The Spore Drive Technology. What Do You Think About It?

Yeah, I don't think it's even that much of a stretch by broader genre standards. How is the spore drive sillier or flimsier than the Navigators "folding space" in Dune?

 

Maybe humans are the "default humanoid DNA that allows the other to breed with fairly easily with. Unlike the more difficult Klingon-Trill mating.

 

How could the galaxy resist this?

 

Star Trek isn’t Dune. And Dune is almost an entirely different genre to Star Trek, Beyond both falling under SF Fiction.
Even if it were closer, it’s these ti y differences between works that pretty much define their feel. It’s no good saying something works in say...Farscape, or Lexx, so it must also therefore work in Trek, Stargate or Dark Matter. Sometimes that will be the case, but as these different narratives are not one, it cannot by definition always be the case.

 

While that is a fair point, the overall objections that I've been reading against the spore drive could very easily be applied any number of concepts within Star Trek, i.e. evolution, larger implications, etc.

 

The only other transdimensional space travelling mushroom I can think of, is the Caretaker and his Missus. Two episodes, one of which was a pilot I grant. XD
Are there other silly or silly-ish things in Trek? Yes...they also tend to vary person to person, as does the Spore drive (God’s that name itself is silly. Like a zit bursting through space to fart things along...) but, it’s easy to smooth over the cracks when it’s not the same silly or silly-ish thing episode after episode. This is like finding out Starfleet uses elephant dung as the matter in the warp core, and there’s a deck with shovels and elephants accordingly, and we see our engineers shovelling it like steam engine every time the ship goes to warp....Ok maybe not that silly, but hopefully the hyperbole helps carry the point...this is recurring Silly. You can argue Q is recurring silly, but at least people could roll their eyes when they see John De Lancie is the guest star and choose to watch it or not (or Majel Barrett for another bit of potential silly.) because it’s not every episode or a cornerstone of the whole thing.
That...aside from the ‘could it be possible’ angle is what gets to people I guess. I mean it’s Spores and Fungus. It’s barely even environmentally friendly.

 

I personally don't think the spore drive is "a conerstone of the whole thing" (the "whole thing": meaning the entire series). I think it's just part of this season's story arc.

I can't remember the exact interview, but prior to the premiere someone from the production said something to the effect of [paraphrasing] "you will see some things that seem to go against canon, but bear with us and things will be explained". I took that to include the spore drive.

I think there will be reasons why the spore drive will be abandoned, and for the rest of the series (maybe starting sometime in the first season) the Discovery will use conventional Star Trek propulsion, with the spore drive storyline just being one multi-episode arc and not the entire point of the whole series, just like Dominion war multi-episode arc was not the entire cornerstone of DS9 or the Xindi weapon was not the cornerstone of ENT.

 

Then I will agree to disagree at this point. Not only do I not find it silly, but the "Spore Drive" actually serves as an opportunity to "go where no one has gone before" in to multi-dimensional space. The implications are far reaching, but for once I applaud Star Trek willing to explore those consequences rather than just abandoning them after an episode.

tl:dr One fan's silliness is another fan's entertainment.

 

True enough...but the whole thing (as other posters have said) will have to be wrapped up fairly soon, because it’s a prequel. The reset button on the paradigm shift has just been kicked into the long grass.

 

Oh I...mostly...agree. But it’s in the credits, and every last episode has depended on it in some way. There will be tech step backwards we haven’t seen since TWOK if this is gonna come out in the wash.

 

Is it a reset button if they actually address the consequences and why it is not longer around?

 

I think it must be, because it’s still the same thing you get at the end of say Voyager episodes, or with the Genesis device.

 

Huh?

 

If, at the end of, or sooner in DSC, they ditch the spore drive and pull in line with known Trek canon, as seems to be the intention, it will still be a reset button, no different to the paradigm shifts we saw regularly reset in Voyager or after the whole Genesis trilogy in the movies. Repercussions explored to an extent, ditched, and as we already know, never mentioned in the future. It just take longer, in screen time, to have done it.
It will have to be very very neatly wrapped up, because any time a later crew is surprised to find organisms in other dimensions, or could have done with a spore drive or some remnants of the tech, considered a human component in a ship particularly unheard of, or considers instant intergalactic travel completely unimaginable, it would contradict this. (Which is probably why the tech is so top secret and only on one ship now...I wonder if the anti cloak algorithm will ever make it out too. If the spore drive becomes widely known in Starfleet, then lots of things we have already seen unravel...tons of Voyager, the Picard Manoeuvre, Iconian Gateways, even The Bajoran Wormhole to an extent. DSC has to end up almost a buried chapter. IF they do what they have implied.)
Or they don’t go Prime, and we have a ‘My name is Khan’ cucumber sandwich scenario, which is, I believe, still something of a sore point in some quarters.

 

I don't count failed technologies as being reset buttons. They are often the bread an butter of Star Trek plots.

 

I agree. To an extent. But it’s an accusation often made, and I think it’s something we will see here again. The spore drive, love it or hate it, is gonna sit in the slightly silly abandoned tech drawer right next to Toms warp ten shuttle. And Stamets is gonna remind us that humans can’t exist everywhere in the universe at once without ramifications.

God help us if there’s lizards in the clearing in the forest. It’s where they go. (I have to say, I would love it if the whole narrative purpose of all this is to rehabilitate other kinks in canon...first ‘why is Sarek such a grumpy git’ then ‘Klingons, how many flavours?’ Followed by ‘Threshold...secretly makes more sense than you think’ along with ‘Venom spitting Worf and fishy Deanna, here’s another reason not to fuck with your DNA’ and ‘Banjoman...he’s a mushroom, honestly’.)

 

I'm sure that they will do this. I don't understand why they had to introduce a psychedelic spore drive tech, when the same thing could of been achieved with early versions of slipstream or trans warp drives. I thought the whole reason to be 10 years pre STOS, was to see the earlier struggles in getting to that exploration era. So far the earlier years have time crystals, space whales, tardigrade navigational computers, hairless Klingons.
If I didn't know any better I would have to say that we started in a mirror universe and will end up in in the prime universe.

 

I think this concept is laughable. There was no need to introduce that kind of thing. They could've used wormholes, or some artificial black holes or something as a means of instant travel from A to B. This spore drive is more like Harry Potter magic...
As to what I think will happen with it? Well, they'll probably discover that having a trip on shrooms isn't devoid of risk and will stop using that experimental magic, I mean technology...

 

Most of Trek's "science" is magic we fool ourselves into thinking is realistic because of some handwavium BS

 

If I had a nickel for every piece of Trek "technology" or alien biology that was really just hand-wavy magic I'd have...I dunno...a bunch of nickels.