Daystrom Institute
Welcome to Daystrom Institute!
Serious, in-depth discussion about Star Trek from both in-universe and real world perspectives.
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Rules
1. Explain your reasoning
All threads and comments submitted to the Daystrom Institute must contain an explanation of the reasoning put forth.
2. No whinging, jokes, memes, and other shallow content.
This entire community has a “serious tag” on it. Shitposts are encouraged in Risa.
3. Be diplomatic.
Participate in a courteous, objective, and open-minded fashion. Be nice to other posters and the people who make Star Trek. Disagree respectfully and don’t gatekeep.
4. Assume good faith.
Assume good faith. Give other posters the benefit of the doubt, but report them if you genuinely believe they are trolling. Don’t whine about “politics.”
5. Tag spoilers.
Historically Daystrom has not had a spoiler policy, so you may encounter untagged spoilers here. Ultimately, avoiding online discussion until you are caught up is the only certain way to avoid spoilers.
6. Stay on-topic.
Threads must discuss Star Trek. Comments must discuss the topic raised in the original post.
Episode Guides
The /r/DaystromInstitute wiki held a number of popular Star Trek watch guides. We have rehosted them here:
- Kraetos’ guide to Star Trek (the original series)
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: The Animated Series
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: The Next Generation
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- Darth_Rasputin32898’s guide to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- OpticalData’s guide to Star Trek: Voyager
- petrus4’s guide to Star Trek: Voyager
view the rest of the comments
Yes and no.
Instant FTL? No.
Science-based? Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Stamets
Science based in that the dude who made the drive is named after a famous mycologist. Not sure how that makes it science based...
Just barely, but isn't that normal for treknobabble to be ripped from science headlines?
Usually it is, but nothing in the wiki you linked to even hints to travel with/through mycelium. Im actually a fan of Discovery, but the only hint of science in the spore drive is the fact that mycelium and fungal networks do exist, they dont however operate in a separate space outside of normal reality. Unless im missing some cool research
Well, that would be difficult to prove one way or the other.
But since we've already got the fictional construct of subspace, the notion of a mycelial species that can extend through it seems...within the realm of truthiness, all things considered.
The part I've never fully grasped is how one travels along the network, but then, I've never fully grasped how the warp coils are supposed to work, either.
The original question for this post was whether or not there was any actual science behind the spore drive. You said yes and no. Please enlighten me as to what scientific theory you are getting the yes part of your answer from. Because I read through your linked Wikipedia article and couldnt find anything about how a spore drive could even be theoretically possible. The spore drive is purely techno babble. The warp drive on the other hand, while being mostly techno babble, has some grounding in actual reality and scientific theory.
Edit: I wasnt paying enough attention when writing this post and assumed I was replying to the original commenter. My apologies to everyone.
I said nothing of the sort.
Star Trek's warp drive isn't really an Alcubierre drive at all.
My apologies, I didn't look at the usernames and made a bad assumption.
You are correct, my point was that the warp drive did fit within our understanding of theoretical physics at the time. So much so that it eventually inspired the Alcubierre drive. I couldnt find a way that the spore drive fits within our understanding of physics.
I and the physicists I know will go to the mat on the principal that the Alcubierre Drive is the first real life physics closed form proof of a warp drive.
For the purposes of this discussion though, the more fundamental point is that Alcubierre’s theoretical proof of concept for warp drives was created in the mid 1990s nearly 30 years after TOS first broadcast and TNG had completed its run.
As I have said here before, following the norm in mathematics-based theory development, Alcubierre started with a tractable corner case. This means he set a number of obviously necessary parameters to zero to make it possible to get to a closed-form solution that didn’t rely on crunching numbers.
His objective in his PhD thesis was prove there was an exception General Relativity that makes warp drives possible theoretically.
He did that, and as is usual with corner solutions, came up with something fairly absurd that would involve massive amounts of exotic matter and couldn’t steer a course due — simply because he intentionally set those parameters to zero for the purposes of the proof.
It’s a misunderstanding of the way theoretical reasoning and research gets done to say that Alcubierre’s warp drive isn’t the one in Star Trek, simply because he chose the simplest case for his proof. The Star Trek warp drive would involve setting these parameters to positive values - but that doesn’t mean it’s a different theory at the fundamental level.
As usual, more realistic applications of the theory, with nonzero values for those parameters that would:
are very likely to involve massive amounts of numerical approximations calculated by a computer and advances in materials science.
Unless someone finds a mathematical trick to get around the numerical approximations with a better closed form solution — and comes up with a materially different basic warp drive equation — whatever we get eventually from this line of research will still be viewed as Alcubierre’s drive. Or, also likely an Alcubierre-OtherPerson drive.
Probably the most salient point - one cannot credibly claim that the warp drive was "based on science" that hadn't yet been published, and wouldn't be for three decades.
I was not saying that the warp drive was based on the Alcubierre drive. My pont was that the warp drive was more grounded in physics than the spore drive, so much so that it inspired the Alcubierre drive.
That's circular reasoning, though.
The fact that Alcubierre was inspired by Star Trek to come up with something (theoretically) workable does not mean that the warp drive as originally conceived was somehow "grounded in physics." At the end of the day, the similarities are pretty superficial.
I'll go ahead and concede my point. I haven't watched enough original Star Trek and definitely dont have enough knowledge in physics to argue this further. My understanding was that the warp drive was kept just vague enough to be argued to be theoretically possible. But honestly, I'm not a physicist, so I am probably missing something obvious.
Yup.
And that Alcubierre’s effort, as a theoretical physics PhD student, to prove mathematically that there was a an exception to General Relativity that would make warp possible, was inspired by Star Trek’s fictional drive and not vice versa.
Which imaginary treknologies strike you as the most scientifically sound?
For me it's the replicator turning shit into food, but everything may as well be magic.
I think there are a couple treknologies that exist now, or at least are pretty close. The translator tech is not very far ahead of what we have today. The communicator actually influenced the design of early cell phones. Trek predicted quite a few real life technologies. I definitely think something similar to the replicators will exist eventually, hell 3D printing food already exists.
In terms of the more out there treknologies, I think the gene editing that is illegal in the federation is pretty scientifically grounded. I also think the medical tricorder will some day inspire/shape new tech similar to the communicator with cell phones.