Silliest Clarketech in all of Science fiction?

[Maximum7]

What is the most silly and incredibly advanced piece of Clarketech (technology indistinguishable from magic) in any Sci-Fi medium?

For me: it’s Gravanol. A medicine you can take to counteract the effects of gravity on your body. It’s from Venus Equilateral

[Solauren]

Pills that let Alfred beat the tar out of Superman. (And by extension, might have allowed him to beat up Darkseid)

[Batman]

How is that pill sillier than the Lantern rings? Or half the other stuff in the DCU?

[Solauren]

How is that pill sillier than the Lantern rings? Or half the other stuff in the DCU?

Fair Question.

The Ring works by force fields and the like, power source not withstanding. It has access to a subspace pocket, so power generation and technical capabilities are extreme.

A little pill altering someones body THAT DAMN FAST to that level of power? Made by a rich guy with deep seated mental health issues? Compared to tech from the first sentient species?

That's maximum silliness. (Mind you, the look of sheer satisfaction of Alfreds face more then made up for it)

[Batman]

A ridiculously rich guy with access to essentially all the technology in the DCU and tons of corporate contacts (some of them offworld). You make it sound like I developed that thing all by my lonesome.

[Simon_Jester]

There are two possibilities.

One is that the level of silliness of a Clarketech technology (one which achieves results indistinguishable from magic within our known real-world reality framework) is inversely proportional to the narrative level of wealth, power, and access enjoyed by the individuals who created it. That is to say, an absurdly wealthy and almost infinitely connected man of Earth can possess technologies far more 'magical' than those of the ordinary men of Earth, without those technologies being 'silly' because they are justified by how much richer and more connected he is.

The other is that the level of silliness is intrinsic to the technology itself, or the context of what assumptions are 'standard' in a genre. Imagine, for instance, a vehicle which travels along the Earth's surface by "exploiting the innate tension of lines of latitude and longitude to be pulled along," as if the lines of latitude and longitude were moving steel cables and the vehicle was a cable car. Such a vehicle would normally be the province of parodic fiction; the idea seems quite silly. One may argue that it is equally silly whether, within the narrative, the vehicle is owned by the richest man in the world, or by the poorest.

Under the second rule, a pill that makes a normal man strong like Superman (and gives him a full ability to acclimate to his sudden power increase so that he isn't flailing and smashing through walls and things) is no more or less silly no matter who invents it.

Under the first rule, a pill that does this is less silly because it was invented by a master Earth scientist or for the richest man on Earth... but then logically one would expect other, even more amazing things that are no less silly to exist on worlds that specifically have more advanced technology than Earth, or in the hands of galaxy-shaking beings.

If Darkseid could force his researchers to invent a pill that would increase his strength by +1 Superman's worth, starting from his already powerful baseline, I strongly suspect he would do it... and he's had much longer to do that, starting from access to nearly any form of science and technology that works in the entire universe.

So we get a new form of silliness out of that: the idea that being "a very rich mortal man" gives you access to things that cosmos-shaking beings that have controlled entire worlds for millennia, or major galactic/intergalactic institutions that have likewise been known and powerful for millennia if not longer, do not have.

[Crazedwraith]

Holy crap it's Simon_Jester! Long time no see. Hope you're well.

To be honest, I'm drawing a blank on silly clarketech. I do find the Injustice pills pretty funny because rather than trust people to accept "this fighting game is not canonically accurate in terms of power levels, everyone can fight everyone because... game" they put in this elaborate in-universe explain away for it.

but then nerds are going to nerd so I guess it's damned if you do, damned if you don't.

[LadyTevar]

You want Clarktech? Iain Bank's CULTURE NOVELS.

I mean, they have implants in their bodies that let them speed up their perception of time, as well as their reflexes, and that body modification and go to the point of not just transitioning male/female, but even into other alien beings; they have tech that can remove, transfer, and manipulate a being's brain, even implanting it in new bodies; there's the whole Sentient AI with their Ships and Cities and even small drones have full intelligence and are Citizens.
Not to mention one alien species created a Matrix-like afterlife for their people to live(suffer) in! That's before we get to completely uplifting a whole species into Ascension beyond physical bodies!