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Spore drive?
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
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this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2026
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Probably the most salient point - one cannot credibly claim that the warp drive was "based on science" that hadn't yet been published, and wouldn't be for three decades.
Yup.
And that Alcubierre’s effort, as a theoretical physics PhD student, to prove mathematically that there was a an exception to General Relativity that would make warp possible, was inspired by Star Trek’s fictional drive and not vice versa.
Although it might go both ways these days, since it wouldn't be at all surprising if newer writers heard of Alcubierre's warp drive, and incorporated that into Star Trek as a mechanism for how it works.
It’s more that Star Trek’s science advisor Dr. Erin MacDonald is a physicist who did her PhD thesis with the team in Scotland that got the Nobel prize shortly after she graduated.
As she puts it, her friends got her into watching Voyager when she was working on her PhD and she thought “oh cool, just what I am studying.”
There’s definitely a feedback loop going on, since Dr. MacDonald is whom they bounce their ideas off of.
She appears as herself - although as a Starfleet officer in the 24th century — in animated form in Prodigy, and explains ‘Temporal Mechanics 101’ in a learning module.
I was not saying that the warp drive was based on the Alcubierre drive. My pont was that the warp drive was more grounded in physics than the spore drive, so much so that it inspired the Alcubierre drive.
That's circular reasoning, though.
The fact that Alcubierre was inspired by Star Trek to come up with something (theoretically) workable does not mean that the warp drive as originally conceived was somehow "grounded in physics." At the end of the day, the similarities are pretty superficial.
I'll go ahead and concede my point. I haven't watched enough original Star Trek and definitely dont have enough knowledge in physics to argue this further. My understanding was that the warp drive was kept just vague enough to be argued to be theoretically possible. But honestly, I'm not a physicist, so I am probably missing something obvious.
In the original Star Trek, that Alcubierre was inspired by, it wasn't explained at all. You just had warp engines and impulse engines. Warp engines made it so the ship could go at warp speed, but go too fast, and they could come off the ship, or the ship would explode.
It was later series that tried to have an explanation for how they worked.
Although I don't think the writers cared particularly much for whether they were theoretically possible or not, anyway. They work through subspace, and that doesn't exist in reality, so a lot of oddities could just be brushed under that.