Gonna make a sci-fi entity that is an AI supercomputer which consumes a planet's worth of resources in order to run, like it is the entire planet, all just for one singular being and its calculations, and it's also stupid as fuck.
Like people regularly pilgrimage out to try and get it to calculate something for them despite the fact that it's widely known that this machine is dumb as bricks. People just refuse to believe that something this big and impression and that takes so much energy to run can actually just be stupid. There are whole entire cults on other worlds that are dedicated to puzzling out the secret actually "smart" interpretations of it's conclusions, widespread disagreements about what the culture of its creators was (if they existed) and how they might impact things like the translation of data submitted or received, there have been historical teams who have worked night and day to understand the planet brain's language and workings and solve this riddle of how it's secretly smart, but prevailing wisdom remains that it just actually, factually gets everything wrong like 99% of the time.
Some people are convinced there's some fundamental flaw to how the planet brain works, and that if this flaw could be fixed then it would become an invaluable resource. So yet more resources and genius have been poured into figuring out what it could be and trying to secure the necessary grants and access privileges to attempt repairs. The few times anyone has actually gotten in to try and change the brain, though, the effect on its output has been negligible, and the brain has gradually reversed those changes and reset itself over time.
It's estimated that multiple billions of resources have been poured into figuring out the planet brain over the years. Experts have dedicated their lives to trying to understand it. Impassioned devotees have ruined themselves and their communities attempting to follow its advice. Even people who agree that it's stupid tend to agree that it should still be preserved and studied, even though trying to recreate some of its systems or apply the super advanced technology involved in its creation to other tech has yielded negative results (it makes everything else dumber too).
Basically it's the sci-fi equivalent of a money pit. Even aside from the energy the planet brain consumes as a planet itself (it's eventually going to spiral into the sun and be destroyed btw), intergalactic civilizations just keep pouring more and more into it because of the conviction that no one would waste THAT much on a stupid machine that did nothing. With the plot twist being that this is exactly what happened. The original aliens who invented it poured a ton of their energy into it out of the belief that a machine intelligence could figure out how to solve all their problems. Over time the investments in the project mounted, the sunk cost fallacy kicked in, and the planet brain even became their last hope of saving themselves from extinction because they had invested too much into it to allow it to fail. Now it exists as an accidental trap, ensnaring those civilizations that discover it and share similar enough cultural flaws as its creators, that they take up the cause of chucking more resources into it.
stormborns
theartofmadeline
ellievsbear
annaxmalina
baratheonpilled
pixelskylines
