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

I think it's not only one of the most ridiculous things Star Trek has ever done, but one of the dumbest things I can think of in modern Scifi, more like a 50's b-movie level of idea.

And it's the basis of the entire plot.

I just...can't.

 

I will say that, like other things in Trek that sounded strange to me, I started to read about it. Actually, this method of powering something isn't too far off the mark of actual science. Mechanisms powered by spores of different kinds, Microbial Fuel Cells and so on are being studied.

While I still don't quite see why it was needed for the series, it is being studied and experimented with.

 

We don’t know for sure if it’s even real. It could be a cover for something else.

 

If it were just being treated as an additive to improve warp speeds, that would be more palatable.

What Stamets is suggesting, causing Starfleet to dust off the Crossfield class and create a new variation of them, is the idea of a universal series of "quantum roads" that the spores are in tune with, allowing the ship to exit normal space and...do...something magical that allows 90 lightyears to take 1.3 seconds to travel.

Even though they keep saying lanes and veins and roads or whatever, the ships appear to jump instantly from one point to another, bypassing any inbetween anyway. And they are going to other dimensions, the Glenn picking up a very violent hitchhiker on her last jump.

And apprently these conduits are rifled, causing helical scatches on physical terms with the hull.

 

Could be a way to grow larger mushrooms for pizza, or even to stem the Portobello mushroom shortage of the mid-23rd Century.

 

If it'll bring the price of those suckers down at Whole Foods I'm all for it.

 

I know! I always grill some when I BBQ, and would love those to be a little more economical!

The price being higher on those, there isn't mushroom to buy other food!

 

It basically sounds like yet another transwarp/slipstream/quantum catapult Faster Than Faster Than Light drive. The explanation seemed almost plausible until it didn't.

It's just the maguffin, and it'll inevitably go wrong. You cannae change the laws of biophysics.

 

I think something is going to go wrong when they test the spore drive. Probably get throw into the future, costing damage to the ship itself and a lost of life, meaning lot of her crew will die.

 

Well that, much like the war, we know kind of "go away" somehow by the 2260's. Or have been covered up/faded into obscurity without the rest of the fleet ever knowing.

Only it looks like everyone in the quadrant knows what's happening down to individual people. Even if no one is aware of her connection to Spock, he knows what's happening and that the person he grew up with is being dragged through the mud as a mutineer.

Maybe as far as he's aware, she made it to the dilithium mine and already considers her as good as dead.

 

Catapulted to the Delta Quadrant and forced to work with an enemy crew if they have any chance to get home in 70 years.

 

Biofuels and microbial fuel cells aren't expected to produce that much energy though - plants run on chemical energy like a lump of coal or barrel of oil - so its sort of like running a warp drive off a gasoline combustion engine - currently Starfleet uses matter-antimatter reactions, which are more powerful than nuclear fusion.

It sounds like the spores aren't actually powering the effect, they are just sort of interacting with something in space, like an existing network of wormholes.

This is the sort of thing where in the Star Trek: Encyclopedia, Mike Okuda would have to write a little note in italics saying "clearly warp drive can't be powered by chemical reactions, so we must assume the spores are some sort of subspace life form".

So I'll give it a go, and play Mike Okuda as best as I can:

"Prototaxites stellaviatorae is a species of fungus discovered by Starfleet sometime prior to 2256. The species is notable for it's ability to interact across interplanetary distances through a natural form of quantum entanglement, in which part of the protein structure of the mycelium spores released by the species form quantum entangled pairs of subatomic particles. In recent theoretical physics models, scientists have found a possible link between quantum entanglement and wormholes; we can assume that when Michael Burnham stood in the spore chamber in engineering in "DSC: Context is For Kings", she was witnessing the effects of an Einstein-Rosen bridge. The technology eventually fell out of favor by James T Kirk's era."

Thats the best I can do, with a lay interest in theoretical physics.

In recent years a number of New Age religious movements have attempted to appropriate aspects of theoretical physics into their beliefs, usually deeply unrepresentative of the actual theories. One idea is that where biology was previously thought to be entirely chemical, there could be a quantum component, such as in the way birds navigate. Anyone who knows High School physics can probably immediately see that they are not necessarily talking about things like quantum entanglement, but just mundane stuff like electrons being excited (an electron is a subatomic particle after all, just a familiar one) - but as with the "Double Slit Experiment" its become a favorite of people who want to argue that we have some sort of quantum soul and want to revive medieval ideas going back to Plato. I worry that DSC might take Star Trek a bit too close to pseudoscience and quackery.

 

I doubt she will in up in the Delta Quadrant. Beside she has the speed to get there in less in twelve minutes.

 

I suggested the connection elsewhere a few months back. I was told I was reaching. I screencapped the original post and gloated, as is the custom of my people.

It's clearly marked as a plot point for the entire series and set up to do something. I'd say that makes it the complete opposite of pointless.

I listened to Paul Stamets (the real one) talk abut mushrooms and.... I don't ahve a fecking clue what he was on about, but he sounded bloody confident in it. This spore drive.... pretty much the same. There's legs in the idea, scientists are generally mad bastards who tend to create science fact out of science fantasy. So for me, personally? Why not.

Besides - outwith Trek I've seen something similar in theory on the Expanse and that worked. I've also seen Doc Brown feul his nuclear reactor based time machine with a banana skin and half a can of coke. Spore drive? No problem.

 

If they had found a new type of dilithium crystal no one would say anything.

 

It's a fun, exotic idea.
I didn't like that they called it "organic propulsion" though.
It makes it sound like: Newton observed an apple falling, so our anti-gravity machine runs on apple sauce.
I wish it had been presented more like transporter technology but not limited by the range of a confinement beam. The spores would allow the ship to navigate and stay coherent along the subatomic network for the journey.
Maybe that is how it's supposed to work. Who knows.

 

That would still be the same crystal moderating element, artificial and for added speed.

Using the Force to go faster because they found the planet midichlorian spores come from and injecting them on the other hand...

 

People would.

But people would be saying less.

And there is a good reason for that.

Dilithium is some sort of mineral. Uranium ore is also an example of a mineral.

I think its safe to say minerals have more of a track record of being nuclear-level fuel sources than mushroom spores, which are basically the sexual reproduction vector of a mushroom. (Yes, the USS Discovery potentially runs on semen).

In the tech manual background material, dilithium is not a fuel source anyway, but is used as a regulator of some kind - the warp engine fires a stream of deuterium and anti-deuterium at each other, and they meet in the dilithium chamber.

 

Yeah, I mean look at TOS - we have a ship that does FTL travel and often near Lightspeed travel on Impulse drive -- and experiences ZERO Relativistic effects whatsoever (basically saying Einstein's Theory of Relativity doesn't actually apply.)
^^^
It's crazy that they posited a show like Star Trek (1966-1969) using such a ridiculous notion in such a series.

 

So magic rocks are more realistic than magic fungi?