The U.S.S. Discovery Spore drive, is it complete nonsense or is there a scientific theory I'm unaware of?

Yes and no.

Instant FTL? No.

Science-based? Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Stamets

lmao "science! fuck yeahhhh!"

Science based in that the dude who made the drive is named after a famous mycologist. Not sure how that makes it science based...

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

they dont however operate in a separate space outside of normal reality

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.

Much of the plant life on Earth is connected by a network of fungal mycelium that helps share resources. In Star Trek, that network of mycelium extends through the multiverse, connecting every planet in every universe. The spore drive allows the ship to travel along the network across all of spacetime instantly.

Current scientific theories do not support the existence of multiversal fungi.

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.

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.

1. I said nothing of the sort.

2. Star Trek's warp drive isn't really an Alcubierre drive at all.

Yeah, it also has aliens, matter-to-energy transporters + replicators, as well as universal translators and faster-than-light travel.

Complete drivel, Star Trek needs to get back to its roots and just be Horatio Hornblower fan fiction.

Would be much more interesting to hear your own thoughts instead of just lazily pasting a link to people who are paid to be haters.

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:

• actually allow a ship to enter warp from a sublight velocity
• permit the ship to control its direction while at warp, and
• would not require massive amounts of exotic matter,

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nonsense? In SciFi?

Well I never!

1. My apologies, I didn't look at the usernames and made a bad assumption.

2. 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 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.

Star Trek is a drama about societal issues in the context of a ship in space.

It's pretty short on science. Star wars is just religious fantasy.

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.

As others have hinted at, sharing a yes or no answer and pasting a link to a youtube video with no further context is not an adequate Daystrom submission. Citing a source is certainly acceptable, but your comment should make it's own self contained argument supported by those sources, not rely on users clicking through to an external site to understand what you are trying to say.

For some reason fungal mycelial networks and tardigrades were all the rage in pop sci and internet memes circa 2015. The writers just hopped on the bandwagon when they were deciding how their non-warp propulsion plot point would work.

Star Trek does better when it shows us the process of science and engineering rather than science itself.

The U.S.S. Discovery Spore drive, is it complete nonsense or is there a scientific theory I’m unaware of?

Both, since it relies quite heavily on Star Trek's Signature Subspace Science, and there's no real-life equivalent for it.

The spores are from the mycelial network, an organism/structure that exists in a subspace domain, and like subspace, is spread/connected throughout the universe/multiverse. The spore drive shifts the ship into that subspace domain, and uses the mycelial network to route the ship to the appropriate destination.

The closest things that might apply is the hyperdrives in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, or the space-folding drives in Dune, where you have a spanning extradimensional network that you can use to get to your destination, as long as you can find the right set of routes to get to where you want to go.

The mycelial network also exists largely within subspace. So far, we have yet to discover whether subspace exists or not.

Although it might go both ways these days, since it wouldn't be at all surprising if newer writers heard of Alcubierre's warp drive, and incorporated that into Star Trek as a mechanism for how it works.

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.

Especially since TNG already had creatures that lived within subspace, in Schisms. If humanoid-ish beings can live in subspace, fungal life doesn't seem that much of a stretch.

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.

IIRC, it's like the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy Hyperdrives. Once you get into spore-space/hyperspace, you get an infinite amount of choices to navigate through, but if you can figure out how to figure out your path, you can exit where you want. Though unlike the Heart of Gold, which tests every single possibility and impossibility simultaneously, the later iterations of the spore drive take a bit more after Dune, where a navigator can commune with the mycelial network and divine the way the ship should go, rather than needing inordinate amounts of computing power to brute force the solution.

How the ship is moved along the network after the navigator figures out the route is left as an exercise for the reader.

It’s more that Star Trek’s science advisor Dr. Erin MacDonald is a physicist who did her PhD thesis with the team in Scotland that got the Nobel prize shortly after she graduated.

As she puts it, her friends got her into watching Voyager when she was working on her PhD and she thought “oh cool, just what I am studying.”

There’s definitely a feedback loop going on, since Dr. MacDonald is whom they bounce their ideas off of.

She appears as herself - although as a Starfleet officer in the 24th century — in animated form in Prodigy, and explains ‘Temporal Mechanics 101’ in a learning module.

In the original Star Trek, that Alcubierre was inspired by, it wasn't explained at all. You just had warp engines and impulse engines. Warp engines made it so the ship could go at warp speed, but go too fast, and they could come off the ship, or the ship would explode.

It was later series that tried to have an explanation for how they worked.

Although I don't think the writers cared particularly much for whether they were theoretically possible or not, anyway. They work through subspace, and that doesn't exist in reality, so a lot of oddities could just be brushed under that.

The translator tech is not very far ahead of what we have today.

I would disagree with the translator. On the surface, yes, but it is incredibly far removed from how any of our translation technologies work.

The universal translator works by scanning your mind/brain signals, finding universal constants within it, and then constructs a translation that way. In theory, a novel alien could be parked next to a universal translator, and it would still be possible to translate for them, in the absence of a linguistic database.

I also think the medical tricorder will some day inspire/shape new tech similar to the communicator with cell phones.

It sort of has, but more in the other way, where the devices are inspired off its functions instead of its form. Going off of wikipedia, there's some speculations that a smartphone might well become our equivalent of a tricorder thanks to the massive amount of sensors that they have in them.