Star Trek Discovery aired on CBS Access in 2017. I didn’t get to see it since it was on a paid streaming service. It looked good and I wanted to check it out. Alex Kurtzman produced it, which is cool. He also worked on Xena, Alias and Fringe—not to mention the recent Star Trek movies. Anyway, I finally got it on DVD from Netflix. It is the 7th Star Trek series on TV. It has had mixed reviews, but overall people seem to enjoy it. I know Ray and I enjoyed it.
Kurtzman pulled in a lot of his previous work into the new series. I can see hints of Alias in the idea that the ship is like a Spy ship, working undercover to win the war. It is also covert science and the science is Fringe science. The idea of a Spore Drive strikes me as something that would have been explored by Walter Bishop.
I liked the whole Spore Drive thing. It made sense to me, but I can see where some fans would find it silly. The show didn’t do a great job of connecting the dots between biology and quantum physics.
We know that light particles travel within a stream or wave. Those particles can jump to anywhere within the path of that wave. That is a quantum leap. We have observed the jumps, which shouldn’t be possible. Although they don’t know for sure why it happens, it seems that the particles are interconnected or entangled. They can leap to where a sister or brother particles is in the stream because of this connection. It isn’t as random as may seem at first.
We also know that trees use fungus networks to talk to each other. The fungus acts as a sort of conduit between living things. This fungus travels for miles and miles and seems to be a part of one huge organism. Scientists compare it to the internet. It is a subject that I know little about though. I have only read a couple of articles on it. I would like to know more.
In any case, someone recognized the parallel between how quantum waves behave and how these fungus networks behave. They wondered if perhaps there couldn’t be some overlap. Maybe fungi can behave like these particles and then it would be possible to travel across them.
When I first saw the creature aboard The Glenn, I told Ray it looked like a Tardigrade. In the next episode, they start studying the creature. And low and behold, they call it a Tardigrade. Instead of being microscopic though, it is bear size. Tardigrades are fascinating creatures, but I am not sure what they eat or if it would be possible to grow one to that size. I do know they are found in the most inhospitable places on earth and are known to people to survive the depths of outer space. They are an unfathomably old species and are damn near indestructible. I suppose it isn’t totally crazy to imagine the Tardigrade could consume the fungus and be able to have a symbiotic relationship with it, but it is perhaps the biggest stretch of the whole theory. The way in which the Tardigrade and Fungi communicate is not at all explained. It is left for the viewer to fill in the blanks. Perhaps they thought the casual viewer wouldn’t care, but Star Trek fans can be more than a little particular. They pick apart everything.
carilynn27 