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

Sci-fi Historians have used kinder words but yeah this is true.

 

It's fair to call Star Trek extremely and clearly derivative of Forbidden Planet, and to note that the series introduced no new or particularly novel ideas to science fiction. It just used a few, reasonably well, on TV and that was enough to make it stand out.

 

There's a big advantage to getting there first. It's like how people credit Rod Serling for coming up with this genius idea for a supernatural anthology show when it was pretty much a straight port of a genre of programming that had been a staple of radio. TZ was well done, yes, but it greatly benefited from its moment in time.

Also, on the Trek front, I'd say there's a difference in using a bad science mcguffin for an episode and using one as a fulcrum for your whole show. Both are bad, but one is worse.

 

Transporter, universal translators and Warp drives are OK but Mushroom drives are not. Isn't that being biased.

 

Correct. I'm glad that's settled then.

 

Absolutely Right™.

 

Those were demanded by the needs of creating an accessible TV show in the 1960s about a spaceship traveling from planet to planet. Warp drive could be rocket drive or quantum drive or whatever -- it's just "how the ship goes." The mushroom drive, on the other hand, is a goofy idea that exists solely as a mcguffin. If it wasn't for the cover provided by the talk of quantum physics, it would be laughable. And it still seems silly.

Sitting through the interminable Klingon subtitles makes me appreciate the universal translator all the more.

 

I’m glad there are so many theoretical physicists and engineers here to explain why one fictional technology is clearly more realistic than another fictional technology.

 

Well, there aren't. But we all have opinions, and this being a BBS we're eager to share them.

I just cant get past the giggle test with the spore drive. It seems so silly to me. I would have been happier with crushed unicorn horn in the dilithium chamber.

 

It doesn't take a scientist to understand what a MacGuffin is. Some are clever and some are pointless. This one is pretty pointless so far.

 

Or what a fungus is.

 

Spores which can save and share information of the Universe on quantum level. Why not. Quantum entanglement can transmitt information.... okay now im out of knowledge

 

As long as there is some realistic happenstance like it all blows up in their face I'm all for it.

But jumping the shark with such supertech creates such a poor environment.

 

A violin produces beautiful sound but if you reduce it down descriptively to "rubbing horse hair on cat guts" it sounds decidedly unromantic.

Likewise there is a bit more to Star Trek than "derivative Forbidden Planet clone".

Also, I would say the quality of a show isn't in how many new ideas it introduces (zero for most things), but how well they are used. I don't mean to be rude, I just feel you are missing the forest for the trees. Star Trek might be a product of chance, as you say, but it was one where hundreds of factors came together, including a great production team with big ideas, and a pretty epic cast that is today more remembered for the work impressionists do on them, rather than the Lennon-McCartney duo of stage and method acting that Shatner and Nimoy were.

 

I'm a trained scientist, is that close enough?

Star Trek has had mcguffins before that were shite science, but as Christopher recently pointed out the show's big picture identity was quite faithful to factual stuff for the most part - it was trying to be believable from the start. It mostly succeeded and was far better than contemporaries.

I would rather people not add to the legacy of stupid macguffins - hopefully there is more to this space fungus than a bit of a different cell structure - but then if this is some kind of energy life-form, how is it even a eukaryotic species anymore, let alone kingdom fungi?

 

You might have something there. Add a bic lighter and you have a new form of propulsion. Please, don't let the STDSC writers get "wind" of this

 

I said this on Reddit, but I think the Shroom Drive is exactly the kind of wacky, off-the-wall idea that would have been at home in TOS.

Making it a glitchy, dangerous technology opens a lot of storytelling possibilities, especially if the unintended consequences change week-to-week. The set-up to the Mirror episode seems clear.