But you can eat some trees for salad and go find something more fleshy. For note, 1 kg is ~43 megatons, not so far from Tsar Bomba.Īll humans on Earth would be around 500 million tonnes so not even worth a trip fuel.

I would say, it would need minimum of 1 billion tonnes from each planet it visits. Just on fast calc for energy needed to move (hope I did not mess up), with perfect antimatter-matter conversion: To move in or out would take around 350 million tonnes of humans(?) And you need to go in and out and have food for your body, savings, extra movements. Your creature is close in size to Earth's moon and lets take the same for mass. Which given the Lovecraftian nature of the critter you may well have anyway. You'd pretty much have to have a 'psychic energy' angle in your world to make it plausible. In any realistic scenario it would be much easier and filling to just feed on stellar radiation. Then of course there's the issue of how & why it feeds on intelligent species. Hundreds if not thousands of years between target systems, during which it will need to be in a basically-dead hibernation state ('In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.') You can model it pretty well from the more realistic generational space ship ideas. It would also take advantage of gravitational slingshots as much as it can (being intelligent would be very helpful here.)Īll of this means that the sucker is going to be very slow. Very little thrust, but excellent efficiency. Barring science fiction Warps and such, the only remotely plausible (still nuts, note) method I can think of is something like a planetary-scale ion drive, where it continuously accelerates and ejects a small amount of core mass at extremely high velocity. The creature could dump heat into its core when energy is plentiful (when near a star, or feeding,) and draw upon it when it's scarce (i.e. It could also serve as a giant heat sink/source to help stabilize its temperature.

The host planetoid could be the source of most the raw materials for the actual creature. This would dramatically cut down on the energy required to reproduce, and give it a structural core that it didn't need to grow itself. the biological portion is only a relatively thin (though still stupendously massive) layer on top.

But that's not much fun, so let's try and think of ways to make it even remotely plausible:įirst, the creature could use an actual moon or large asteroid as a core i.e.

Dead space brethren moon afraid