What was "The Burn" and what caused it?

Whatever it is. The resolution will take about two and a half minutes of the last episode of the season... but it can't be... the Klingons or an AI, as those have already been used.

 

Maybe the solution will be sending Georgiou back in time so that she may perhaps prevent the burn from ever happening, that way they'll kill two birds with one stone...

 

Spoiler

looks like she’s going back in the next week or so. Question is, what kind of temporal havoc is wreaked because she does?

 

Spoiler

Georgiou: The dilithium, man! It's gonna BURN!!!!!!!
Starfleet: Sure, Phillipa sure.

 

Linus and his nose mucus are how the Burn will be prevented. You just watch.

 

LD already used mucus to solve a problem.

 

The Keenser Maneuver.

 

He sneezed on all the warp cores at once.

 

S'not easy.

 

Is there something LD hasn't used?

 

The moment when there was only few dilithium over, and the remaining dilithium suddenly became inert. That caused all the active warp engines to explode, destroying most Federation starships.

 

Where is it stated that faster computers could replace human (with "Ripper" DNA) interfaces?

 

Well, Season 1 established that a 23rd century computer is simply too slow to handle the processing needed to navigate the Mycelial network.
By the 24th century, they had artificial brains... so by the 32nd century, its more than likely a computer alone could handle the processing needed for Spore Drive. But since Discovery does have Tardigrade DNA, they could combine it with some organic circuitry (such as say a 32nd century equivalent of bio-neural gel packs - even though by that time computer cores would effectively be a combo of organic and synthetic circuitry).

 

Found it, it's in episode 4 of season 1. The ship should already have enough processing power (apparently thanks to the sphere data), since it can run Zora. From 3x04 we know you also have "to pierce the [Mycelial] subspace domain" in order to use the drive, probably what the DNA is needed for.
Even with the DNA incorporated into some kind of organic circuitry it's possible that a sentient being is still required for navigation. Perhaps Zora could do it which they haven't realised yet.

 

It would have happened that way in the TNG era...

 

Well, it has to be something and that something has to be simple enough for the audience to know what the hell they're talking about, so a computer virus is just as plausible as anything else. Although they already did the AI gone crazy so it would just be a repeat of basically the same thing.

 

I'm trying to make sense of what we've learned so far...
The origin of the Burn seems to be a Kelpien ship that sent a distress signal (actually a Romulan one) that some star turned into a melody that became part of many people's playlists, including the Barzans and Gray. So a lot of people heard it and it became embedded into their cultures. None of them seem to know that their childhood evergreen was composed by a star modulating a comm signal.
That's it, right? So far, it's really odd.

 

I don't think they have identified the Kelpian ship as the origin of the Burn. It is in the same nebula though.

 

To paraphrase someone... "Odd is our business".

 

Janeway said to Kim's duplicate the following: 'Weird is part of the job'.