What was "The Burn" and what caused it?
- Thread starter F. King Daniel
- Start date
They should learn it pretty quickly the first time they run into someone running at warp on dilithium.
Indeed yes. And learn more about the Burn in the process. Quite interesting, I would say.
I don't know, honestly. There are already plenty of questions of why the Federation would fall over dilithium when there were other forms of FTL and recrystalizing what dilithium they did have at play. I doubt going further into it would just raise more questions without satisfying answers. The Burn set the table, hopefully they'll leave it at that.
Why not? Gunpowder-operated internal combustion engines were all the fad at one point, before folks came up with gasoline. And when gasoline ran out, folks came up with carbon monoxide. If you don't have stuff that doesn't explode on your face or suffocate you, you use what you have.
VOY mentions other inferior types of lithium, namely paralithium. The galaxy is full of bad and worse alternatives. But it also offers this one very good alternative, which has irrelevant shortcomings such as its mining destroying the environment (Stamets is the first in Trek to bring this up) or it making everything blow up once in a blue moon. I don't see much reason to disbelieve in 99% of the uses by 99% of the users being related to dilithium, with superior systems such as slipstream dependent on even more expensive resources, and with inferior systems too inferior to be worth considering.
(FWIW, the old novel Battlestations! postulated that big and bad starships in the 23rd century did run on trilithium. Perhaps even bigger and badder ones would run on pentalithium?)
Timo Saloniemi
Trilithium was an explosive in GEN and DS9 but then again nuclear power was also an explosive before it was used as a fuel source for naval vessels and in the Trek universe interplanetary spacecraft. 
The trilithium mention is odd, it was never mentioned to be used as a power source, or in a power source in the other series. It could stop nuclear fusion, it was used in weapons, but never as some sort of power thing.
None of those lines explains why the Federation would fall.
While it is true that lots of different ways exist to generate power, it was never actually established how widespread they were. For all we know, there might have been only a few civilizations that used alternative modes while the vast majority of the galaxy resorted to dilithium-moderated M/AM warp cores. And just because alternatives exist, it doesn't mean the Federation would just collectively shrug and immediately switch to them. I mean, if all combustion engines spontaneously failed one day, I'd say it's very probable that the global economy would collapse despite the existence of electric cars.
We don't know how big the pre-Burn Federation actually was, either. They might have dominated the galactic economy, and any other civilizations dependent on trade with the Federation would feel the effects of the Burn too.
And, of course, it's only been one episode and we've seen only a few planets yet. For all we know, the Romulans might have actually exploited the fact that their ships were unaffected, we just haven't heard about them yet because they aren't active in the specific region Burnham found herself in. We shouldn't expect all possible questions to be answered before the first hour of the story was up.
We don't know how big the pre-Burn Federation actually was, either. They might have dominated the galactic economy, and any other civilizations dependent on trade with the Federation would feel the effects of the Burn too.
And, of course, it's only been one episode and we've seen only a few planets yet. For all we know, the Romulans might have actually exploited the fact that their ships were unaffected, we just haven't heard about them yet because they aren't active in the specific region Burnham found herself in. We shouldn't expect all possible questions to be answered before the first hour of the story was up.
If it came down to our survival, I imagine we could turn over in a relatively short period of time. What has Starfleet R&D been doing for the last thousand years, playing with user interface updates? There's nothing about Benamite being affected by The Burn, and I would imagine that Starfleet would've eventually cracked the Slipstream nut.
Under normal circumstances, I would say you're 100% correct, but the one thing that could prevent that from happening is DeLancie's Q, who developed an affinity for humanity, starting with Picard's development, and continuing through his involvement with Janeway. We are his favorite pets. Remember how big of a bone he threw to Picard in AGT. Q could have just let us all get wiped out by the anti-time incident if he truly didn't care about us. At one point he was clearly threatened by our potential to ascend to the Q's level, but after a while, he came around to the notion that it might not be a bad thing. I mean, why go through all the trouble of trials and games if there weren't some higher purpose beyond the simple entertainment of a higher-order being playing with us simple hairless monkeys fumble about like rats in a maze? Allowing the rest of his people to destroy all life in the galaxy would have made for wasted effort. And perhaps we are not the only ones still developing. Remember the Metrons highly valued the "advanced trait of mercy". Perhaps that was an evolutionary step the Q really had yet to make. They evolved from Trelaine-like sadism against lesser beings to more Metron-like elevated behavior.
But, yeah, at the end of the day, this is admittedly all wild speculation and is likely never to happen. I'm always a sucker for shows like this attempting to depict the "Grand Cosmic Chess Game", in realms above our own existence.
Likely so. There was the one brief shot in the season 3 trailer showing a bunch of SF ships crashing down on a planet (one of them was a Hiawatha type medical frigate). So the explosions weren't enough to decimate starships in a huge instant flash. It looks as if they simply stopped working. The lack of ability for interstellar travel could very easily impact the Federation's ability to govern and the member worlds retreated into their own systems with sublight fusion vessels and returned to more isolationist tendencies just to survive, "circling the wagons", so to speak.
So as explained so far, dilithium is a consumable, and eventually wears out with use, and the shards that are left can only power the drive so far. So. Range is limited, so is who can fly since its a rare commodity so, there's no cargo, passenger transports no "fleet" to guard and patrol, there were 7000 vessels in the 23rd. Imagine in the 31st? And probably galaxy wide presence. All colapsed. No ships to patrol, keep order. If ships exist there short range so only a few planets in say a 100ly range.
So its all local. Local goverments, few planet aliances, warlords, pirates.
So its all local. Local goverments, few planet aliances, warlords, pirates.
But I wouldn't expect our global civilization to survive it completely unscathed and rebound back to exactly how it was with the same degree of globalization in just a few years like nothing happened. We're talking about having to replace entire supply chains. Over interstellar distances, that would mean entire solar systems being cut off from resources required to rebuild their infrastructure. Thousands if not millions of starships would be lost in deep space on impulse power or maybe completely unpowered.
If it's a problem that the vast majority of the galaxy still uses M/AM propulsion after a thousand years, why wasn't it a problem that they didn't switch to a better alternative in the 200 years between the 22nd century and the TNG era? I've said before, that's like if we didn't invent any alternatives for coal power until the mid-21st century. It also wouldn't be the first time speculative fiction had civilizations existing in a comparative stasis for hundreds of years. Why should Star Trek be held to a different standard? It's not "hard" sci-fi and it never pretended to be one.
What is the point of jumping a thousand years in the future if everything from a tech standpoint is exactly the same? Star Trek has always been problematic on that front, but we’ve never done such a huge leap before.
The idea would’ve probably been more coherent if it had been something along the lines of the nature of subspace changing for whatever reason. Something like it started to disintegrate making our technology useless. Which would change when the Discovery brings forward the Spore Drive tech to the new era.
I know that in the 31st century future Daniels called home there were tantalizing hints at what technology was like in his century and that he himself was only "mostly" human. He told Archer that in his time school students had quantum discriminators in every desk and, of course, his Federation has access to time travel technology but we learned almost nothing about the 31st century Federation other than it commanded high levels of technology and had managed to survive 700 years past Picard's era.
It is sort of amusing that the one visit Archer makes to that century shows an archaic library full of paper and leatherbound books and almost no futuristic technology whatsoever, so either the disaster that destroyed the Federation happened early enough to prevent the tech from Daniels' generation or decade from ever existing or that 31st century humans still loved reading paper books in a physical library setting.
It is sort of amusing that the one visit Archer makes to that century shows an archaic library full of paper and leatherbound books and almost no futuristic technology whatsoever, so either the disaster that destroyed the Federation happened early enough to prevent the tech from Daniels' generation or decade from ever existing or that 31st century humans still loved reading paper books in a physical library setting.
