> @ryuranger said: > if you guys watch today's Episode more clues about the Burn and to me it sounds like a Revenge on the Federation and if Fresh Dylithum to blow up like that then it safe to say it might have to be something with in Subspace linked that would cause that to happen I think it might actually Discovery it self when it Travel through time with the time Crystal Super Nova might caused something with in Subspace to Over Load the Crystals.
My guess is dilithium mines dried up. They try other FTL modes but nothing is quite like dilithium. They turn to some brilliant scientist to make artificial dilithium. Brilliant scientist however forget to cross a T or dot an I or carry the 4 in their equations and one day artificial dilithium stops doing what it’s supposed to do. Ships go boom.
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.
Um... what?
What supernova? And Discovery didn't use the time crystal. She just followed along behind Burnham's suit, which had been powered by one.
I'm sorry but that just makes NO sense whatsoever.
Nothing about "the burn" makes any sense whatsoever either so I would not put it past them. The writers needed a magic macguffin to make force an entirely unlikely situation and took the laziest most arbitrary road possible to do it.
> ryuranger said:
> if you guys watch today's Episode more clues about the Burn and to me it sounds like a Revenge on the Federation and if Fresh Dylithum to blow up like that then it safe to say it might have to be something with in Subspace linked that would cause that to happen I think it might actually Discovery it self when it Travel through time with the time Crystal Super Nova might caused something with in Subspace to Over Load the Crystals.
My guess is dilithium mines dried up. They try other FTL modes but nothing is quite like dilithium. They turn to some brilliant scientist to make artificial dilithium. Brilliant scientist however forget to cross a T or dot an I or carry the 4 in their equations and one day artificial dilithium stops doing what it’s supposed to do. Ships go boom.
I think you mean natural dilithium stops doing what it's supposed to do.
If dilithium stops doing what it's supposed to do, then any ship that was drawing power from the warp core not just ships at warp would be destroyed or severely damaged due to not being able to control the matter-antimatter reaction. So the excuse that Saru gave of not being at warp at the time doesn't make sense since avoiding being destroyed or severely damaged by the Burn requires turning off the matter-antimatter reaction for all power. However a ship at warp would cause far more damage than a ship not at warp since the warp core uses far more power at warp.
We haven't really had any hints yet, so my current list if suspects is rather short:
1) Borg
2) Species 8472
3) Iconians
4) a rogue Q
5) Terrans
Its actually probably shorter than that, Q is the only one who could change the natural laws of the universe to make dilithium stop working. If it is anything else then the most likely thing is nanites, Kurtzman is showing his JJ Abrams roots by essentially copying Abrams failed series Revolution with a thin veneer of Star Trek over it. Or it could be mushrooms since that is what the series revolves around anyway.
When I saw they were shark jumping to a post-Federation far future I half expected the season to be dross at best, but the more I hear about it the less I think it will reach that high.
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rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,577Community Moderator
We could just wait and see what happens and how the story plays out rather than rip it apart in chapter 1 so to speak.
Based on what people are saying, nothing about this strikes me as some kind of natural disaster/fire that spread out of control and thus would make sense to be called a burn. If it was the natural result of burning up the supply of dilithium crystals, then no one would blow up at warp because they knew they were running low and would not risk suicide for no good reason. A burn is not really a fast or instant thing.
However, If it was more of an instantaneous thing, then it would make more sense for an intelligence to be behind it. This to me would imply Q for that awesome power, but it could also be an AI/computer program that was designed to manage the low dilithum supplies but failed (maybe deliberately.) An AI could be maliciously altered by anyone. Still none of that makes sense to be called the "burn."
Obviously it could be bad writing at play, selecting an awful name for the event, but, what if... What if the Burn was caused by... Burnham?
Temporal shenanigans are already in play. What if she learns something in the future to make her go to the past and cause the Burn? Say she believes the New Federation they rebuild is better than the old one and decides to create the "burn" to ensure it happens?
> @starkaos said: > (Quote) > > I think you mean natural dilithium stops doing what it's supposed to do. > > If dilithium stops doing what it's supposed to do, then any ship that was drawing power from the warp core not just ships at warp would be destroyed or severely damaged due to not being able to control the matter-antimatter reaction. So the excuse that Saru gave of not being at warp at the time doesn't make sense since avoiding being destroyed or severely damaged by the Burn requires turning off the matter-antimatter reaction for all power. However a ship at warp would cause far more damage than a ship not at warp since the warp core uses far more power at warp.
My theory is the federation switched to an artificial dilithium and that’s what went inert and caused ships to explode. We see in this future that people still use dilithium to get around. It’s just very scarce.
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.
Um... what?
What supernova? And Discovery didn't use the time crystal. She just followed along behind Burnham's suit, which had been powered by one.
I'm sorry but that just makes NO sense whatsoever.
Burnhams suit used the Time Crystal witch powered by a Artfiual Super nova what if her Time Suite took damage the Crystal leaked radiation into Subspace and caused the Dylithum go Blank and vessels at Warp Speed Blew up from the Leaking Suit that she had on she went through time and Discovery Engines could have some damage to them and might actually mixed the final ingerdiant that caused the Burn
> starkaos said:
> (Quote)
>
> I think you mean natural dilithium stops doing what it's supposed to do.
>
> If dilithium stops doing what it's supposed to do, then any ship that was drawing power from the warp core not just ships at warp would be destroyed or severely damaged due to not being able to control the matter-antimatter reaction. So the excuse that Saru gave of not being at warp at the time doesn't make sense since avoiding being destroyed or severely damaged by the Burn requires turning off the matter-antimatter reaction for all power. However a ship at warp would cause far more damage than a ship not at warp since the warp core uses far more power at warp.
My theory is the federation switched to an artificial dilithium and that’s what went inert and caused ships to explode. We see in this future that people still use dilithium to get around. It’s just very scarce.
So the artificial dilithium was unstable and eventually went inert? All of the dilithium went inert at the same time and it is doubtful that the artificial dilithium was created at the same time. So the artificial dilithium would have to be connected to each other in some manner.
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rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,577Community Moderator
Burnhams suit used the Time Crystal witch powered by a Artfiual Super nova what if her Time Suite took damage the Crystal leaked radiation into Subspace and caused the Dylithum go Blank and vessels at Warp Speed Blew up from the Leaking Suit that she had on she went through time and Discovery Engines could have some damage to them and might actually mixed the final ingerdiant that caused the Burn
Problem. Burnham showed up 100+ years after The Burn. Discovery a year later. And the amount of radiation needed to spread across the galaxy (subspace or not) would have not only fried Burnham, it probably would have vaporized her a million times over.
Even if that was possible in theory, wouldn't The Burn happen when Burnham arrived then? Because until she popped out of that temporal wormhole she was NOT part of the timestream whatsoever. She didn't appear 100+ years ago to trigger it.
Burnhams suit used the Time Crystal witch powered by a Artfiual Super nova what if her Time Suite took damage the Crystal leaked radiation into Subspace and caused the Dylithum go Blank and vessels at Warp Speed Blew up from the Leaking Suit that she had on she went through time and Discovery Engines could have some damage to them and might actually mixed the final ingerdiant that caused the Burn
Problem. Burnham showed up 100+ years after The Burn. Discovery a year later. And the amount of radiation needed to spread across the galaxy (subspace or not) would have not only fried Burnham, it probably would have vaporized her a million times over.
Even if that was possible in theory, wouldn't The Burn happen when Burnham arrived then? Because until she popped out of that temporal wormhole she was NOT part of the timestream whatsoever. She didn't appear 100+ years ago to trigger it.
It depends on how that version of time travel works. Some time travel like from the Time Machine has time travel accelerate time. So it is possible to accidentally affect another time while travelling to a different time like travelling from ancient Rome to the 21st Century and accidentally dropping an iPhone in the 19th Century. There is some justification for the Time Suit travelling through the Centuries which could cause some contaminant from Discovery causing the Burn since Burnham exited sooner and ended up a year earlier. It doesn't seem to be like Back to the Future's time travel where a date is entered and the Delorian is instantly transported to 1955 or 2015.
Burnham and the Discovery were in a wormhole, causally separated from reality, tethered to it only in the 23rd century and the 32nd century. Their personal timeline completely bypassed the Burn; they were not interacting with the external universe because so far as they were concerned, there was no external universe, and would not be until they emerged.
Oh, and clearly "all the dilithium went inert" is a figure of speech. The Mercantile, for instance, has a supply of dil that they use as their hook in their couriers, giving them only enough to make each run (which is why they have such tiny crystals), and Earth has been hoarding a supply for long enough that they felt the need to construct a force field that could encompass the entire freaking planet. There's clearly still some dil out there, it's just become as hard to find as benamite.
And of course there's the fear reaction - in our world, there are still Americans who fear getting on airplanes because of 9/11, and we know what happened there. Gotta figure that in known space there were substantial movements to give up interstellar travel altogether, because what happened to the dilithium frightened them so badly they thought it was a sign of divine displeasure. (Which probably would have spurred a wave of "honorable combat" suicides in Klingon space, as they sought to swell the ranks of warriors in Sto'vo'kor to destroy these new "gods".)
On the third hand, as I sit here typing all this, it also occurs to me that it could have been Q - oh, not any of the Q we know, but another Q who's become impatient waiting for humanity (and probably a few other species) to advance, so they destroy the dilithium supplies in order to prod someone into discovering some other method of FTL. Maybe they think the DASH drive is still viable, because they don't care about mycelial space, I dunno.
(Keep in mind, of course, that like everyone else here I'm speculating in the absence of data, which as Sherlock Holmes noted is "a capital mistake. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, rather than theories to suit facts." None of this is ex cathedra, just my own ramblings as the coffee begins to kick in. Except the first two paragraphs, those are just recitations of the facts we've been given so far.)
Burnhams suit used the Time Crystal witch powered by a Artfiual Super nova what if her Time Suite took damage the Crystal leaked radiation into Subspace and caused the Dylithum go Blank and vessels at Warp Speed Blew up from the Leaking Suit that she had on she went through time and Discovery Engines could have some damage to them and might actually mixed the final ingerdiant that caused the Burn
Problem. Burnham showed up 100+ years after The Burn. Discovery a year later. And the amount of radiation needed to spread across the galaxy (subspace or not) would have not only fried Burnham, it probably would have vaporized her a million times over.
Even if that was possible in theory, wouldn't The Burn happen when Burnham arrived then? Because until she popped out of that temporal wormhole she was NOT part of the timestream whatsoever. She didn't appear 100+ years ago to trigger it.
It depends on how that version of time travel works. Some time travel like from the Time Machine has time travel accelerate time. So it is possible to accidentally affect another time while travelling to a different time like travelling from ancient Rome to the 21st Century and accidentally dropping an iPhone in the 19th Century. There is some justification for the Time Suit travelling through the Centuries which could cause some contaminant from Discovery causing the Burn since Burnham exited sooner and ended up a year earlier. It doesn't seem to be like Back to the Future's time travel where a date is entered and the Delorian is instantly transported to 1955 or 2015.
I am not sure what the Time After Time TV series said about it (I only saw the pilot for that, and also the movie it was based on), but the original story and the 1960 movie both said that while there is some interaction it is all at an infinite number of "zero time" points along the timeline which are shorter than a chronon wavelength, which is why bombs and whatnot just caused turbulence instead of destroying the machine and pilot.
The theory in the book is based on the fact that things smaller than the wavelength of whatever is being used to "look" at them are not visible (which is why electron microscopes are used for looking at a virus and the like). Since the machine in operation only existed in units too small for reality to register in the fourth dimension it could slip along that dimensional line freely.
While I don't recall anything being dropped from the machine (it has been a very long time since I read it however so I may be wrong), the description of its operation makes it seem unlikely that something dropped from it would regain reality on its own, more likely it would simply cease to exist altogether.
One interesting point is that the large quartz crystals that formed the heart of the engine, once charged up to standby, would seem to twist into a bar that scintillated, shifted, and sparkled in a way that looked impossible and unreal.
You have to treat Book and everyone else as an unreliable narrator. He doesn’t know all the details. Neither do we for that matter but there are hints.
1) Dilithium became scarce.
2) Dilithium became inert and everyone using Dilithium to regulate M/AM reactions went boom.
3) In this new future Dilithium is still used.
My deduction is that when Dilithium went scarce, the Federation created artificial Dilithium. This “new Dil” had a flaw or someone caused it to go inert. “Old Dil” didn’t go inert which is why Book still uses it. People who have “old Dil” are now space rich. Earth became Fortress Earth to protect their stores.
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.
I have a conspiracy that the Burn will be caused by Burnham, the future will use the Mycelial network to travel in the future, all the Dilithium dependency is killing a space whale or something and she destroys the biggest Dilithium refinement to save the future, Her reason is why they banned Temporal Agents cause of this incident, when Season 3 ends the future will be restored with new ships using Mycelial Warp Engines and the Temporal Agents will return (It has literally turned Discovery into Deus ex Burnham so any problems that arises will be solved by Burnham in some since) this is WHY i don't like the new Star Trek, a central character feels like Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, "oh, cut off his lightsaber hand? man that is life changing! *WRONG* new cybernetic hand, better than the original, oh wait, he has lost his lightsaber!! *WRONG* some reason he has Obi Wan Kenobi's one, probably stopped off at the shack to grab his back-up for some reason"
Q was at a birthday party and was the juggler of omega particles and then someone punched him and they all fell to the floor and destroyed all dilithium. Then he said don't worry there will be a discovery from a ship name discovery that will discover something that hasn't been discovered yet.
I have a conspiracy that the Burn will be caused by Burnham, the future will use the Mycelial network to travel in the future, all the Dilithium dependency is killing a space whale or something and she destroys the biggest Dilithium refinement to save the future, Her reason is why they banned Temporal Agents cause of this incident, when Season 3 ends the future will be restored with new ships using Mycelial Warp Engines and the Temporal Agents will return (It has literally turned Discovery into Deus ex Burnham so any problems that arises will be solved by Burnham in some since) this is WHY i don't like the new Star Trek, a central character feels like Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, "oh, cut off his lightsaber hand? man that is life changing! *WRONG* new cybernetic hand, better than the original, oh wait, he has lost his lightsaber!! *WRONG* some reason he has Obi Wan Kenobi's one, probably stopped off at the shack to grab his back-up for some reason"
It would have to be a previous Burnham since current Burnham knows about the Burn and would not take any actions to cause it. There is the possibility that the Time Suit's destruction caused the Burn.
I agree with you the Wormhole could have still been open at the time or the area could still be in flux when she Self Distrusted the Suit; But that would have not caused the Burn alone the Suit could have been leaking taycon particals and mixed with Warp plasma from Discovery from with in the Wormhole as it was travailing through time caused the Explosion. If you look at the X-men theory on Time Travel that Time is like a Raving River and any Disruption in the Flow changes it so an Explosion from Burnham suit and the Taycons and Warp Plasma from Discovery's Engines that was leaking may have traveled back in time to where Burn happen
May the Shwartz Be With You
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rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,577Community Moderator
Burnhams suit used the Time Crystal witch powered by a Artfiual Super nova what if her Time Suite took damage the Crystal leaked radiation into Subspace and caused the Dylithum go Blank and vessels at Warp Speed Blew up from the Leaking Suit that she had on she went through time and Discovery Engines could have some damage to them and might actually mixed the final ingerdiant that caused the Burn
Problem. Burnham showed up 100+ years after The Burn. Discovery a year later. And the amount of radiation needed to spread across the galaxy (subspace or not) would have not only fried Burnham, it probably would have vaporized her a million times over.
Even if that was possible in theory, wouldn't The Burn happen when Burnham arrived then? Because until she popped out of that temporal wormhole she was NOT part of the timestream whatsoever. She didn't appear 100+ years ago to trigger it.
Hmm..... Michael Burham did, but did Gabrielle Burnham?
Think about what occurred in the episode 'Perpetual Infinity. Leland/Control shot through the containment field and hit Gabrielle Burham's Red Angel AND the time crystal with a blast from that phaser rifle he was using. The time crystal released a 'pulse' of energy on contact with the phaser beam. The containment field fails and a wormhole opens and forcibly pulls first the Red Angel suit and subsequently Gabrielle Burnham into it.
But think about it - firstly, the damaged suit and it's also damaged (by an intense phaser blast) Crystal went first; it isn't too much of a stretch of the imagination to beleive that the damage taken by Gabrielle's time crystal may have caused it to NOT arrive back at the anchor point. Again, the time crystal was damaged.
And what if it released another, far larger, pulse of energy when it arrived at the exit point?
Also, since Gabrielle Burnham was pulled into the wormhole a few moments after the suit she could (as evidence by Michael Burnham arriving in the future one year before Discovery) have arrived a short time after her suit at a point where any damage caused by her suit would already have occurred.
So some of @ryuranger 's theory might not be completely unfeasable.
The burn sounds like it would either have to have been an alteration of natural laws or some targeted conspiracy thing (like the nanite attack in JJ Abram's Revolution series).
If it is the alteration of natural laws via the time crystal explosion somehow, there actually is a precedent via the Kelvin timeline that could apply.
Back during the runup hype for the 2009 movie Kurtzman said that they created the new timeline for two reasons, the first being a clearing of the decks so that anything they did with the licensed Trek wouldn't impact the traditional Trek, and secondly to change the way that time travel worked in the new movies.
Like a lot of people, they did not like the back-and-forth time travel along the same timeline that traditional Trek did, so the weird supernova powered time jump landed Spock and Nemo and company in a "branch" that had different natural laws in regard to time. Instead of paradox changing the time traveller's own timeline like in The City on the Edge of Forever changing anything in the past would instead cause a branch (which is actually somewhat supported by Parallels).
Kurtzman may have fallen back on old habits and done the same thing to DSC, only instead of the natural laws of time being changed it could have changed something having to do with dilithium. If that is the case then it is stretching suspension of disbelief well past the breaking point (not to mention incredibly lazy writing), but then again that is rather par for the course with Kurtzman Trek.
On the other hand, an equally strong (and equally ridiculous) contender for the burn is some sort of wide ranging conspiracy that somehow sabotaged all of the dilithium at once, or at least some way that triggered all at the same time. That way the conspirators could gain wealth and power at the expense of untold billions of dead and destroy the society which frowned upon greed so heavily.
in all fairness she probably WILL know the burn and it would be like "if i don't cause the burn the space whale we will need in the future will die and we are doomed, so if i kill 850,000,000 ship and crews and send us back into the dark ages i am giving us another 2,000,000 years to survive, oh the humanity.. what to do? (PRIME SPOCK) "Michael, The needs of the many outweighs the needs of the few" Oh TRIBBLE, he is right, well goodbye everyone else, I wont tell your surviving family I killed your TRIBBLE TRIBBLE"
We are spelling it wrong. It is not the Burn, but The Bern. The Bern has been trying to become President for centuries only to fail to become the presidential candidate every time until The Bern finally snapped after 1000 years of failure.
Regarding the other known war capable species, especially the likes of the Klingon and Romulan, there's a good chance they were members of the Federation prior to the burn.
During the battle of Prycon V (Enterprise-J) the Klingon Empire had merged with the Federation, and the Xindi had members in there as well, possibly having even joined.
Considering what happened with Romulus, there's a good chance the Romulan state have also joined the Federation by this point, so it's not as if they'd be independent factions leading up to the burn.
What remains of them now is anyone's guess. I would like to see a 32nd Century Klingon looks like.
As for the burn itself, I'd like to believe that it was simply an experiment gone wrong, rather than an attack on the Federation. It would be rather idiotic for any intergalactic power to intentionally blow up the majority of warp capable ships, Federation or otherwise.
What would a 32nd century Klingon look like? With Kurtzman's weird influence and all the other Klingon looks it could be anything, they might even look like Big Bird in DSC s3 the way inter-series compatibility goes in DSC.
Comments
What supernova? And Discovery didn't use the time crystal. She just followed along behind Burnham's suit, which had been powered by one.
I'm sorry but that just makes NO sense whatsoever.
> if you guys watch today's Episode more clues about the Burn and to me it sounds like a Revenge on the Federation and if Fresh Dylithum to blow up like that then it safe to say it might have to be something with in Subspace linked that would cause that to happen I think it might actually Discovery it self when it Travel through time with the time Crystal Super Nova might caused something with in Subspace to Over Load the Crystals.
My guess is dilithium mines dried up. They try other FTL modes but nothing is quite like dilithium. They turn to some brilliant scientist to make artificial dilithium. Brilliant scientist however forget to cross a T or dot an I or carry the 4 in their equations and one day artificial dilithium stops doing what it’s supposed to do. Ships go boom.
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.
Nothing about "the burn" makes any sense whatsoever either so I would not put it past them. The writers needed a magic macguffin to make force an entirely unlikely situation and took the laziest most arbitrary road possible to do it.
I think you mean natural dilithium stops doing what it's supposed to do.
If dilithium stops doing what it's supposed to do, then any ship that was drawing power from the warp core not just ships at warp would be destroyed or severely damaged due to not being able to control the matter-antimatter reaction. So the excuse that Saru gave of not being at warp at the time doesn't make sense since avoiding being destroyed or severely damaged by the Burn requires turning off the matter-antimatter reaction for all power. However a ship at warp would cause far more damage than a ship not at warp since the warp core uses far more power at warp.
1) Borg
2) Species 8472
3) Iconians
4) a rogue Q
5) Terrans
Its actually probably shorter than that, Q is the only one who could change the natural laws of the universe to make dilithium stop working. If it is anything else then the most likely thing is nanites, Kurtzman is showing his JJ Abrams roots by essentially copying Abrams failed series Revolution with a thin veneer of Star Trek over it. Or it could be mushrooms since that is what the series revolves around anyway.
When I saw they were shark jumping to a post-Federation far future I half expected the season to be dross at best, but the more I hear about it the less I think it will reach that high.
However, If it was more of an instantaneous thing, then it would make more sense for an intelligence to be behind it. This to me would imply Q for that awesome power, but it could also be an AI/computer program that was designed to manage the low dilithum supplies but failed (maybe deliberately.) An AI could be maliciously altered by anyone. Still none of that makes sense to be called the "burn."
Obviously it could be bad writing at play, selecting an awful name for the event, but, what if... What if the Burn was caused by... Burnham?
Temporal shenanigans are already in play. What if she learns something in the future to make her go to the past and cause the Burn? Say she believes the New Federation they rebuild is better than the old one and decides to create the "burn" to ensure it happens?
> (Quote)
>
> I think you mean natural dilithium stops doing what it's supposed to do.
>
> If dilithium stops doing what it's supposed to do, then any ship that was drawing power from the warp core not just ships at warp would be destroyed or severely damaged due to not being able to control the matter-antimatter reaction. So the excuse that Saru gave of not being at warp at the time doesn't make sense since avoiding being destroyed or severely damaged by the Burn requires turning off the matter-antimatter reaction for all power. However a ship at warp would cause far more damage than a ship not at warp since the warp core uses far more power at warp.
My theory is the federation switched to an artificial dilithium and that’s what went inert and caused ships to explode. We see in this future that people still use dilithium to get around. It’s just very scarce.
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.
So the artificial dilithium was unstable and eventually went inert? All of the dilithium went inert at the same time and it is doubtful that the artificial dilithium was created at the same time. So the artificial dilithium would have to be connected to each other in some manner.
Problem. Burnham showed up 100+ years after The Burn. Discovery a year later. And the amount of radiation needed to spread across the galaxy (subspace or not) would have not only fried Burnham, it probably would have vaporized her a million times over.
Even if that was possible in theory, wouldn't The Burn happen when Burnham arrived then? Because until she popped out of that temporal wormhole she was NOT part of the timestream whatsoever. She didn't appear 100+ years ago to trigger it.
It depends on how that version of time travel works. Some time travel like from the Time Machine has time travel accelerate time. So it is possible to accidentally affect another time while travelling to a different time like travelling from ancient Rome to the 21st Century and accidentally dropping an iPhone in the 19th Century. There is some justification for the Time Suit travelling through the Centuries which could cause some contaminant from Discovery causing the Burn since Burnham exited sooner and ended up a year earlier. It doesn't seem to be like Back to the Future's time travel where a date is entered and the Delorian is instantly transported to 1955 or 2015.
aut vincere aut mori pro imperio
either to conquer or to die for the Empire
Oh, and clearly "all the dilithium went inert" is a figure of speech. The Mercantile, for instance, has a supply of dil that they use as their hook in their couriers, giving them only enough to make each run (which is why they have such tiny crystals), and Earth has been hoarding a supply for long enough that they felt the need to construct a force field that could encompass the entire freaking planet. There's clearly still some dil out there, it's just become as hard to find as benamite.
And of course there's the fear reaction - in our world, there are still Americans who fear getting on airplanes because of 9/11, and we know what happened there. Gotta figure that in known space there were substantial movements to give up interstellar travel altogether, because what happened to the dilithium frightened them so badly they thought it was a sign of divine displeasure. (Which probably would have spurred a wave of "honorable combat" suicides in Klingon space, as they sought to swell the ranks of warriors in Sto'vo'kor to destroy these new "gods".)
On the third hand, as I sit here typing all this, it also occurs to me that it could have been Q - oh, not any of the Q we know, but another Q who's become impatient waiting for humanity (and probably a few other species) to advance, so they destroy the dilithium supplies in order to prod someone into discovering some other method of FTL. Maybe they think the DASH drive is still viable, because they don't care about mycelial space, I dunno.
(Keep in mind, of course, that like everyone else here I'm speculating in the absence of data, which as Sherlock Holmes noted is "a capital mistake. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, rather than theories to suit facts." None of this is ex cathedra, just my own ramblings as the coffee begins to kick in. Except the first two paragraphs, those are just recitations of the facts we've been given so far.)
I am not sure what the Time After Time TV series said about it (I only saw the pilot for that, and also the movie it was based on), but the original story and the 1960 movie both said that while there is some interaction it is all at an infinite number of "zero time" points along the timeline which are shorter than a chronon wavelength, which is why bombs and whatnot just caused turbulence instead of destroying the machine and pilot.
The theory in the book is based on the fact that things smaller than the wavelength of whatever is being used to "look" at them are not visible (which is why electron microscopes are used for looking at a virus and the like). Since the machine in operation only existed in units too small for reality to register in the fourth dimension it could slip along that dimensional line freely.
While I don't recall anything being dropped from the machine (it has been a very long time since I read it however so I may be wrong), the description of its operation makes it seem unlikely that something dropped from it would regain reality on its own, more likely it would simply cease to exist altogether.
One interesting point is that the large quartz crystals that formed the heart of the engine, once charged up to standby, would seem to twist into a bar that scintillated, shifted, and sparkled in a way that looked impossible and unreal.
1) Dilithium became scarce.
2) Dilithium became inert and everyone using Dilithium to regulate M/AM reactions went boom.
3) In this new future Dilithium is still used.
My deduction is that when Dilithium went scarce, the Federation created artificial Dilithium. This “new Dil” had a flaw or someone caused it to go inert. “Old Dil” didn’t go inert which is why Book still uses it. People who have “old Dil” are now space rich. Earth became Fortress Earth to protect their stores.
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.
It would have to be a previous Burnham since current Burnham knows about the Burn and would not take any actions to cause it. There is the possibility that the Time Suit's destruction caused the Burn.
The burn sounds like it would either have to have been an alteration of natural laws or some targeted conspiracy thing (like the nanite attack in JJ Abram's Revolution series).
If it is the alteration of natural laws via the time crystal explosion somehow, there actually is a precedent via the Kelvin timeline that could apply.
Back during the runup hype for the 2009 movie Kurtzman said that they created the new timeline for two reasons, the first being a clearing of the decks so that anything they did with the licensed Trek wouldn't impact the traditional Trek, and secondly to change the way that time travel worked in the new movies.
Like a lot of people, they did not like the back-and-forth time travel along the same timeline that traditional Trek did, so the weird supernova powered time jump landed Spock and Nemo and company in a "branch" that had different natural laws in regard to time. Instead of paradox changing the time traveller's own timeline like in The City on the Edge of Forever changing anything in the past would instead cause a branch (which is actually somewhat supported by Parallels).
Kurtzman may have fallen back on old habits and done the same thing to DSC, only instead of the natural laws of time being changed it could have changed something having to do with dilithium. If that is the case then it is stretching suspension of disbelief well past the breaking point (not to mention incredibly lazy writing), but then again that is rather par for the course with Kurtzman Trek.
On the other hand, an equally strong (and equally ridiculous) contender for the burn is some sort of wide ranging conspiracy that somehow sabotaged all of the dilithium at once, or at least some way that triggered all at the same time. That way the conspirators could gain wealth and power at the expense of untold billions of dead and destroy the society which frowned upon greed so heavily.
During the battle of Prycon V (Enterprise-J) the Klingon Empire had merged with the Federation, and the Xindi had members in there as well, possibly having even joined.
Considering what happened with Romulus, there's a good chance the Romulan state have also joined the Federation by this point, so it's not as if they'd be independent factions leading up to the burn.
What remains of them now is anyone's guess. I would like to see a 32nd Century Klingon looks like.
As for the burn itself, I'd like to believe that it was simply an experiment gone wrong, rather than an attack on the Federation. It would be rather idiotic for any intergalactic power to intentionally blow up the majority of warp capable ships, Federation or otherwise.