First I say, I haven't watched and won't. The concepts in the show are still interesting to discuss.
As much as I'm mildly interested in this Burn thing just as a curiosity to see what the writers come up with, I don't have real faith that they aren't going to explain it without some heavy handed environmental extremist nonsense. We used too much dilithium, so it all blew up!
Still, there are some real issues with this. The idea that dilithium is the main source of FTL travel and no one can come up with an alternative idea that can become widespread is absurd in a science fiction show where IDIC and ingenuity were standard fare.
I'll be impressed if they have a good explanation for it.
Now, the idea of banning universal truths like the mushroom kingdom or time travel makes them impossible to ever see again is also ludicrous. Nothing can stop some fundamental property of the universe from being discovered or rediscovered. It isn't like burying the name of the spy you used to blow up Q'onos. Now it might take them 1000 years to rediscover it, but it will happen, but without FTL travel, no idea gestapo can stop it from being rediscovered somewhere else.
I haven't seen episode 2 yet, but if you're referring to it's appearance in episode 1 that didn't bother me, I didn't even notice it myself cause it's just an extra ship flying in the background. It could just be intended as an easter egg for all we know, but even if it's not Star Trek has ALWAYS reused assets for various things.
The idea that dilithium is the main source of FTL travel and no one can come up with an alternative idea that can become widespread is absurd in a science fiction show where IDIC and ingenuity were standard fare.
Good thing nobody's said that, then. Book doesn't have the stuff he needs to make quantum slipstream work, tachyon solar sails work but take too long for what he needs, and I can't recall at the moment but he had a reason why he couldn't use transwarp.
Mycelial tech took until the 23rd century to find - and there have been spacefaring civilizations since about a billion years ago or so (the Preservers), none of whom ever stumbled across it. Heck, if it were that easy, the Kelvans never would have been reduced to hijacking the Enterprise, rejiggering the warp drive, and trying to reduce the entire crew to a pile of D12s in order to return to the Andromeda galaxy. All they would have had to do would be to talk somebody into researching interstellar mushroom spores. No, that took somebody with a literally insane idea of how mycelial root networks function just randomly stumbling across the one fungal species that actually did what he thought. Not exactly something that's gonna happen every Tuesday, you know?
As for slingshot time travel, the Enterprise found that one completely by accident, because they managed somehow to blunder their way into the accretion disk of a black hole and had to warp out of there. No sane space traveler is getting any closer to one of those tears in reality than they have to, because the process of being pulled in will tear you into a stream of subatomic particles (it's called "spaghettification", because sometimes even astrophysicists just can't resist the obvious gag). Doing it on purpose also calls for something that seems insane on the face of it - you head straight toward a large-enough star, then hit the warp drive on its highest setting, and if you get it right you time-travel, and if you get it wrong you risk falling straight into the star. If you don't know that there's a "right way", it's just a fancy, highly expensive way to commit suicide. Nobody's messing around with that just to see what will happen, not when they can already travel at warp speed without a slingshot. (The reason we use slingshot orbits for space probes is in order to gain extra acceleration, saving on rocket fuel. That's not really a major concern for a starship.)
Basically, hiding how to do time travel is easy, because it violates every known law of physics. It's the reason why so many physicists in our world deny the very possibility of FTL, because somehow (for reasons I don't quite have the math to understand) it implies reversal of causality in information transmission. Just don't tell people it can be done, and nobody outside certain life-endangering situations will have any reason to try.
The D'deridex uses an artificial quantum singularity. And Starfleet (and apparently Klingon) ships use matter/antimatter reactions. Again, dilithium crystals are not a power source. They enable the energies employed to be channeled into a warp drive. (And, as has been pointed out, if you're willing to still take years between stars, low-yield warp drives can operate without dilithium - the Phoenix, for instance, wouldn't have had access to dilithium, as apparently it's not found on Earth.) We don't know if the Roms used it, although given available data it seems likely. We also don't know why they haven't taken over the galaxy - maybe they all decided to follow the teachings of Surak, maybe they wiped themselves out in a massive internecine war, maybe they made a Q mad, maybe we just haven't seen them yet.
Your complaint, and continuing argument, is based upon a misunderstanding of the available information, and of the lack of same.
Jon once again you are a master of re-stating the plainly obvious and lacking any sort of reading comprehension. I am not misunderstanding anything. I never once suggested whatsoever that Romulan ships were powered by dilithium. I said they were powered by artificial singularities and to the best of my knowledge, there was never a mention anywhere in a canon source that said they require dilithium for anything. That much is abundantly obvious. Again, I never said it powers the ships.
If you or anyone else want to claim that the warbirds absolutely require dilithium for something on the warbird, by all means show the canon source for this and I will believe you. Until then it is assumption and conjecture. For all anyone knows, Romulans mined dilithium for commerce or other purposes besides anything to do with FTL.
I want to say that Geordi mentions something about Warbirds not using dilithium in the TNG episode Timescape. Again, I could be wrong on that however I am confident there was never any mention of Romulan warbirds needing dilithium.
The Romulans were known to have developed a multitude of different technologies that are either the first of their kind or unique to the Romulan Star Empire.
You are not wrong, Geordie did say they don't use dilithium in their drives.
Avatar kind of stole the dilithilum idea for their unobtanium (and I am fairly sure Roddenberry stole it from someone earlier in the grand tradition of borrowing things in sci-fi), it makes the best and safest (and most compact) regulator valve for the antimatter stream for matter/antimatter reactors (or "warp reactors" in Trek terms).
And M/AM reactors are one of the few things that put out enough energy to power warp drive very fast. The Romulans had the problem of not having much of it (Remus must have been their biggest source even though it was hideously difficult to mine it there), but proximity to the resource, bad as it was, was probably the reason the settled Romulus in the first place.
Interestingly, the the people who made one of the star maps (I think it was the one canonized in PIC but I am not sure) placed the RSE where they did because it was a patch of older, less mineral rich stars which fit the idea that the Romulans were a bit resource poor (Joanne Linville's character mentioned they were "poor but proud" or words to that effect in TOS).
Apparently the Romulans developed the singularity drive to get around their dilithium shortage though they probably still used M/AM reactors for other things (probably smaller ships that could use smaller, lower quality crystals and possibly planetary powergrid reactors where the idea of a singularity on the surface sounds more than a bit insane). And of course they would have to use the crystals in the Klingon ships they got in the mid 2260s.
It is also possible that they use them in their plasma torpedo launchers since they are apparently a form of "warp plasma" (which could explain how one caught up to the Enterprise which was running away at warp 7).
There really is not a good reason why singularity cores did not spread to other factions after "the burn", especially with the hints that the Romulans were part of the galactic union by Daniels time.
As for the time cops enforcing a total ban on time travel, unless CBS goes the magic wand route that is not possible since it would rather quickly take an infinite number of time cops to do that and cover all the quantum branchings (though maybe they could take away the infinite number of typewriters and draft the monkeys for that....).
And even if they could scrape up an infinite number of time cops there are a few things like the Guardian of Forever and the Prophets that they still would not be able to do anything about even if they could keep a lid on all the natural time anomalies people run into.
The idea that dilithium is the main source of FTL travel and no one can come up with an alternative idea that can become widespread is absurd in a science fiction show where IDIC and ingenuity were standard fare.
Good thing nobody's said that, then. Book doesn't have the stuff he needs to make quantum slipstream work, tachyon solar sails work but take too long for what he needs, and I can't recall at the moment but he had a reason why he couldn't use transwarp.
Mycelial tech took until the 23rd century to find - and there have been spacefaring civilizations since about a billion years ago or so (the Preservers), none of whom ever stumbled across it. Heck, if it were that easy, the Kelvans never would have been reduced to hijacking the Enterprise, rejiggering the warp drive, and trying to reduce the entire crew to a pile of D12s in order to return to the Andromeda galaxy. All they would have had to do would be to talk somebody into researching interstellar mushroom spores. No, that took somebody with a literally insane idea of how mycelial root networks function just randomly stumbling across the one fungal species that actually did what he thought. Not exactly something that's gonna happen every Tuesday, you know?
As for slingshot time travel, the Enterprise found that one completely by accident, because they managed somehow to blunder their way into the accretion disk of a black hole and had to warp out of there. No sane space traveler is getting any closer to one of those tears in reality than they have to, because the process of being pulled in will tear you into a stream of subatomic particles (it's called "spaghettification", because sometimes even astrophysicists just can't resist the obvious gag). Doing it on purpose also calls for something that seems insane on the face of it - you head straight toward a large-enough star, then hit the warp drive on its highest setting, and if you get it right you time-travel, and if you get it wrong you risk falling straight into the star. If you don't know that there's a "right way", it's just a fancy, highly expensive way to commit suicide. Nobody's messing around with that just to see what will happen, not when they can already travel at warp speed without a slingshot. (The reason we use slingshot orbits for space probes is in order to gain extra acceleration, saving on rocket fuel. That's not really a major concern for a starship.)
Basically, hiding how to do time travel is easy, because it violates every known law of physics. It's the reason why so many physicists in our world deny the very possibility of FTL, because somehow (for reasons I don't quite have the math to understand) it implies reversal of causality in information transmission. Just don't tell people it can be done, and nobody outside certain life-endangering situations will have any reason to try.
If he doesn't have what he needs, then its reasonable to assume it is not widespread, isn't it? Book is some guy who makes his living doing courier jobs if I'm not mistaken. He's one of the people that would want access to better FTL before some farmer.
We don't know anything about the mushroom tech pre ST:D, because it was invented by ST:D writing, kind of an issue with fiction. However, this stuff is supposedly the stuff that lines the walls of the universe, and without it the universe dies. It is necessarily going to be more discoverable than not because of that. You can't have fundamental parts of the universe being out there without someone finding out about them, because every theory is going to have holes in it until you find that part.
Theory is the key here. It goes for time travel or mushrooms or whatever. Someone is trying to solve the mysteries of the universe, and their theory expects certain things to happen, but they don't, or things happen that shouldn't be possible. Why? By everything they've figured, it should work one way, but it doesn't, so there must be something else there.
Alternatively, theory suggests something should be possible, but they need to be able to test it. Slingshotting a probe around a black hole or star or whatever to test a theory would be pretty easy, and you end up finding the probe before you built it if you did it right. Someone will test it and do it right some day.
Just don't tell people it can be done, and nobody outside certain life-endangering situations will have any reason to try.
And this is just BS. The world is replete with examples of people doing/thinking crazy stuff that no one thinks is possible, ignoring the naysayers. The sound barrier ring a bell? The math explicitly told us that it was impossible, because as you approached Mach 1, the drag on an aircraft should approach infinity. We knew that equation was fantastic for calculating drag on aircraft so it had to be right, but it wasn't. The math isn't wrong though, just the assumptions used to get that equation. Turns out it only works well within a range.
I mean we've been told for decades the world food/oil/snow/tree supply should be gone by now. Scientists said so! They can't have gotten it wrong, can they? Well empirically, they did.
The entire principle of the scientific method is based on skepticism, and questioning everything, even fundamental truths and established science. That is why we know Newtons laws of motion are not accurate, relativity taught us that. Some day we may well learn that FTL travel is possible because someone disproved special relativity, or found a way around it. We already know relativity has its problems, especially with quantum mechanics, but like Newtons laws, it will probably still be highly useful within a certain range of conditions.
People explore to find something new, question conventional wisdom or even established science, and many times find out that what people used to think was wrong, and sometimes they might even do it by accident like blundering too close to a black hole.
Your pain runs deep.
Let us explore it... together. Each man hides a secret pain. It must be exposed and reckoned with. It must be dragged from the darkness and forced into the light. Share your pain. Share your pain with me... and gain strength from the sharing.
Book is some guy who makes his living doing courier jobs if I'm not mistaken. He's one of the people that would want access to better FTL before some farmer.
Book is a contracted courier. He's given exactly what the Mercantile calculates he needs for each run, just enough to get there and back; anything more is on his dime, which he spends mostly collecting endangered species, it would appear. The only reason he doesn't have enough dil right now is because the collision with Burnham broke his dilithium recrystallizer, and neither of them knows how to repair it. (I got the feeling, from his dealings with the Mercantile, that his recrystallizer was kind of a black-market item, something they didn't want people to have.)
The sound barrier ring a bell? The math explicitly told us that it was impossible, because as you approached Mach 1, the drag on an aircraft should approach infinity.
That is a gross misstatement of Mach's equations. The math said it was "impossible" given the design of wings as used up until the Bell X-1. Nothing in them states that it's "impossible" to merely exceed sound. Hell, bullets do it routinely - that loud BANG! is in fact the bullet crossing the sound barrier, and the muffled >bang< of a "silenced" pistol is what happens when it's subsonic. P-51 Mustangs could break the sound barrier by diving, with the minor side effect of having the wings torn off the plane (rendering it a falling bomb with a man inside, which as I'm sure you can see is a suboptimal result).
That's why any method of FTL is going to have to involve sidestepping velocity as such, whether it be through the exploitation of some kind of hyperspace (like the subspace domain used by warp drives), or by using Alcubierre's idea of taking advantage of a loophole in Einstein (an object with mass cannot achieve nor exceed the speed of light as it moves through space, as the energies needed to do so would be transfinite - but the equations don't limit how fast space itself can expand or contract, so all you need is a way to make it contract in front of your ship and expand behind it, and you're off like a shot while still not technically moving through space. You're taking it with you).
I think people are trying to read a little TOO much into the situation without enough information.
We have a major mystery here. What caused The Burn?
Fact of the matter is... we don't know. Odds are that will be the big mystery that we will get pieces of over the course of the season.
As for the Romulans... we don't even know if they fully recovered enough to have major shipyards or anything to produce ships after Hobus. Yea we saw the Zhat Vash fleet, but what do you expect from sneaky types. They probably hid them away for a rainy day.
Also if the Romulans had singularity cores... why aren't we seeing Romulans everywhere? Whatever The Burn was... it had some serious, wide ranging effects on pretty much everyone.
The Class C shuttle could have been a replica or someone fixed it up. Its no different than the Klingons using the basic D7 design from the 23rd century well into the late 24th at least. Also the Class C seemed to be a bit bigger than say the Type 6 from TNG.
Now... with 23rd Century tech the Spore Drive is probably still pretty unreliable. However... jumping into this time period... it might actually make the tech more viable without the need for an organic pilot. Which means Stamets was on to something WELL ahead of time. He just didn't know it. And since the Spore Drive doesn't rely on the standard Cochrane style M/AM core... she could very well hold the key.
Ultimately... its a case of we'll just have to wait and see.
Now... with 23rd Century tech the Spore Drive is probably still pretty unreliable. However... jumping into this time period... it might actually make the tech more viable without the need for an organic pilot. Which means Stamets was on to something WELL ahead of time. He just didn't know it. And since the Spore Drive doesn't rely on the standard Cochrane style M/AM core... she could very well hold the key.
Ultimately... its a case of we'll just have to wait and see.
An extremely dangerous key considering previous seasons. It is not a wise idea to use a FTL technology that can destroy the universe.
Episode 3 better have a flashback with an extremely good reason how Burnham was easily able to locate the USS Discovery within less than a day of their arrival in the 32nd Century.
Book is some guy who makes his living doing courier jobs if I'm not mistaken. He's one of the people that would want access to better FTL before some farmer.
Book is a contracted courier. He's given exactly what the Mercantile calculates he needs for each run, just enough to get there and back; anything more is on his dime, which he spends mostly collecting endangered species, it would appear. The only reason he doesn't have enough dil right now is because the collision with Burnham broke his dilithium recrystallizer, and neither of them knows how to repair it. (I got the feeling, from his dealings with the Mercantile, that his recrystallizer was kind of a black-market item, something they didn't want people to have.)
The sound barrier ring a bell? The math explicitly told us that it was impossible, because as you approached Mach 1, the drag on an aircraft should approach infinity.
That is a gross misstatement of Mach's equations. The math said it was "impossible" given the design of wings as used up until the Bell X-1. Nothing in them states that it's "impossible" to merely exceed sound. Hell, bullets do it routinely - that loud BANG! is in fact the bullet crossing the sound barrier, and the muffled >bang< of a "silenced" pistol is what happens when it's subsonic. P-51 Mustangs could break the sound barrier by diving, with the minor side effect of having the wings torn off the plane (rendering it a falling bomb with a man inside, which as I'm sure you can see is a suboptimal result).
That's why any method of FTL is going to have to involve sidestepping velocity as such, whether it be through the exploitation of some kind of hyperspace (like the subspace domain used by warp drives), or by using Alcubierre's idea of taking advantage of a loophole in Einstein (an object with mass cannot achieve nor exceed the speed of light as it moves through space, as the energies needed to do so would be transfinite - but the equations don't limit how fast space itself can expand or contract, so all you need is a way to make it contract in front of your ship and expand behind it, and you're off like a shot while still not technically moving through space. You're taking it with you).
Orrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.....we just don't know. Just because WE don't know how to travel faster than light yet, does not mean everyone out there can not. We humans gotta stop thinking we know it all, and no one else out there might be better than us. I could see someone handing an alien all that stuff you said and go, "you people don't know what you are talking about."
The idea that dilithium is the main source of FTL travel and no one can come up with an alternative idea that can become widespread is absurd in a science fiction show where IDIC and ingenuity were standard fare.
Good thing nobody's said that, then. Book doesn't have the stuff he needs to make quantum slipstream work, tachyon solar sails work but take too long for what he needs, and I can't recall at the moment but he had a reason why he couldn't use transwarp.
Mycelial tech took until the 23rd century to find - and there have been spacefaring civilizations since about a billion years ago or so (the Preservers), none of whom ever stumbled across it. Heck, if it were that easy, the Kelvans never would have been reduced to hijacking the Enterprise, rejiggering the warp drive, and trying to reduce the entire crew to a pile of D12s in order to return to the Andromeda galaxy. All they would have had to do would be to talk somebody into researching interstellar mushroom spores. No, that took somebody with a literally insane idea of how mycelial root networks function just randomly stumbling across the one fungal species that actually did what he thought. Not exactly something that's gonna happen every Tuesday, you know?
As for slingshot time travel, the Enterprise found that one completely by accident, because they managed somehow to blunder their way into the accretion disk of a black hole and had to warp out of there. No sane space traveler is getting any closer to one of those tears in reality than they have to, because the process of being pulled in will tear you into a stream of subatomic particles (it's called "spaghettification", because sometimes even astrophysicists just can't resist the obvious gag). Doing it on purpose also calls for something that seems insane on the face of it - you head straight toward a large-enough star, then hit the warp drive on its highest setting, and if you get it right you time-travel, and if you get it wrong you risk falling straight into the star. If you don't know that there's a "right way", it's just a fancy, highly expensive way to commit suicide. Nobody's messing around with that just to see what will happen, not when they can already travel at warp speed without a slingshot. (The reason we use slingshot orbits for space probes is in order to gain extra acceleration, saving on rocket fuel. That's not really a major concern for a starship.)
Basically, hiding how to do time travel is easy, because it violates every known law of physics. It's the reason why so many physicists in our world deny the very possibility of FTL, because somehow (for reasons I don't quite have the math to understand) it implies reversal of causality in information transmission. Just don't tell people it can be done, and nobody outside certain life-endangering situations will have any reason to try.
If he doesn't have what he needs, then its reasonable to assume it is not widespread, isn't it? Book is some guy who makes his living doing courier jobs if I'm not mistaken. He's one of the people that would want access to better FTL before some farmer.
We don't know anything about the mushroom tech pre ST:D, because it was invented by ST:D writing, kind of an issue with fiction. However, this stuff is supposedly the stuff that lines the walls of the universe, and without it the universe dies. It is necessarily going to be more discoverable than not because of that. You can't have fundamental parts of the universe being out there without someone finding out about them, because every theory is going to have holes in it until you find that part.
Theory is the key here. It goes for time travel or mushrooms or whatever. Someone is trying to solve the mysteries of the universe, and their theory expects certain things to happen, but they don't, or things happen that shouldn't be possible. Why? By everything they've figured, it should work one way, but it doesn't, so there must be something else there.
Alternatively, theory suggests something should be possible, but they need to be able to test it. Slingshotting a probe around a black hole or star or whatever to test a theory would be pretty easy, and you end up finding the probe before you built it if you did it right. Someone will test it and do it right some day.
Just don't tell people it can be done, and nobody outside certain life-endangering situations will have any reason to try.
And this is just BS. The world is replete with examples of people doing/thinking crazy stuff that no one thinks is possible, ignoring the naysayers. The sound barrier ring a bell? The math explicitly told us that it was impossible, because as you approached Mach 1, the drag on an aircraft should approach infinity. We knew that equation was fantastic for calculating drag on aircraft so it had to be right, but it wasn't. The math isn't wrong though, just the assumptions used to get that equation. Turns out it only works well within a range.
I mean we've been told for decades the world food/oil/snow/tree supply should be gone by now. Scientists said so! They can't have gotten it wrong, can they? Well empirically, they did.
The entire principle of the scientific method is based on skepticism, and questioning everything, even fundamental truths and established science. That is why we know Newtons laws of motion are not accurate, relativity taught us that. Some day we may well learn that FTL travel is possible because someone disproved special relativity, or found a way around it. We already know relativity has its problems, especially with quantum mechanics, but like Newtons laws, it will probably still be highly useful within a certain range of conditions.
People explore to find something new, question conventional wisdom or even established science, and many times find out that what people used to think was wrong, and sometimes they might even do it by accident like blundering too close to a black hole.
Today's science will be tomorrow's conjecture. I remember hearing about the so-called 'energy crisis', in the early 1970's, how oil would be gone within 10 years. Don't see big oil out of business, so far, sadly. Or the days when said "9 out of 10 doctors recommend Camel cigarettes", and go on how it's not only SAFE, but GOOD FOR YOU! Etc, etc.
And hopefully, man will also learn something truly needed.....MODESTY. Stop acting like we're the masters over matter and nature...because we are not.
Book is some guy who makes his living doing courier jobs if I'm not mistaken. He's one of the people that would want access to better FTL before some farmer.
Book is a contracted courier. He's given exactly what the Mercantile calculates he needs for each run, just enough to get there and back; anything more is on his dime, which he spends mostly collecting endangered species, it would appear. The only reason he doesn't have enough dil right now is because the collision with Burnham broke his dilithium recrystallizer, and neither of them knows how to repair it. (I got the feeling, from his dealings with the Mercantile, that his recrystallizer was kind of a black-market item, something they didn't want people to have.)
Fair enough. Sounds like a bad deal for him, though, if his job is moving stuff, but he doesn't have real control over his transport ability.
The sound barrier ring a bell? The math explicitly told us that it was impossible, because as you approached Mach 1, the drag on an aircraft should approach infinity.
That is a gross misstatement of Mach's equations. The math said it was "impossible" given the design of wings as used up until the Bell X-1. Nothing in them states that it's "impossible" to merely exceed sound. Hell, bullets do it routinely - that loud BANG! is in fact the bullet crossing the sound barrier, and the muffled >bang< of a "silenced" pistol is what happens when it's subsonic. P-51 Mustangs could break the sound barrier by diving, with the minor side effect of having the wings torn off the plane (rendering it a falling bomb with a man inside, which as I'm sure you can see is a suboptimal result).
No its not a mistatement. Now you're very right about bullets and P-51s, which is one of the reasons they went around trying to break the sound barrier despite the math, but the math is what had people saying it was impossible, and in part because 'look, the wings broke!'
The math though, is crystal clear, and is known as the Prandtl-Glauert singularity which comes out of using the Prandtl-Glauert transformation for compressible, inviscid flow. Without getting into it deep, the issue is that the math completely breaks down as mach number gets really close to 1, and ends up making the equation divide by zero which results in a mathematical singularity. Of course this is a footnote in history now as many decades of experimentation and data and figuring out the right way to do the math has helped us figure out how to handle supersonic flight.
That's why any method of FTL is going to have to involve sidestepping velocity as such, whether it be through the exploitation of some kind of hyperspace (like the subspace domain used by warp drives), or by using Alcubierre's idea of taking advantage of a loophole in Einstein (an object with mass cannot achieve nor exceed the speed of light as it moves through space, as the energies needed to do so would be transfinite - but the equations don't limit how fast space itself can expand or contract, so all you need is a way to make it contract in front of your ship and expand behind it, and you're off like a shot while still not technically moving through space. You're taking it with you).
We don't know if or how we can do it. However it is easily observed that the Lorentz transformation has the exact same problem that the Prandtl-Glauert transformation has. As you approach the speed of light, you get a mathematical singularity. What really happens at v=c? We may never know, probably not in our lifetimes, and you're right it probably is a lot safer to find ways around c instead. But we are talking about a fictional show here, so such things are somewhat meaningless, as they can invent whatever they want, like the mushroom kingdom.
We've been at this automobile thing since Carl Benz in 1886. How many ways are there to power an automobile?
- Alcohol doesn't burn as efficiently, mostly useful for steam rather than internal combustion
- Electricity must be generated and stored, and batteries can't hold the same amount of power
- Hydrogen is unstable, difficult to store, and expensive
Why can't we come up with anything as energy-dense as gasoline? Bad writing?
We've been at this automobile thing since Carl Benz in 1886. How many ways are there to power an automobile?
- Alcohol doesn't burn as efficiently, mostly useful for steam rather than internal combustion
- Electricity must be generated and stored, and batteries can't hold the same amount of power
- Hydrogen is unstable, difficult to store, and expensive
Why can't we come up with anything as energy-dense as gasoline? Bad writing?
Or big oil pimps not wanting us to find better. Not like they are honorable and honest.....
Stan Meyer, had he not been killed, will vouch on that.
IF you think big oil will simply stand down, proudly, and allow something better to come along....Suuuuuuuuuuuuure.
Now I know this may come as a shocker, automobiles are real and Star Trek is not.
And yet there are some things in Trek that are rooted in reality. The fact that very few species have come up with alternatives to the Cochrane style warp drive mirrors a few things in reality. Why do we all use similar designs for aircraft? Why do all our guns work the same way despite being built in different countries? Why did swords develop along similar lines between nations that never had any contact with each other?
Why are Federation Warp Drives so functionally identical to Dominion Warp Drives which are 2000 years older? Why are Federation Warp Drives so functionally identical to frickin' Kazon Warp Drives?
The number of races that developed alternatives is extremely small. And most of them have some limitation or other that prevents widespread use. The only race that really had a viable alternative was the Voth with their Transwarp, but we don't know if it relies on a Cochrane style reactor or not. We just know they have it. Close behind was the Slipstream Drive. I don't really count the Borg because they pretty much steal and adapt everything they find so its hard to tell exactly what the Borg developed on their own and what they just assimilated.
Also... for the argument that the Spore Drive can destroy the multiverse... it can't actually. Its if you use Mycelial tech as a POWER CORE like the Terran Empire did that it becomes a threat. The Spore Drive only just surfed across with minimal impact. The only thing you really have to worry about is messing up the coordinates and jumping into a parallel universe. But with 32nd Century tech that might get mitigated to the point of being a non issue.
Comments
As much as I'm mildly interested in this Burn thing just as a curiosity to see what the writers come up with, I don't have real faith that they aren't going to explain it without some heavy handed environmental extremist nonsense. We used too much dilithium, so it all blew up!
Still, there are some real issues with this. The idea that dilithium is the main source of FTL travel and no one can come up with an alternative idea that can become widespread is absurd in a science fiction show where IDIC and ingenuity were standard fare.
I'll be impressed if they have a good explanation for it.
Now, the idea of banning universal truths like the mushroom kingdom or time travel makes them impossible to ever see again is also ludicrous. Nothing can stop some fundamental property of the universe from being discovered or rediscovered. It isn't like burying the name of the spy you used to blow up Q'onos. Now it might take them 1000 years to rediscover it, but it will happen, but without FTL travel, no idea gestapo can stop it from being rediscovered somewhere else.
I haven't seen episode 2 yet, but if you're referring to it's appearance in episode 1 that didn't bother me, I didn't even notice it myself cause it's just an extra ship flying in the background. It could just be intended as an easter egg for all we know, but even if it's not Star Trek has ALWAYS reused assets for various things.
Mycelial tech took until the 23rd century to find - and there have been spacefaring civilizations since about a billion years ago or so (the Preservers), none of whom ever stumbled across it. Heck, if it were that easy, the Kelvans never would have been reduced to hijacking the Enterprise, rejiggering the warp drive, and trying to reduce the entire crew to a pile of D12s in order to return to the Andromeda galaxy. All they would have had to do would be to talk somebody into researching interstellar mushroom spores. No, that took somebody with a literally insane idea of how mycelial root networks function just randomly stumbling across the one fungal species that actually did what he thought. Not exactly something that's gonna happen every Tuesday, you know?
As for slingshot time travel, the Enterprise found that one completely by accident, because they managed somehow to blunder their way into the accretion disk of a black hole and had to warp out of there. No sane space traveler is getting any closer to one of those tears in reality than they have to, because the process of being pulled in will tear you into a stream of subatomic particles (it's called "spaghettification", because sometimes even astrophysicists just can't resist the obvious gag). Doing it on purpose also calls for something that seems insane on the face of it - you head straight toward a large-enough star, then hit the warp drive on its highest setting, and if you get it right you time-travel, and if you get it wrong you risk falling straight into the star. If you don't know that there's a "right way", it's just a fancy, highly expensive way to commit suicide. Nobody's messing around with that just to see what will happen, not when they can already travel at warp speed without a slingshot. (The reason we use slingshot orbits for space probes is in order to gain extra acceleration, saving on rocket fuel. That's not really a major concern for a starship.)
Basically, hiding how to do time travel is easy, because it violates every known law of physics. It's the reason why so many physicists in our world deny the very possibility of FTL, because somehow (for reasons I don't quite have the math to understand) it implies reversal of causality in information transmission. Just don't tell people it can be done, and nobody outside certain life-endangering situations will have any reason to try.
You are not wrong, Geordie did say they don't use dilithium in their drives.
Avatar kind of stole the dilithilum idea for their unobtanium (and I am fairly sure Roddenberry stole it from someone earlier in the grand tradition of borrowing things in sci-fi), it makes the best and safest (and most compact) regulator valve for the antimatter stream for matter/antimatter reactors (or "warp reactors" in Trek terms).
And M/AM reactors are one of the few things that put out enough energy to power warp drive very fast. The Romulans had the problem of not having much of it (Remus must have been their biggest source even though it was hideously difficult to mine it there), but proximity to the resource, bad as it was, was probably the reason the settled Romulus in the first place.
Interestingly, the the people who made one of the star maps (I think it was the one canonized in PIC but I am not sure) placed the RSE where they did because it was a patch of older, less mineral rich stars which fit the idea that the Romulans were a bit resource poor (Joanne Linville's character mentioned they were "poor but proud" or words to that effect in TOS).
Apparently the Romulans developed the singularity drive to get around their dilithium shortage though they probably still used M/AM reactors for other things (probably smaller ships that could use smaller, lower quality crystals and possibly planetary powergrid reactors where the idea of a singularity on the surface sounds more than a bit insane). And of course they would have to use the crystals in the Klingon ships they got in the mid 2260s.
It is also possible that they use them in their plasma torpedo launchers since they are apparently a form of "warp plasma" (which could explain how one caught up to the Enterprise which was running away at warp 7).
There really is not a good reason why singularity cores did not spread to other factions after "the burn", especially with the hints that the Romulans were part of the galactic union by Daniels time.
As for the time cops enforcing a total ban on time travel, unless CBS goes the magic wand route that is not possible since it would rather quickly take an infinite number of time cops to do that and cover all the quantum branchings (though maybe they could take away the infinite number of typewriters and draft the monkeys for that....).
And even if they could scrape up an infinite number of time cops there are a few things like the Guardian of Forever and the Prophets that they still would not be able to do anything about even if they could keep a lid on all the natural time anomalies people run into.
If he doesn't have what he needs, then its reasonable to assume it is not widespread, isn't it? Book is some guy who makes his living doing courier jobs if I'm not mistaken. He's one of the people that would want access to better FTL before some farmer.
We don't know anything about the mushroom tech pre ST:D, because it was invented by ST:D writing, kind of an issue with fiction. However, this stuff is supposedly the stuff that lines the walls of the universe, and without it the universe dies. It is necessarily going to be more discoverable than not because of that. You can't have fundamental parts of the universe being out there without someone finding out about them, because every theory is going to have holes in it until you find that part.
Theory is the key here. It goes for time travel or mushrooms or whatever. Someone is trying to solve the mysteries of the universe, and their theory expects certain things to happen, but they don't, or things happen that shouldn't be possible. Why? By everything they've figured, it should work one way, but it doesn't, so there must be something else there.
Alternatively, theory suggests something should be possible, but they need to be able to test it. Slingshotting a probe around a black hole or star or whatever to test a theory would be pretty easy, and you end up finding the probe before you built it if you did it right. Someone will test it and do it right some day.
And this is just BS. The world is replete with examples of people doing/thinking crazy stuff that no one thinks is possible, ignoring the naysayers. The sound barrier ring a bell? The math explicitly told us that it was impossible, because as you approached Mach 1, the drag on an aircraft should approach infinity. We knew that equation was fantastic for calculating drag on aircraft so it had to be right, but it wasn't. The math isn't wrong though, just the assumptions used to get that equation. Turns out it only works well within a range.
I mean we've been told for decades the world food/oil/snow/tree supply should be gone by now. Scientists said so! They can't have gotten it wrong, can they? Well empirically, they did.
The entire principle of the scientific method is based on skepticism, and questioning everything, even fundamental truths and established science. That is why we know Newtons laws of motion are not accurate, relativity taught us that. Some day we may well learn that FTL travel is possible because someone disproved special relativity, or found a way around it. We already know relativity has its problems, especially with quantum mechanics, but like Newtons laws, it will probably still be highly useful within a certain range of conditions.
People explore to find something new, question conventional wisdom or even established science, and many times find out that what people used to think was wrong, and sometimes they might even do it by accident like blundering too close to a black hole.
Let us explore it... together. Each man hides a secret pain. It must be exposed and reckoned with. It must be dragged from the darkness and forced into the light. Share your pain. Share your pain with me... and gain strength from the sharing.
That is a gross misstatement of Mach's equations. The math said it was "impossible" given the design of wings as used up until the Bell X-1. Nothing in them states that it's "impossible" to merely exceed sound. Hell, bullets do it routinely - that loud BANG! is in fact the bullet crossing the sound barrier, and the muffled >bang< of a "silenced" pistol is what happens when it's subsonic. P-51 Mustangs could break the sound barrier by diving, with the minor side effect of having the wings torn off the plane (rendering it a falling bomb with a man inside, which as I'm sure you can see is a suboptimal result).
That's why any method of FTL is going to have to involve sidestepping velocity as such, whether it be through the exploitation of some kind of hyperspace (like the subspace domain used by warp drives), or by using Alcubierre's idea of taking advantage of a loophole in Einstein (an object with mass cannot achieve nor exceed the speed of light as it moves through space, as the energies needed to do so would be transfinite - but the equations don't limit how fast space itself can expand or contract, so all you need is a way to make it contract in front of your ship and expand behind it, and you're off like a shot while still not technically moving through space. You're taking it with you).
We have a major mystery here. What caused The Burn?
Fact of the matter is... we don't know. Odds are that will be the big mystery that we will get pieces of over the course of the season.
As for the Romulans... we don't even know if they fully recovered enough to have major shipyards or anything to produce ships after Hobus. Yea we saw the Zhat Vash fleet, but what do you expect from sneaky types. They probably hid them away for a rainy day.
Also if the Romulans had singularity cores... why aren't we seeing Romulans everywhere? Whatever The Burn was... it had some serious, wide ranging effects on pretty much everyone.
The Class C shuttle could have been a replica or someone fixed it up. Its no different than the Klingons using the basic D7 design from the 23rd century well into the late 24th at least. Also the Class C seemed to be a bit bigger than say the Type 6 from TNG.
Now... with 23rd Century tech the Spore Drive is probably still pretty unreliable. However... jumping into this time period... it might actually make the tech more viable without the need for an organic pilot. Which means Stamets was on to something WELL ahead of time. He just didn't know it. And since the Spore Drive doesn't rely on the standard Cochrane style M/AM core... she could very well hold the key.
Ultimately... its a case of we'll just have to wait and see.
An extremely dangerous key considering previous seasons. It is not a wise idea to use a FTL technology that can destroy the universe.
Episode 3 better have a flashback with an extremely good reason how Burnham was easily able to locate the USS Discovery within less than a day of their arrival in the 32nd Century.
Orrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.....we just don't know. Just because WE don't know how to travel faster than light yet, does not mean everyone out there can not. We humans gotta stop thinking we know it all, and no one else out there might be better than us. I could see someone handing an alien all that stuff you said and go, "you people don't know what you are talking about."
Today's science will be tomorrow's conjecture. I remember hearing about the so-called 'energy crisis', in the early 1970's, how oil would be gone within 10 years. Don't see big oil out of business, so far, sadly. Or the days when said "9 out of 10 doctors recommend Camel cigarettes", and go on how it's not only SAFE, but GOOD FOR YOU! Etc, etc.
And hopefully, man will also learn something truly needed.....MODESTY. Stop acting like we're the masters over matter and nature...because we are not.
Fair enough. Sounds like a bad deal for him, though, if his job is moving stuff, but he doesn't have real control over his transport ability.
No its not a mistatement. Now you're very right about bullets and P-51s, which is one of the reasons they went around trying to break the sound barrier despite the math, but the math is what had people saying it was impossible, and in part because 'look, the wings broke!'
The math though, is crystal clear, and is known as the Prandtl-Glauert singularity which comes out of using the Prandtl-Glauert transformation for compressible, inviscid flow. Without getting into it deep, the issue is that the math completely breaks down as mach number gets really close to 1, and ends up making the equation divide by zero which results in a mathematical singularity. Of course this is a footnote in history now as many decades of experimentation and data and figuring out the right way to do the math has helped us figure out how to handle supersonic flight.
We don't know if or how we can do it. However it is easily observed that the Lorentz transformation has the exact same problem that the Prandtl-Glauert transformation has. As you approach the speed of light, you get a mathematical singularity. What really happens at v=c? We may never know, probably not in our lifetimes, and you're right it probably is a lot safer to find ways around c instead. But we are talking about a fictional show here, so such things are somewhat meaningless, as they can invent whatever they want, like the mushroom kingdom.
- Alcohol doesn't burn as efficiently, mostly useful for steam rather than internal combustion
- Electricity must be generated and stored, and batteries can't hold the same amount of power
- Hydrogen is unstable, difficult to store, and expensive
Why can't we come up with anything as energy-dense as gasoline? Bad writing?
Or big oil pimps not wanting us to find better. Not like they are honorable and honest.....
Stan Meyer, had he not been killed, will vouch on that.
IF you think big oil will simply stand down, proudly, and allow something better to come along....Suuuuuuuuuuuuure.
And yet there are some things in Trek that are rooted in reality. The fact that very few species have come up with alternatives to the Cochrane style warp drive mirrors a few things in reality. Why do we all use similar designs for aircraft? Why do all our guns work the same way despite being built in different countries? Why did swords develop along similar lines between nations that never had any contact with each other?
Why are Federation Warp Drives so functionally identical to Dominion Warp Drives which are 2000 years older? Why are Federation Warp Drives so functionally identical to frickin' Kazon Warp Drives?
The number of races that developed alternatives is extremely small. And most of them have some limitation or other that prevents widespread use. The only race that really had a viable alternative was the Voth with their Transwarp, but we don't know if it relies on a Cochrane style reactor or not. We just know they have it. Close behind was the Slipstream Drive. I don't really count the Borg because they pretty much steal and adapt everything they find so its hard to tell exactly what the Borg developed on their own and what they just assimilated.
Also... for the argument that the Spore Drive can destroy the multiverse... it can't actually. Its if you use Mycelial tech as a POWER CORE like the Terran Empire did that it becomes a threat. The Spore Drive only just surfed across with minimal impact. The only thing you really have to worry about is messing up the coordinates and jumping into a parallel universe. But with 32nd Century tech that might get mitigated to the point of being a non issue.