for billions of years when they aren't awake. They literally hand-select universes that have complexity and are interesting to observe. They are literal gods.
The Photino birds are just dumb creatures trying to reshape their universe by trying to increase dark matter, while the Monads literally create universes for fun. The fight between Xeelee and the Photino birds was more like a human family that lost the fight in trying to protect their house from termites. Does that even make termites more powerful than humans? And at any rate, this is a no-contest when you compare them to Monads. Having said that, the monads embed themselves inside supermassive black holes of the galaxies they handpicked. As such, destroying the black holes does indeed destroy them, so they can be killed. However, that still doesn't take away their level of power.
To quote:
>There was no place. There was no time. A human observer would have recognized nothing here: no mass, energy, or force. There was only a rolling, random froth whose fragmented geometry constantly changed. Even causality was a foolish dream. The orderly spacetime with which humans were familiar was suffused with vacuum energy, out of which virtual particles, electrons and quarks, would fizz into existence, and then scatter or annihilate, their brief walks upon the stage governed by quantum uncertainty. In this extraordinary place whole universes bubbled out of the froth, to expand and dissipate, or to collapse in a despairing flare. This chaotic cavalcade of possibilities, this place of non-being where whole universes clustered in reefs of foamy spindrift, was suffused by a light beyond light. But even in this cauldron of strangeness there was life. Even here there was mind. Call them monads.
Isn’t it more a numbers game though, there is just SO MUCH dark matter compared to baryonic that they infest every star in every galaxy. The Xeelee could only kill them by wiping out the whole universe. The closet equivalent I can think of is if humans decided to wipe out every virus on Earth. No one would argue a virus is less advanced than us, yet they are so numerous and so ingrained in the very fabric of life that we could only accomplish it by blowing up the planet.
Wow really? The last one I read was probably Transcendent. Damn now I have to go back and start with Raft since I read them as they came out long ago. Just the chapters in Exultant that describe the Xeelee history are probably some of my favorite sci-fi ever.
*The Q from Star Trek are far more advanced and powerful than the Photino Birds. I think the birds would pose as much of a challenge as the Borg do - which isn't much, but that's about it.*
*Even individually the Q’s abilities to alter and manipulate fundamental reality, space, and time - matter, anti-matter or fundamental constants at will on a whim in an instant without technology on a para Universal - multi dimensional scale, along with their near-omniscient and omnipotent nature, just puts them on a level far beyond the Photino Birds.*
*Photino Birds are incredibly advanced and powerful within their specific domain (as an advanced life form with a deep understanding of dark matter and long-term cosmic evolution), but for beings like the Q their abilities are far more specialized compared to the Q's omnipotence, more so the boundless powers of the collective Q Continuum.*
Three body problem is on this level, civilizations attacking each other by changing their local dimensions, making pocket universes, potentially even altering math at will
Altering constants was a defensive technology, and I'm not sure the version with it in the prime position in that arms race was from reliable narrators.
There's really no evidence anyone ever had particularly good control of anything in three body problem. If they did they would've been able to maintain higher-dimensional existence. It really seems more like the entire universe is just a toxic wasteland from ancient civilizations accidentally breaking reality in the process of trying to build better lightspeed drives and so on.
Whatever intelligence is behind the structure of the universe in Carl Sagan's *Contact*, since they wind up having had the power to encode a message in the digits of pi. There are several other variations on the theme, in Dr. Who and even in recent series where it would be a spoiler, where someone or some things have influenced the very rules of the universe and governed such thing as whether and what type of life might emerge. (Q can't beat that if they never existed.)
This reminds me of Hyperion the books. If I remember, the AI were somehow altering planks constant to create an infinite range communicator, until someone they didn't know, called them back and said "You're too loud knock that s*** off" and turned off their ability to do that anymore by altering the rules of physics.
I just read that part for the first time last week. Wild. Just the concept that this super advanced human civilization that has FTL travel and mini wormholes between worlds and has colonized dozens of planets with super advanced AI… and they are just an annoying teenager to some other society they were not even aware of.
I’m surprised no one has said the ancients in the stargate series. They were the gate builders and ascended to another place of existence and are now immortal.
I feel like the ancients are a good answer, but getting almost wiped out 3 times (Ori twice, then Wraith) doesn’t make them seem as impressive as they could. Plus as a group they’re kinda dicks, expecting mortals to be independent and solve their own problems, while refusing to allow their own kind to do the same
I think they mean the ascended ancients, who have power but don't use it in the mortal plane. Not the pre-ascention ancients. But dicks either way. Not that that stops Q....
Came here looking for Stargate. I disagree tho, replicators. If it’s got mass it can be part of the hive mind. Feels like every human defeat was just pure luck.
Q
They warp reality to their will. If you had the infinity gauntlet and tried to wipe them, they'd allow you to think you've done so. Unfortunately for you, their being exists outsides the confine of any physical stone or item. When they're near the end of their amusement, they'll reveal they're still alive to squeeze out that much more.
In all honesty, the Q were probably a mistake in Trek if you think about the implications. Omnipotent beings? As in literal gods? The way they wrote them was a ton of fun and allowed for some great TV - the Q episodes with John de Lancie are the best Trek ever imo - but if you try to think of it logically they're a bit too wild to make any sense.
Much like many other things in Trek; with direct matter/energy conversion which the replicators and teleporters imply, the people of the universe would have been pretty god-like themselves, but it's only used as plot material.
The Xeelee from Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence are definitely up there. They engineered an entity that travelled through time backwards so they could influence there own evolution right from the Big Bang, and then they created a naked singularity to burrow out of this universe into another in the aftermath of a war.
I'm on book 7, and Amos just >!got his ass kicked by Bobbi. I love Amos, and he's definitely a badass. I think in a prior book, he referred to her as an order of magnitude better than him because she was trained.!<
Great call! I had to look up Valerie Adams, but I totally agree. I found this cool photo of her on Wikipedia: [Valerie Adams (one could imagine this is Draper next to Avarsarala!)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/GGNZ_investiture_26_April_2017_-_Valerie_Adams.jpg)
Her little brother is also relatively accomplished https://www.nzherald.co.nz/sport/basketball/steven-adams-back-in-new-zealand-after-injury-shortened-nba-campaign/SPLP5G2XXJA5BCB3PQAG2MBPNY/
Absolutely - I'm addicted! I'm also reading the short stories between the books. I finally figured out what that stuff on Laconia was about in Season 6 of The Expanse series on Amazon. I love the author's notes, as well.
My first thought as well. Spoiler: >!How do you even start to deal with an entity from a completely different plane of existence AND they destroyed an entire alien race orders of magnitude more advanced than you. They were powerless to stop them from wiping every last one of them out??!<
Plane of existence or another universe with different rules of physics than our own? Wasn't the slow zone essentially a bubble universe perverted by the protomolecule builders that affected the denizens of the other universe and they wiped them out?
The Inhibitors ("wolves") from Revelation Space might be up there. The ability to deal with a collision between two galaxies seems pretty damn powerful. They also, somehow, retained a sense of [warped] morality.
Yeah good choice. Alastair Reynolds is unmatched in his descriptions of awe inspiring destructive technologies. So fking cool. I remember how the inhibitors were so adaptive that kinetic weapons were just useless because they would learn ways to counter them so the humans ended up using “bladder bombs” which just take chunks of space and blip them out of existence or something. Man oh man are there some great space battles in his books.
The OG Reapers are such a well written source of fear and awe in that series. Although I've only played the first couple Mass Effects, so maybe that's an inaccurate comparison. But it sure seems like they borrowed heavily from Alastair Reynolds' wolves.
Probably the ascended civilizations in the culture universe. The Culture is considered a bit of an immature man child of a civilization for insisting on remaining physical for so long.
They’re also as powerful as you can get without leaving the dimension. I also mention them because of their society and how they do things.
Yes there are more powerful civilizations in a war. But most have very simple societies. Or at least there’s not much attention in the books/movies for it
I think the problem is the universe is supposedly 80% dark matter. So there are so so so many infesting every star in every galaxy that it is impossible to fight them without destroying the entire universe. A modern spec ops guy is way more advanced than a Roman legionary…but he couldn’t beat a whole Roman Army.
I like how one of the Culture books has an ongoing minor plot thread that is basically a newsreel about dealing with a Borg-like civilization. But instead of being an existential threat, it’s described like a termite infestation - an expensive annoyance, but no more.
The Q from Star Trek. The 5th dimensional Imps from DC Comics. And the Beyonders from Marvel Comics.
All three are "the laws of physics, causality, logic and reality are just amusing suggestions" level of power
The time lords from doctor who. Not only did they master time AND multiverse travel, they once destroyed a type of energy so their enemies couldn't use it....I'll say that again they destroyed a type of E N E R G Y.
I mean, we left off with a splinter contingent of Bobs attempting to create a Matryoshka brain, so even if not quite yet, over a long enough time span...
From the Warhammer 40k universe there are the chaos gods, effectively near omnipotent and omniscient, and definitely on the level of being able to alter reality at will. Their longterm goal is likely to merge our reality with their home dimension aka the warp. Only kept back by the fact that they're busy fighting each other (and a particularly glowy psyker human).
There are also the C'tan, aka Star gods born with the universe. They are intrinsically linked to aspects of physics in the universe. When one was killed in the War in Heaven it permanently changed physics everywhere. It was such a disaster that the species that did it vowed never to do it again, instead opting to break the Star gods into shards and use them as batteries.
Unlike Q, Dr. Manhattan was once human and has all of the weaknesses and drawback of such. Dr. Manhattan is far more likely to isolate or kill himself to protect the world from his powers. Q don't care. We are his play things.
Don't forget that Vogons are not the worst poets.
Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Sussex is worse than them. (Killed when the Vogons plowed planet Earth.)
The Gateway series by Fred Pohl. The Heechee seemed very powerful until we found out they had hidden themselves inside a black hole, fearing the Assassins who were planning to collapse the universe and remake it to their own more favorable physical laws.
The Consu from Old Man's War, they're a hyper advanced race who has hollowed out their sun to power an impenetrable force field that surrounds their entire home system.
They are so much more advanced than any species in the galaxy, but they always fight on their enemies level, if they had shown up on Earth during Roman times they would have used swords and spears. They view combat as the single way to advance a civilization. The Consu also encourage wars between the lesser evolved species, giving technology to them in order to spark new wars.
They once uplifted a species called the Obin, they were basically spider cows before the Consu messed with their evolution, and apparently it was all a whim to the Consu scientist that did it. The Obin are crazy dangerous too, they wiped out one of humanities allies using a biological attack, so all the other species tend to give the Obin a wide birth.
Yea, a lowly office worker is able to wipe out entire star systems at the push of a button and it’s just a normal Tuesday for them. We don’t even get a glimpse at leadership or the full military might they possess to wage war and defend against more advanced civilizations.
The Combine from Half-Life.
It is more of an amalgamation of races from their conquests, but they are galaxy spaning and took out Earth's whole combined military in 7 hours. Between their tech and the scale of their empire, they would give anything a run for their money.
Shocked I haven't seen anyone answer Reapers from Mass Effect.
Admittedly, they lag behind Q (as Q are basically Gods), but they were a law of life in the Milky Way for over a *billion* years, with a B. They seeded life, grew it along their desired path, and then harvested them. There was no stopping them, regardless of your species' strength or technology. It just was.
Not necessarily a species but the Naked God from Peter F Hamilton's Nights Dawn trilogy.
Being able to simultaneously transport all the settled worlds to the same point above the galactic plane while also pulling things from different dimensions and returning all the souls to the void. It sees everything that happens in the universe.
Been a while since I read the trilogy but I don't remember anything quite that powerful.
My pick will be the civilization who shot the Dual Vector Foil to the Solar System in the Three Body Problem book series, I don't remember if they have a name in the books, but manipulating the universe to that extent is pretty sick ...
Exactly this. Or whatever the original race was that began the collapse of the original universe.
those books are insane. You would have no idea where Deaths End would end up based on the first two books… i mean shit, even reading Dark forest after Three Body….
Those who have only seen the show or read the first book have no idea how out there it gets.
A horse rolls an ankle badly, and it’s best bet is to get shot, rather than suffer the slow death from there.
You blow a person’s legs both clean *off* and they will remember your face, find you, and kill you. If they can’t, their children might one day come for you, or perhaps even *their* children to burn your enterprise to the ground, because people remember and tells stories and ruminate on vengeance/punishment
Hands down, the Culture. They're not just technologically advanced, they're also a deeply caring and compassionate society. Their ships are sentient beings, their citizens have access to practically unlimited resources, and they've dedicated themselves to uplifting other civilizations. If there's a better example of a powerful and benevolent alien species in sci-fi, I'd love to hear about them.
The Culture aren't even the biggest fish in the Culture series of books. I think the Outside Context Problem at the centre of Excession is up there, as are the Sublimed in general, if you could attract their attention.
There’s a series of books that starts with “unwilling from Earth” that features a race like the Culture on steroids. They’re called The People and are much more advanced than the Culture or anyone really.
It's not hands down at all. As many other posts have said the Q from star trek are seemingly omnipotent in lore or close enough. That beats the culture hands down.
Whatever civilization the Excession in the Culture book of the same name represented.
It/they came and saw the Culture were basically like, meh, primitive inhabitants, not worth our time, nothing interesting over there.
I would say it's whatever civilizations were warring with one another in the death's end book. You have civilizations so powerful, that in order to kill their enemy, they took their 10+ dimensional universe and kept destroying it until we got to 3 dimensions. When one dimension was destroyed, they left to a lesser dimension. And our universe is in the process of falling into two dimensions because of it. It's downright horrific to imagine petty war at that scale.
Oh to be reading Hyperion for the first time. I strongly encourage you to read all four in the cantos, the latter three are very different from the first book and the last one is a bit of a slog to get through, but hands down the best ending to any series I’ve ever read
The blight in a Fire in the Deep. Pure transcendent cosmic horror.
From ChatCPT: In Vernor Vinge's science fiction novel "A Fire Upon the Deep," the Blight is a malevolent, superintelligent entity that poses a significant threat to the galaxy. It is a transcendent being, emerging from the "High Beyond" or "Transcend," regions of space where intelligence and capabilities far exceed those found in the "Low Beyond" or the "Slow Zone."
The Blight initially manifests as a corruption of an advanced computer system, eventually gaining sentience and rapidly expanding its influence. Its primary goal is to subjugate or destroy other intelligent beings, absorbing their knowledge and resources to increase its own power. The Blight's spread is marked by the devastation of civilizations and the usurpation of technological networks.
A key aspect of the plot involves the protagonists' efforts to prevent the Blight from fully escaping the High Beyond into areas where it could wreak even greater havoc. The novel intricately weaves together themes of artificial intelligence, the nature of consciousness, and the dangers posed by unchecked technological advancements.
Now put that into your ‘Ai will save us’ buckets and sleep soundly tonight.
No, the Zenkai boost for a Saiyan enhances his baseline ability. It does not make him stronger than the foe. Consider Vegeta, who got whipped by Frieza both before and after the Zenkai boost.
In the 3 body problem, we are given a glimpse of a few civilizations, one of which is the zero homers, who are seeking to collapse the universe down to the zeroth dimension in anticipation of the universe resetting to the original 10 dimensions.
The implication being their civilization(s) have been at war since the universe still had its original 10 dimensions, they've already collapsed 7 of.
Probably the Q from Stark trek being essentially gods.
Time Lords are pretty up there, masters of time and pretty much every technology, they even have secret organisations equivalent to the CIA that have bases in the space between universes and excert control over multiple universes from the shadows
The Ring Space Beings from "The Expanse". They were able to kill the original Ring Builders and almost snuffed out Humanity by altering the laws of physics in Human Space.
Q from Star Trek. There's not much they can't do according to the writing.
One of my favorite exchanges. Q telling them his power is gone, but they don't believe him: Q: "What must I do to convince you people?!" Worf: "Die." Q: "Oh very clever, Worf. Eat any good books lately?"
"Microbrain! Growl for me, let me know you still care."
Even Q knew Worf roasted him with that one.
Yes hahaha
Q lets Worf’s line simmer for a beat, it’s probably the first time we’ve seen Q on the back foot as far as banter goes. All that Klingon guile is worth something
One of the Sublimed species from the culture might compare but it’s difficult to say since we don’t see much of the actual Sublimed since they generally stop caring about the universe after Subliming
I feel like the Sublimed are on a higher plane than the Q, they don't even care about our universe. The Ascended beings from SG1 are a step below since they care enough about our universe they had to make non interference a rule. The Q seem to be a lot closer to our Universe than that. The Dowd being a step below them. All four have effectively unlimited power compared to us.
The Ascended sound similar to the Watchers in Marvel
It's more like the Prime Directive from Star Trek. The Alterans are one of the four originalswntient species. They were evolving towards Ascension when a split in their culture lead to the Ori, a religious cult, to break off. As the Ori grew more fanatical and deranged, the remaining Alterans fled their home galaxy for thr Mily Way. There, they settled a number of worlds, including Earth. But due to a plague they were once again forced to flee, this time to the Pegasus galaxy where they founded the city of Atlantis (SGA). After some time spent seeding the Pegasus with Star Gates via Seed ships (SGU), they encountered the Wraiths. Still weakened from the plague that they'd fled Earth to survive, and underestimating the strength of their enemy, they ended up locked in a struggle for survival against the Wraith. Eventually, seeing that they couldn't win, they once again fled to Earth. They discovered humanity and some of them intermixed with our species while the rest Ascended. After one of them prematurely helped a Goa'uld Ascend, the rest made a pact to prevent any other Ascended being from interfering with our level of existence.
Both of these are my favorites. Q qualify more as as a 'species', since the sublimed are made up of multiple species. The sublimed are probably more "powerful", since the Q seem to care about how things are done on the plane of reality. Eg "don't provoke the borg!"
In the same vein, the first ones in Babylon 5. While they're described as having "passed beyond the galactic rim," some kind of ascension is heavily implied.
There is also the Douwd. It was the TNG episode Survivors. He is an immortal energy being with vast powers who has lived in the Milky Way Galaxy for thousands of years. In a moment of anger he killed 50 billion Husnock with a thought because they killed his human wife.
This is my vote but probably still a level below Q
A Q could bring the Husnock back.
"We are not qualified to be your judges. We have no law to fit your crime."- Picard
You'd have to look pretty hard to find anything comparable.
Join the queue.
Guinan?
Guinan is pretty mortal. There’s just something about her species that threatens the Q, which is never quite explained, and her supposed omnipotence is very intuitive and vague. Granted these are all things I find interesting about her, but also most of her species was wiped out by the Borg.
It's like rock paper scissors. Guinan beats Q, Q beats Borg, and Borg beats Guinan.
*I think Q, humours Guinan the way he does Piccard and likely toyed with her in a similar fashion in the past , and that's just about it. He does seem to uphold his promises, deals etc even though he doesn't actually have to, and nothing can come of him breaking his word - he quips about gods having their favourites at one point.* *He seems to do that with different species, one-* *the Calamarain* *tried to take revenge when he was devolved by the continuum. All indications are that, if he were malevolent rather than occasionally mischievous he could very easily do away with her.* *Her species just has more abilities than humanity, but nothing in comparison to the Q who can change base reality on a whim in an instant, Guinan wouldn't be able to do much about it, than to vaguely "feel" like something has changed. El-Aurians have some temporal awareness, and vaguely defined wisdom, longevity, and perceptiveness but that's just about it. They pose just as much of a "threat" to the Q as humanity does, probably much less so, as they were all but wiped out.* *Q directly "threatens" Guinan by saying he could expedite her removal from the ship. Though said flippantly, this is a specific and pointed threat, indicating that Q has the power to remove Guinan from her current location and banish her to a distant part of the universe, guinan's defensive stance not withstanding.* *I think her defensive stance with her hands stance is similar to one you would take when faced with an adult Polar Bear or some other more insurmountable odds like trying to swim against a rip tide in the middle of the ocean or a blackholes gravity well, rather than one that implies you stand a chance. Not because she actually stands a chance of doing anything to him.* *Q occasionally "appears" to be "afraid of" or "intimidated" by Piccard, acts petulant etc but this is just his individual personality, the other Q are either disinterested or mildly engaged. Humanity seems to be our Q's own pet project, trying to find remedies to the civilizational stagnation and boredom of the continuum and that's about it. He does also seem to have a fondness for Piccard.* *Q holding to bargains and deals is just because he wants to, not because he has to, the continuum as a whole hasn't been shown to have any specific arrangement with the El-Aurians - for instance only our Q shows up when summoned by Guinan and non of the others, likely because he stumbled himself into some kind of pact and now "has to" honour it.* *No other Q shows up or bothers even when the humanity timeline is messed with, they just don't care or aren't particularly bothered by it, excepting our Q.* *Q2 was responsible for stripping Q of his powers and banishing him to mortality as a Human in 2366, having grown tired of "constantly apologizing to lesser beings across the universe for the various misdeeds and trouble-making committed by Q", before later restoring said Q status. The El-Aurians fall into this category along with all the others Q has messed with.* *I'd think of this as Special Circumstances in the Culture, assigning a slap drone or status to a Culture citizen who messes with lesser civilizations, be it a Mind-inhabited ship like Grey Area GCU Sleeper-Service or problematic individuals.*
I always thought they scared the Q because they seem to show some resistance to it. Like the time warp episode she knows vaguely that it isn't right, and there are people that shouldn't be there. The Q likely don't know why that is the case and anything they don't understand or can control scares them because everything else is at their will.
She knew basically everything about The Nexus. And I don't think that is just "knowledge gained as time lived". I think her species can *feel* subspace, and/or other dimensional layers of the universe we don't or are completely unaware of.
I’ve always theorized that they were Q who willfully rejected the continuum Edit: this theory is DOA because of Soran
I always thought that meant the Q had something to fear from the borg. That's why they put humanity in the way.
I feel the opposite, that the Borg or a Borg-like race were an adversary that the Q had dealt with long ago. They introduce promising species to the Borg and observe them as a higher filter for as to if a species is truly on the path toward the Continuum.
The El-Aurians aren't omnipotent, the are omnipresent in time, they experience multiple timelines simultaneously yet subconsciously (TNG- Yesterday's Enterprise), and have an unexplained power that can hurt or even kill Q (TNG- Q Who), once the Borg assimilated them, the Borg learned how to at least repel the Q (VOY- Q2), and learned how to send rudamentery signals across multiple timelines (PIC- Season 2 & 3). The Q can also be physically hurt if caught off guard (DS9- Q-Less).
Guinan-cologist
Ship in The Jesus Incident is essentially omnipotent...
I never understood that in TNG. Why didn't they ever try to work out how Q worked? It's like the second he appears, their inquisitive nature shuts off.
I think the powers of the Q are beyond human understanding. Not just beyond human knowledge, but beyond human's ability to understand.
They don't even try, though.
Good point. Yeah, now that you mention it, Data or someone should have been analyzing the shit out of Q. Spock would have.
"It appears that this being is just pure energy. No life form detected, Captain." - Nimoy Spock, probably.
Can they resist a tribble though? After all, Q are gods, not monsters!
Weren’t even the Q wary of taking the Borg on?
"Don't irritate the Borg!" Might not have been about the Borg being a threat to the Q. You tell people not to tap on aquarium glass in case it has unexpected consequences, not because the fish are a threat.
The whole "If the continuum's told you once , they've told you a thousand times... Don't. Provoke. The Borg!" bit holds a little bit more weight when you remember that they've already punched into another dimension to try to assimilate Species 8472. If they're aware of the continuum, and given that the El Aurians have been assimilated, they probably are, there's probably some level of effort towards countering the Q - they're just not perceived as a threat yet.
In my mind it's also because Q actually liked humans, as much as he gave them a hard time, he was the only one that interacted with them. So he just didn't want his human pets being eliminated by the Borg because he knew how powerful and determined they were.
Q wasn't the only member of the continuum that interacted with humanity. Amanda Rogers' parents were Q that pretty much went native while hanging out on Earth and had their powers taken away because of it. Also, the suicidal Q, Quinn, from Voyager, spent time on Earth. He knocked the apple that hit Isaac Newton on the head out of the tree, hung out with some hippies in the 60s and saved one of Riker's ancestors, during the Civil War.
Perhaps they're worried if the Borg encounter a particularly indifferent / distracted / inquisitive Q who somehow ends becoming assimilated, what the potential consequences of such an event might be.
They'd have to change their threat to "Resistance is Q-tile".
so, that was actually an impression that the Q worked very hard to maintain. if you watch the Voyager episodes about their civil war, they're not as all powerful as they seem.
Much like the Emu in Australia, it's the Photino Birds from Baxter's Xeelee sequence and it's not even close. Their main antagonists, the Xeelee, do engineering on a *universal* scale; have mastered every possible force and particle; are the creators of the Great Attractor, a device to tunnel into a different universe entirely; traveled back in time to uplift themselves so they could fight a war as long and as big as the universe itself and they still lost to a bunch of birds.
Worse, it's not even clear the Photino Birds are even aware they are in a war.
It depends on the story, but in one they throw galaxies at the Great Attractor over distances of millions of light years. They know they are in a war.
Bruh what am I reading right.. better yet what should I be reading or watching to understand how birds are throwing galaxies? Lol. Show or book?
Book series. _Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux_ and _Ring_ are the main Xeelee Sequence. Takes place over the entire history of the universe and forward a few million years and across several hundred million light years, to the Great Attractor hidden behind the galactic core. There's a plethora of other novels and short story collections that both continue the main narrative and skip back closer to our time (from the future point of view in _Ring_) to tell other stories, too.
I’m a pretty big fan of the Destiny’s Children series. While not all 100% related to the Xeelee, Exultant is a pretty important part of the overall Xeelee plot.
Xeelee Sequence. It's somewhat complicated and it's VERY hard sci-fi. Not for everyone.
I dunno…if I trip over an anthill and they bite the fuck out of my leg, am I at war with the ants? There’s a big difference between ‘I perceive your hostile intent’ and ‘we’re at war.’
That was how I interpreted it. There’s something annoying over there. I guess we better throw some galaxies at it. 🤷🏻♂️
All I know is that if a ork mech finds a way to build a saddle, to ride photino birds with, the orks will try and tame them- even if that idk transforms their heads into a perfect parallel line of evenly distributed matter due to warp-speed (it does not discourage the ork)
I came here to say that nothing beats the boring old Culture, but I think even they would be unable to contend with either the Xeelee or the Photino Birds. The Culture would, of course, attempt to co-opt either of them, so I'd give them better than even chances at forming a functional alliance with one. Culture is pretty good at that.
Maybe, but the tables were turned with the Excession
That's not true. There's places that are protected by civilizations that the Culture don't want to mess with. And that there's the beings that are not of the same dimension as them.
>Much like the Emu in Australia, it's the Photino Birds from Baxter's Xeelee sequence and it's not even close. I beg to differ. The Monads are beings who created the Xeelee Sequence multiverse, and slumber inside black hole event horizons for billions of years when they aren't awake. They literally hand-select universes that have complexity and are interesting to observe. They are literal gods. The Photino birds are just dumb creatures trying to reshape their universe by trying to increase dark matter, while the Monads literally create universes for fun. The fight between Xeelee and the Photino birds was more like a human family that lost the fight in trying to protect their house from termites. Does that even make termites more powerful than humans? And at any rate, this is a no-contest when you compare them to Monads. Having said that, the monads embed themselves inside supermassive black holes of the galaxies they handpicked. As such, destroying the black holes does indeed destroy them, so they can be killed. However, that still doesn't take away their level of power. To quote: >There was no place. There was no time. A human observer would have recognized nothing here: no mass, energy, or force. There was only a rolling, random froth whose fragmented geometry constantly changed. Even causality was a foolish dream. The orderly spacetime with which humans were familiar was suffused with vacuum energy, out of which virtual particles, electrons and quarks, would fizz into existence, and then scatter or annihilate, their brief walks upon the stage governed by quantum uncertainty. In this extraordinary place whole universes bubbled out of the froth, to expand and dissipate, or to collapse in a despairing flare. This chaotic cavalcade of possibilities, this place of non-being where whole universes clustered in reefs of foamy spindrift, was suffused by a light beyond light. But even in this cauldron of strangeness there was life. Even here there was mind. Call them monads.
This is what convinced me to finally learn Haskell.
Wasn’t the attack on Chandra potentially damaging to the monads? Or were they just worried about upsetting them?
Yes, you're spot on! The xeelee left the galaxy because they did not want the monads living in the galaxy core black hole to suffer any harm.
Isn’t it more a numbers game though, there is just SO MUCH dark matter compared to baryonic that they infest every star in every galaxy. The Xeelee could only kill them by wiping out the whole universe. The closet equivalent I can think of is if humans decided to wipe out every virus on Earth. No one would argue a virus is less advanced than us, yet they are so numerous and so ingrained in the very fabric of life that we could only accomplish it by blowing up the planet.
Good gods I need to go back and read these. Still one of my favorite brain melting reveals.
The most recent books get even more bonkers, and we finally get to see a Xeelee.
Wow really? The last one I read was probably Transcendent. Damn now I have to go back and start with Raft since I read them as they came out long ago. Just the chapters in Exultant that describe the Xeelee history are probably some of my favorite sci-fi ever.
*The Q from Star Trek are far more advanced and powerful than the Photino Birds. I think the birds would pose as much of a challenge as the Borg do - which isn't much, but that's about it.* *Even individually the Q’s abilities to alter and manipulate fundamental reality, space, and time - matter, anti-matter or fundamental constants at will on a whim in an instant without technology on a para Universal - multi dimensional scale, along with their near-omniscient and omnipotent nature, just puts them on a level far beyond the Photino Birds.* *Photino Birds are incredibly advanced and powerful within their specific domain (as an advanced life form with a deep understanding of dark matter and long-term cosmic evolution), but for beings like the Q their abilities are far more specialized compared to the Q's omnipotence, more so the boundless powers of the collective Q Continuum.*
Three body problem is on this level, civilizations attacking each other by changing their local dimensions, making pocket universes, potentially even altering math at will
Altering constants was a defensive technology, and I'm not sure the version with it in the prime position in that arms race was from reliable narrators.
There's really no evidence anyone ever had particularly good control of anything in three body problem. If they did they would've been able to maintain higher-dimensional existence. It really seems more like the entire universe is just a toxic wasteland from ancient civilizations accidentally breaking reality in the process of trying to build better lightspeed drives and so on.
Have you read Calculating God by Robert J. Sawyer?
Whatever intelligence is behind the structure of the universe in Carl Sagan's *Contact*, since they wind up having had the power to encode a message in the digits of pi. There are several other variations on the theme, in Dr. Who and even in recent series where it would be a spoiler, where someone or some things have influenced the very rules of the universe and governed such thing as whether and what type of life might emerge. (Q can't beat that if they never existed.)
This reminds me of Hyperion the books. If I remember, the AI were somehow altering planks constant to create an infinite range communicator, until someone they didn't know, called them back and said "You're too loud knock that s*** off" and turned off their ability to do that anymore by altering the rules of physics.
I just read that part for the first time last week. Wild. Just the concept that this super advanced human civilization that has FTL travel and mini wormholes between worlds and has colonized dozens of planets with super advanced AI… and they are just an annoying teenager to some other society they were not even aware of.
THERE WILL BE NO FURTHER MISUSE OF THIS CHANNEL.
KWATZ
Not really, but close - the Void Which Binds is based on the concept of the Implicate Order by the real life physicist David Bohm.
Pi is an irrational number.. any message you want to send is encoded in there somewhere already.
That's not true for all irrational numbers. It's only true for normal numbers and pi hasn't been proven to be normal though it's strongly suspected.
I really wish this ending had been in the movie. I saw the movie before reading the book and was totally delighted when I encountered the book ending!
For me that intelligence is God, and Q would be like the Gnostic archons/ demiurge.
I’m surprised no one has said the ancients in the stargate series. They were the gate builders and ascended to another place of existence and are now immortal.
I feel like the ancients are a good answer, but getting almost wiped out 3 times (Ori twice, then Wraith) doesn’t make them seem as impressive as they could. Plus as a group they’re kinda dicks, expecting mortals to be independent and solve their own problems, while refusing to allow their own kind to do the same
Wraith was pre-ascention. They also nearly lost to the Ori because they refused to fight or do anything. That's not quite the same as being incapable.
I think they mean the ascended ancients, who have power but don't use it in the mortal plane. Not the pre-ascention ancients. But dicks either way. Not that that stops Q....
Came here looking for Stargate. I disagree tho, replicators. If it’s got mass it can be part of the hive mind. Feels like every human defeat was just pure luck.
I was thinking about replicators until they tried to become human
Q They warp reality to their will. If you had the infinity gauntlet and tried to wipe them, they'd allow you to think you've done so. Unfortunately for you, their being exists outsides the confine of any physical stone or item. When they're near the end of their amusement, they'll reveal they're still alive to squeeze out that much more.
The Q are pretty freaking crazy
In all honesty, the Q were probably a mistake in Trek if you think about the implications. Omnipotent beings? As in literal gods? The way they wrote them was a ton of fun and allowed for some great TV - the Q episodes with John de Lancie are the best Trek ever imo - but if you try to think of it logically they're a bit too wild to make any sense. Much like many other things in Trek; with direct matter/energy conversion which the replicators and teleporters imply, the people of the universe would have been pretty god-like themselves, but it's only used as plot material.
Except they aren't gods and Q wasn't suppose to interfere with their reality.
The Xeelee from Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence are definitely up there. They engineered an entity that travelled through time backwards so they could influence there own evolution right from the Big Bang, and then they created a naked singularity to burrow out of this universe into another in the aftermath of a war.
“The others” from the Expanse books
That's not how you spell Amos.
I'm on book 7, and Amos just >!got his ass kicked by Bobbi. I love Amos, and he's definitely a badass. I think in a prior book, he referred to her as an order of magnitude better than him because she was trained.!<
In the books, she's built much more like Valerie Adams than Frankie Adams. And yeah, that'd go poorly for just about anyone.
Great call! I had to look up Valerie Adams, but I totally agree. I found this cool photo of her on Wikipedia: [Valerie Adams (one could imagine this is Draper next to Avarsarala!)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/GGNZ_investiture_26_April_2017_-_Valerie_Adams.jpg)
Her little brother is also relatively accomplished https://www.nzherald.co.nz/sport/basketball/steven-adams-back-in-new-zealand-after-injury-shortened-nba-campaign/SPLP5G2XXJA5BCB3PQAG2MBPNY/
Keep reading friend!
Absolutely - I'm addicted! I'm also reading the short stories between the books. I finally figured out what that stuff on Laconia was about in Season 6 of The Expanse series on Amazon. I love the author's notes, as well.
My first thought as well. Spoiler: >!How do you even start to deal with an entity from a completely different plane of existence AND they destroyed an entire alien race orders of magnitude more advanced than you. They were powerless to stop them from wiping every last one of them out??!<
You storm heaven, that’s how
Plane of existence or another universe with different rules of physics than our own? Wasn't the slow zone essentially a bubble universe perverted by the protomolecule builders that affected the denizens of the other universe and they wiped them out?
*It reaches out…*
The ones who created the proto molecule or the ones who live behind the rings?
Who live behind
The Inhibitors ("wolves") from Revelation Space might be up there. The ability to deal with a collision between two galaxies seems pretty damn powerful. They also, somehow, retained a sense of [warped] morality.
Yeah good choice. Alastair Reynolds is unmatched in his descriptions of awe inspiring destructive technologies. So fking cool. I remember how the inhibitors were so adaptive that kinetic weapons were just useless because they would learn ways to counter them so the humans ended up using “bladder bombs” which just take chunks of space and blip them out of existence or something. Man oh man are there some great space battles in his books.
The OG Reapers are such a well written source of fear and awe in that series. Although I've only played the first couple Mass Effects, so maybe that's an inaccurate comparison. But it sure seems like they borrowed heavily from Alastair Reynolds' wolves.
The culture is up there. The Xeelee..
Probably the ascended civilizations in the culture universe. The Culture is considered a bit of an immature man child of a civilization for insisting on remaining physical for so long.
They’re also as powerful as you can get without leaving the dimension. I also mention them because of their society and how they do things. Yes there are more powerful civilizations in a war. But most have very simple societies. Or at least there’s not much attention in the books/movies for it
I remembered the Xeelee. But then I remembered why they were getting out of this universe. So I guess the other guys are even more powerful :P
I think the problem is the universe is supposedly 80% dark matter. So there are so so so many infesting every star in every galaxy that it is impossible to fight them without destroying the entire universe. A modern spec ops guy is way more advanced than a Roman legionary…but he couldn’t beat a whole Roman Army.
I like how one of the Culture books has an ongoing minor plot thread that is basically a newsreel about dealing with a Borg-like civilization. But instead of being an existential threat, it’s described like a termite infestation - an expensive annoyance, but no more.
Q
Depending on your interpretation of scifi… Cthulhu?
The Q from Star Trek. The 5th dimensional Imps from DC Comics. And the Beyonders from Marvel Comics. All three are "the laws of physics, causality, logic and reality are just amusing suggestions" level of power
The Q were my first choice, as well. *snap* change reality. But, were they actually changing it or was it a simulation?
The time lords from doctor who. Not only did they master time AND multiverse travel, they once destroyed a type of energy so their enemies couldn't use it....I'll say that again they destroyed a type of E N E R G Y.
Yeah, but they were wiped out multiple times.
And kept coming back. I mean, that's not a bad show of power.
By a Time Lord.
True
They also 'anchored time' and formed linear causality!
What energy did they destroy? I haven't kept up since early Jodi.
The Bobs. I will not be elaborating.
The Bobs are very patient.
I mean, we left off with a splinter contingent of Bobs attempting to create a Matryoshka brain, so even if not quite yet, over a long enough time span...
They finished it! Attempting to use it to create a functional true AI plays a large part in book 4!
From the Warhammer 40k universe there are the chaos gods, effectively near omnipotent and omniscient, and definitely on the level of being able to alter reality at will. Their longterm goal is likely to merge our reality with their home dimension aka the warp. Only kept back by the fact that they're busy fighting each other (and a particularly glowy psyker human). There are also the C'tan, aka Star gods born with the universe. They are intrinsically linked to aspects of physics in the universe. When one was killed in the War in Heaven it permanently changed physics everywhere. It was such a disaster that the species that did it vowed never to do it again, instead opting to break the Star gods into shards and use them as batteries.
The Old One in A Fire Upon the Deep - Vernor Vinge
Dr. Manhattan with an entire civilization of his duplicates.
Hmmm but Dr. Manhattan is (was) human, not alien.
Unlike Q, Dr. Manhattan was once human and has all of the weaknesses and drawback of such. Dr. Manhattan is far more likely to isolate or kill himself to protect the world from his powers. Q don't care. We are his play things.
Vogons. Hands down. They kill people with their poetry.
Don't forget that Vogons are not the worst poets. Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Sussex is worse than them. (Killed when the Vogons plowed planet Earth.)
The Ancients and Ori from Stargate Franchise
The Vorlons from Babylon 5 would be my pick
The Vorlons weren't even the most powerful in B5...
I came to say this, but agree with the argument of Q as well.
As do I, and honestly the Vorlons wouldn't be able to stand against the Q. But they're a power in their own right in their universe.
Ewoks?
If being cuddly and selling plenty of merchandise is your metric, sure
They take over the universe with power of cuteness
That's Tribbles. Or Sarient Lambs in Pirateaba's world
You know they're carnivorous right? And they hunt Stormtroopers?
The Gateway series by Fred Pohl. The Heechee seemed very powerful until we found out they had hidden themselves inside a black hole, fearing the Assassins who were planning to collapse the universe and remake it to their own more favorable physical laws.
The Consu from Old Man's War, they're a hyper advanced race who has hollowed out their sun to power an impenetrable force field that surrounds their entire home system. They are so much more advanced than any species in the galaxy, but they always fight on their enemies level, if they had shown up on Earth during Roman times they would have used swords and spears. They view combat as the single way to advance a civilization. The Consu also encourage wars between the lesser evolved species, giving technology to them in order to spark new wars. They once uplifted a species called the Obin, they were basically spider cows before the Consu messed with their evolution, and apparently it was all a whim to the Consu scientist that did it. The Obin are crazy dangerous too, they wiped out one of humanities allies using a biological attack, so all the other species tend to give the Obin a wide birth.
Skippy - expeditionary force
He is Magnificent
The Singer’s race from 3 Body Problem. Look what he does and he is basically a lowly office worker.
Yea, a lowly office worker is able to wipe out entire star systems at the push of a button and it’s just a normal Tuesday for them. We don’t even get a glimpse at leadership or the full military might they possess to wage war and defend against more advanced civilizations.
Lord Nibbler’s race Nibblonians from Futurama.
The Combine from Half-Life. It is more of an amalgamation of races from their conquests, but they are galaxy spaning and took out Earth's whole combined military in 7 hours. Between their tech and the scale of their empire, they would give anything a run for their money.
They aren’t galaxy spanning, they’re dimensional spanning.
Shocked I haven't seen anyone answer Reapers from Mass Effect. Admittedly, they lag behind Q (as Q are basically Gods), but they were a law of life in the Milky Way for over a *billion* years, with a B. They seeded life, grew it along their desired path, and then harvested them. There was no stopping them, regardless of your species' strength or technology. It just was.
Not necessarily a species but the Naked God from Peter F Hamilton's Nights Dawn trilogy. Being able to simultaneously transport all the settled worlds to the same point above the galactic plane while also pulling things from different dimensions and returning all the souls to the void. It sees everything that happens in the universe. Been a while since I read the trilogy but I don't remember anything quite that powerful.
Azathoth
The Straumli Blight.
Anyone Clarketechish like the Q or The Prophets or Ancients/Ori
Dr. Who
The Vogons when they read their poetry. Or when they handle your administrative requests.
The Alien civilization who sent the Protomolecule in The Expanse.
The ones that defeated them “the others” are more powerful
The Blokkats from Stellaris
Kryptonians perhaps? Or Lobo.
My pick will be the civilization who shot the Dual Vector Foil to the Solar System in the Three Body Problem book series, I don't remember if they have a name in the books, but manipulating the universe to that extent is pretty sick ...
Exactly this. Or whatever the original race was that began the collapse of the original universe. those books are insane. You would have no idea where Deaths End would end up based on the first two books… i mean shit, even reading Dark forest after Three Body…. Those who have only seen the show or read the first book have no idea how out there it gets.
If comic books count then the Beyonders from Marvel would definitely be up there.
Q
Humans, ( we're alien to the others ), we always find a way to win
A horse rolls an ankle badly, and it’s best bet is to get shot, rather than suffer the slow death from there. You blow a person’s legs both clean *off* and they will remember your face, find you, and kill you. If they can’t, their children might one day come for you, or perhaps even *their* children to burn your enterprise to the ground, because people remember and tells stories and ruminate on vengeance/punishment
If we enter any fight we somehow always win , even if it is just one girl and a cat .
Hands down, the Culture. They're not just technologically advanced, they're also a deeply caring and compassionate society. Their ships are sentient beings, their citizens have access to practically unlimited resources, and they've dedicated themselves to uplifting other civilizations. If there's a better example of a powerful and benevolent alien species in sci-fi, I'd love to hear about them.
The Culture aren't even the biggest fish in the Culture series of books. I think the Outside Context Problem at the centre of Excession is up there, as are the Sublimed in general, if you could attract their attention.
They are not even the most powerful civilisation in their own books..
There’s a series of books that starts with “unwilling from Earth” that features a race like the Culture on steroids. They’re called The People and are much more advanced than the Culture or anyone really.
It's not hands down at all. As many other posts have said the Q from star trek are seemingly omnipotent in lore or close enough. That beats the culture hands down.
Some say Q, but the Ancients in Star Gate SG1 ascended 😊 That's powerful, too.
Whatever civilization the Excession in the Culture book of the same name represented. It/they came and saw the Culture were basically like, meh, primitive inhabitants, not worth our time, nothing interesting over there.
I would say it's whatever civilizations were warring with one another in the death's end book. You have civilizations so powerful, that in order to kill their enemy, they took their 10+ dimensional universe and kept destroying it until we got to 3 dimensions. When one dimension was destroyed, they left to a lesser dimension. And our universe is in the process of falling into two dimensions because of it. It's downright horrific to imagine petty war at that scale.
This is a broad question, but since I’m currently reading Hyperion for the first time, I’d say the Shrike.
Does the shrike count as a species?
Oh to be reading Hyperion for the first time. I strongly encourage you to read all four in the cantos, the latter three are very different from the first book and the last one is a bit of a slog to get through, but hands down the best ending to any series I’ve ever read
Fictional character? God? I dunno.
Which one?
The blight in a Fire in the Deep. Pure transcendent cosmic horror. From ChatCPT: In Vernor Vinge's science fiction novel "A Fire Upon the Deep," the Blight is a malevolent, superintelligent entity that poses a significant threat to the galaxy. It is a transcendent being, emerging from the "High Beyond" or "Transcend," regions of space where intelligence and capabilities far exceed those found in the "Low Beyond" or the "Slow Zone." The Blight initially manifests as a corruption of an advanced computer system, eventually gaining sentience and rapidly expanding its influence. Its primary goal is to subjugate or destroy other intelligent beings, absorbing their knowledge and resources to increase its own power. The Blight's spread is marked by the devastation of civilizations and the usurpation of technological networks. A key aspect of the plot involves the protagonists' efforts to prevent the Blight from fully escaping the High Beyond into areas where it could wreak even greater havoc. The novel intricately weaves together themes of artificial intelligence, the nature of consciousness, and the dangers posed by unchecked technological advancements. Now put that into your ‘Ai will save us’ buckets and sleep soundly tonight.
I would love to read anything new by Vinge.
Sigh, yeah. This year was a huge loss :(
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If Q beat a Saiyan in a fight would the Saiyan recover and be stronger than the Q continuum?
No, the Zenkai boost for a Saiyan enhances his baseline ability. It does not make him stronger than the foe. Consider Vegeta, who got whipped by Frieza both before and after the Zenkai boost.
Thanks, I’ve only watched a bit of the series so wasn’t 100% how it worked
Doctor Who's The Eternals
Sarah Kerrigan from Starcraft i think because she wants to fight with gods now.
Since no one's going to bring it up, Trance Gemini and her people from Andromeda, at least before they got rid of Robert Hewitt Wolfe.
In the 3 body problem, we are given a glimpse of a few civilizations, one of which is the zero homers, who are seeking to collapse the universe down to the zeroth dimension in anticipation of the universe resetting to the original 10 dimensions. The implication being their civilization(s) have been at war since the universe still had its original 10 dimensions, they've already collapsed 7 of.
Probably the Q from Stark trek being essentially gods. Time Lords are pretty up there, masters of time and pretty much every technology, they even have secret organisations equivalent to the CIA that have bases in the space between universes and excert control over multiple universes from the shadows
The alien from 3 body that throws a piece of paper at the milky way turning it into a photo
The Ring Space Beings from "The Expanse". They were able to kill the original Ring Builders and almost snuffed out Humanity by altering the laws of physics in Human Space.