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Are you ashamed of your size? You should be! Compared to Ego The Living Planet or Unicron the planet who turns into a giant robot, you're not only puny and tiny, you're kind of dumb as well. If there's one thing that science fiction teaches us, it's that you need a sun-sized brain to think truly cosmic thoughts. (And to eat other planets for lunch, too.) But which life form in scifi is the hugest (and therefore the smartest)? We've got the answer.
Note: I was almost done compiling this list when I came across this helpful post from Lev Grossman at Time.com, and its equally helpful comments. (Although the person who thought the ship in Farscape was called "Moira" cracked me up.)
Mogo the Green Lantern planet, from Green Lantern. Created by Alan Moore in his classic "Mogo Doesn't Socialize" short comic strip, Mogo is a whole planet wearing a green-lantern ring and defending the galaxy against wrongdoers. He's been brought back in recent issues of Green Lantern Corps. and has actually managed to communicate with the otherLanterns, despite the whole "not socializing" thing. How does he travel around? How does he defend all the planets in his sector of the galaxy? It's not clear to me, but here are some more details, including a link to scans of his first appearance.
Ego The Living Planet, from Thor and various other Marvel Comics. Which sentient planet is bigger, Ego or Mogo? It's hard to say. But I'm going to come down on the side of Ego being more awesome, because he cruises around and acts sleazy — as in one of his most recent appearances, where he falls in love with Earth and tries to seduce the entire planet (which has become sentient). In a smackdown between Ego and Mogo, my money is on Ego, even though Mogo has the magic alien ring. You know Ego would fight dirty, because everything he does is dirty. 
The Beast With A Billion Backs from Futurama, "The Beast With A Billion Backs." The second direct-to-DVD Futurama movie involves our heroes contacting another universe, and then they encounter a planet-sized tentacle monster, voiced by David Cross. And Fry becomes pope of a new religion. (There are also planet-sized creautres in Tarkovsky's Solaris and in the GWAR mythos.( Here's the trailer.
Unicron from Transformers. We can only hope Michael Bay tries to take on this concept at some point — a mechanical planet who transforms into a humongous giant robot in space. And then he goes around eating other planets. In his first appearance, he was voiced by Orson Welles. I love how, in his planet form, he has giant metal horns sticking out. Party on, Unicron. But could he beat the planet-eating Galactus?
Gaea from John Varley's Titan. A planet-sized entity orbiting Saturn, Gaea is a "sentient space habitat that may or may not be batshit insane," as Bookslut puts it. The controlling intelligence of Gaea presents itself as a middle-aged woman who's obsessed with classic movies. In the second book of the Gaea trilogy, she offers miracle cures to humans whom she deems worthy, and in the third she provides a refuge for humans fleeing Earth's nuclear war.
Marvin The Paranoid Android, from The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams. Well, he's always reminding us his brain is the size of a planet, although we never actually see this mega-brain.
Solaris, The Tyrant Sun, from DC One Million. The "One Million" event, in which the Justice League traveled forward to the 853rd century to meet their curiously similar counterparts, was probably the 17th most demented thing Grant Morrison has written, and that's saying something. A giant artificial sun, Solaris causes his own creation in the late 20th century (thanks to a time-travel paradox) and then becomes one of Superman's arch-enemies. Finally, in the 500th century, Solaris becomes a good guy, but never quite gets over his jealousy of our solar system's "real" sun. So he plots to kill the original Superman, in a plot involving a galactic super-Olympics. To be honest, I've read this comic three times and still don't understand it.
Evil Nebula, from Captain Simian And The Space Monkeys. Half-human, half-black hole, Lord Nebula could run over Mogo and Ego and barely even notice. And the Evil Nebula thinks big — in the first episode, he decides he wants to absorb the entire universe into himself. ("It's an ego thing.") But he's not too big to come up with a monkey enemy for Captain Simian, the vicious Rhesus-2. Plus he's voiced by Michael Dorn, which is full of win.
The Behemothaurs from Iain M. Banks' Look To Windward (2000). Lev Grossman suggests these in his blog post. And StrangeHorizons describes them as "miles-long symboitic gasbags." They live in a massive drifting weightless
The Cloud, from The Black Cloud by Sir Fred Hoyle. In this classic 1957 novel, a Jupiter-sized interstellar cloud floats into our solar system and threatens all life on Earth. Scientists struggle to communicate with the Cloud — and they succeed. It turns out the Cloud has a "brain" made out of complex networks of molecules. And the Cloud turns out to be sort of size-ist towards poor limited humans:
[I]t is most unusual to find animals with technical skills inhabiting planets, which are in the nature of extreme outposts of life... Living on the surface of a solid body, you are exposed to a strong gravitational force. This greatly limits the size to which your animals can grow and hence limits the scope of your neurological activity.Eventually the Cloud has a mishap and decides to leave our solar system, before we can learn from its ageless wisdom about the universe. But not before it's like "There was no Big Bang, kthxbai."
The spaceship-eating amoeba, from Star Trek, "The Immunity Syndrome." An 11,000 mile single-celled creature, this huge but pretty monster has to be destroyed before it reproduces and eats the entire galaxy. There's also an episode of the Trek animated series, "One Of Our Planets Is Missing," where they go inside a similar huge creature that's draining their power and munching on planets. But in that case, Spock manages to communicate with the creature, which is another one of those size-ist jumbo sentients and doesn't believe that such tiny creatures as ourselves could be intelligent. You could also make a case that the massive planet-crusher in "The Doomsday Weapon" is sentient, although it's never made clear. And another giant Trek baddie, of course, is the "crystalline entity" who stars in some of the most boring TNG episodes. Oh, and then there's V'Ger from The Motion Picture.
Jane from the Ender's Game saga by Orson Scott Card. An artificial intelligence, Jane occupies the entire galactic ansible network and is the only one who can make faster-than-light travel possible. Her one weakness is that when the Galactic Congress shuts down the galaxy-wide internet, she shuts down too.
The Calebans, from Frank Herbert's Dosadi Experiment and Whipping Star. Huge, unimaginably advanced creatures, the Calebans manifest themselves as stars in our universe. They give humans the secret of the "jump door," which allows you to teleport anywhere in space instantaneously. As Timothy O'Reilly writes:
[T]he Calebans are as close to infinite beings as he can imagine. Their visible embodiments are stars, and on a deeper level the Calebans are one gigantic consciousness that forms the topological matrix of the manifest universe. The jump-doors are simply an expression of their pervasive existence behind or apart from space.The Calebans are super-advanced, but they have one weakness: they can't break a contract. Thus, one Caleban allows a psychotic human to torture it to death, which spells death for anyone who's ever used a jump-gate. Probably the best argument for contract-law reform ever. Despite this pitfall, the Calebans are the biggest and brilliantest life forms in scifi.
Comments
Oh my lord. Captain Simian! And you have a toy to scan!
Spin me indeed.
Wait, now I have to dig out my captain simian.
Also, you forgot to tag this post as a [en.wikipedia.org]
You forgot God from Futurama! Sentient galaxy? Cmon! ;>
gwar!? on io9!? *sniffle* yay! seriously... yay.
How did Solaris end up a parenthetical to the Futurama entry? And how did it become Tarkovsky's and not Lem's?
He/She is Fantasy, not sci-fi, but we mustn't overlook the Discworld series' astrochelonian, Great Atuin.
What, no Lexx?
[www.lilformers.com]
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Unicron v. Galactus
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Unicron V. Galactus V. Darth Vader/Death Star the Transformer sellout
@donkeyjote: I looked up Lexx, but couldn't find its size... how big is it? Is it actually planet sized? I know it eats planets.
Wasn't Marvin from HGTTG equipped with a planet sized intellect? Does that count?
Unicron does have the advantage of his "conscience", Starscream
What, no mention of the Solid State Entity from David Zindell's Neverness?
Surely a 'nebula-sized brain made up of millions of moon-sized biocomputers' is worth a mention?
For shame!
@Git Em SteveDave: Marvin is in there!
@HomoSapiensRex: Totally missed that one!
@Charlie Jane Anders: [io9.com] I knew I remembered io9 doing something featuring the various ship sizes and scale of them.
@Charlie Jane Anders: Sorry, I missed it b/c the name wasn't in bold and I just assumed it was still about Gaea, which I didn't care about. I am a bad io9er.
@Charlie Jane Anders: Its moon size-ish. Definetly Pluto sized. Then again, Unicron is more of a Pluto size as well.
check out the multitude of mega-entities in Benford's Galactic Center series.
@Tim Faulkner: Technically, Lem's Solaris was an ocean-like organism covering a planet, it wasn't the planet itself. Still, that would make it pretty huge.
@Charlie Jane Anders:
No biggie. Now let's have a shout-out for the sentient universe that evolves at the end of Olaf Stapledon's 1937 novel 'Star Maker' and we'll say no more about it...
@HomoSapiensRex: Just one universe?
What happened to that chart that showed all the artificial constructs. It was great to see the size differences between everything from the Halo rings, to the enterprise.
@Mathmos:
If I remember right, the titular Star Maker creates many universes - both pre and post our own. However, at the end of the book, ours joins its myriad parts into one supreme whole so it can attempt a communion with its creator. Which in true Stapledonian style fails miserably because the truth is all ultimately ineffable and stuff. I think. Old Olaf always was a mind****.
@mikecoscia: [io9.com]
Dude, no props for Zenoma Sekot?!
Not only is it conscious and planet sized it has the power of the Force! Which basically trumps every other freaky cosmic power.
No seriously. It basically ended the most costly war in the Star Wars EU's history!
@mikecoscia: Silly rabbit: [io9.com] do pay attention.
@CantankerousDave:I'm petty sure Great A'tuin is a female. These bozos claim its gender is unclear. [en.wikipedia.org] But I recall that in one of the books She travelled to a star to laya clutch of eggs that hatched into baby planetoid-sized turtles complete with elephant calves. Awwww.
Not that any of us serious Skiffy types adore such silly frippery such as Discworld.(harrumph) No indeed!
How about the planet-sized "cloud of evil" from the Fifth Element? You know, the one that calls you on the phone and makes you sweat 10w30?
The Ellimist and Crayak are pretty frellin huge.
I'd guess multivac from a few Asimov stories for both largest and most intelligent. It did eventually get so large that it could exist only in hyperspace and powerful enough to become god.
[en.wikipedia.org]
What about "The Beast Planet"? From cgi tv show War Planets aka Shadow Raiders.
The Beast Planet eats other planets whole, and before the intro of the first episode, has eaten Planet Tek!
It eats planets by opening up huge doors, and a huge claw comes out and grabs the whole planet, a field of death goes over the planet, and then the claw is retracted.
Check out this link
[www.veoh.com]
and welcome to Planet Tek...on Doomsday!
This was a Mainframe production, the people who did Reboot.
New Futurama movie? Yay!
I'm glad somebody already pointed out God -- don't know how you could mention Futurama without remembering him! That was a great episode.
Also, does Deep Thought count?
Maybe V-ger?
Also, stars were people, called "illuminaries", in Diana Wynne Jones's book "Dogsbody". Sirius is sentenced to live life on Earth in the body of, wait for it, a dog.
How about Iain M. Banks's giant Culture ships? Not planet-sized perhaps, but they could take on a sentient planet and win.
Also from Futurama was the InfoSphere, which was was pretty much just a giant brain. How ever its size tends to change shot to shot, on the out side its planet sized and big enough to house millions of flying brains, yet inside the size is reduced quite a bit.
There was the InfoSphere from Futurama as well, which was basically a giant brain. But its size is debatable I guess, it seems to change shot to shot. At first its planet sized and can house millions of brains, where as when inside its not as big.
@QuasarErazar: I remember this show. It reminds me of Titan AE.
Comment on The Largest Mega-Sentients In The Entire Universe The organism at the end of Greg Bear's music of the blood would qualify too, I presume?
@HomoSapiensRex: Sounds like it might be fun rereading Stapledon. I read everything of his that was available as a teeenager but can't recall any detail. Of course plenty of people speculate about the universe evolving sentience (though given current thinking about dark energy I think it might require faster than light communication.)
By the way, quite arguably we're all already part of information processing systems larger in scale than the individual human. Whether some of those systems can become conscious, well...
The series refers to the Lexx as being "the size of Manhattan."
There is a Jupiter-size ship that contains an Earth-size planet at it's core, in the Robert Reed book Marrow. And interesting read, and this ship stays at sublight, so you get wild time spans. Please, may I fanboyishly scream about Charles Stross's Accelerando, with its matryoshka-doll-sphere of smart matter. Or Singularity sky with its post-Singularity uber AI that becomes an super-being-un-god. I think Ian M. Banks needs a mention for his Minds that watch over entire ring worlds and ships the size of states (Rhode Island). I liked the Herbert cosmology that got worked into the TV show Andromeda, with its sentient stars. The Green Lantern planet reminds me of a God that's just doing his job but doesn't want to chat with the local rabble.
Greg Bear's Eon has an alien race that strives to collect all the knowledge in the Universe, just like V-y-ger wanted to. I think that most AI would reach the conclussion that one can not know everything unless you freeze the Universe so that no new information is created as those femtoseconds scream by.
DUDE you totally left out the pitcher plant beast from Voyager (which is absolutely sentient or it wouldn't know to target starships and people's brains and take them away in a cumbaya-ish fantasy land dreamworld).
And why'd you leave out the Borg? Yes, I'm sure they aren't technically one big Thing, but they are mega-sentients in the sense that you've got an entire race of beings thinking as one. THEY SO TOTALLY ARE STOP WRITING A COMMENT AGAINST IT NOW kthxbai.
There's a lot that was later extrapolated from Transformers: The Movie's weird vague concepts, including not only Unicron being a god, but Cybertron being inhabited by an opposing god, Primus, who had been responsible for luring Unicron into imprisoning himself in a planet in the first place and then created the Transformers to fight him. Later on there was even a Primus/Cybertron toy just as big as the one they made of Unicron. Primus first showed up in the Marvel comics in the late 80s and was never in the original cartoon, so he's kind of obscure as pop culture Transformers knowledge goes.
I guess Herbert's God Emperor Leto II counts. He controls the spice, the Universe is his for the most part.
@rileyjam514: There was also the alien "rift" that envelped the Enterprise and started killing off crew members. It was Nagilum.
@Nealjs: It still doesn't change the fact that this article misattributes Solaris to Tartovsky and not to Lem, the author of the original novel. And I think the Solaris organism deserves its own entry in this article if other not-quite-planet-sized organisms make the list. After all, none of the other entries in this list are living oceans of goo that make fantastically complicated and bizarre structures for no reason and create living facsimiles of people snatched from the memories of a research crew.
egads... Does no one remember the magnetic entities from Arthur C. Clarke's "Against the Fall of Night", and the sequel by Gregory Benford "Beyond the Fall of Night"? The Mad Mind, Vanamonde, and the precursor magnetic entities were at least light weeks in length.
Larry 832, yes, you're right! That old paper back is sure buried deep. There are the dark-matter birds in Baxter's book/s, whatever the name was. They are the size of galaxies, if I remember correctly. And there are numerous hive-mind swarms, like the one in Glen Cook's Star Fisher books.
Gurren-lagann: it hurls galaxies to its enemies.
Am I the only one who has read Isaac Asimov? Only one of the greatest sci-fi series ever, the Foundation series. Remember Gaia and Galaxia?
[en.wikipedia.org])
@Ubik2501: Exactly my point. How often does someone say: when we encounter an alien, they are likely to be so foreign we can't comprehend their sentience (but we rarely get this in scifi)? Well, Solaris is the classic example of an incomprehensible sentience. It's also mega (after all, are we judging mega by surface area, volume, or density -- Solaris is essentially the planet). Most of these other examples are merely anthropomorphic villains that happen to be big as planets (very clever). To me, Solaris exemplifies Mega-Sentience.
How do we know our own universe isn't sentient? It could be chatting to another universe right now. I bet you could find 1000 people who think it has spoken to them directly.
Also in HHGTTG I think it is safe to assume that the Earth would have had the same sentience as Deep Thought if it had not been so destroyed and had finished its programming.
Where's Erythro? It's the best psychic bacteria planet ever!
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@Tim Faulkner: Well said. Solaris remains one of my favorite SF novels to this day. Too bad I can't get through more than an hour of the original Russian movie without falling asleep. :)
@Jeff-Minor: The dark matter entities were called photino birds, and they were causing stars to prematurely age in order to make the universe more hospitable to them. I don't remember them being colossal in size, however, but it's been a long time since I read any of Baxter's Xeelee books.
@Git Em SteveDave: True but I think he was more of a "Q-ish" pest - considering he contacted Picard afterwards on his personal viewscreen. And being Q-ish he wouldn't necessarily count as a mega-sentient.
I'm surprised this list and the link at the top didn't mention Asimov's Gaia, Galaxia, or Multivac.
@ ac14112 No, not the only one, just one of the few ... You are correct sir (or madam as the case maybe) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_%28Foundation_universe%29 Gaia was the planet sized "seed" from which Galaxia would/did grow (is growing?) So ... as far as >one< fictional veiw ... Galaxia could be the largest ... longest established (known) "Large entity" However ... mention of the Borg should have been quickly countered with another, long established and known, single dimension of existence ... [url=http://www.startrek.com/startrek/view/library/aliens/article/119943.html]species 8479[/url] ... fluidic space and alla that ... eh? Then again ... those two "galactic" sized entities are, yet again, Dwarfed ... by the creatures playing mables with galactic "spaces" ... In the final scene of Men In Black ... *bows*
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