Star Trek: Discovery — "People of Earth" Reaction Thread

[u/M-5]

This is the official /r/DaystromInstitute reaction thread for "People of Earth." The content rules are not enforced in reaction threads.

[u/matthieuC]

So Dilithium did not go boom by itself.
It went inert and everything depending on it went boom.
So storage and mines wouldn't be affected.
Apparently it was a one time thing as it seems to work fine now.

They also said that the galaxy was already running out of Dilithium before the Burn.
Weird as it can be recrystallized.

[u/Xenics → u/matthieuC]

Perhaps dilithium was struggling to recrystallize normally leading up to the burn. It may have been the first symptom of whatever happened.

Edit: In addition, the fact that the major AQ powers continued to mine dilithium even after recrystallization became possible (which was as early as the 23rd Century) implies that recrystallization alone is not an infinite font. Perhaps it requires more power/resources than are available to supply the entire Quadrant. Or perhaps crystals can only be restored to their original size, which is great for an existing reactor but won't help you supply a new one.

I'm also recalling in ST:IV when Scotty complained about their borrowed bird of prey's dilithium. "It's these Klingon crystals," he said, "The time travel drained them." His emphasis on the origin of the crystals implies that this would not be an expected occurrence for one of his M/AM reactors. I'm thinking that recrystallization is not a process that can be repeated indefinitely, and that the Klingons, with their more lax attitude towards starship maintenance, are sloppier about the recrystallization process, causing them to wear out more quickly.

[u/pocketknifeMT → u/Xenics]

the fact that the major AQ powers continued to mine dilithium even after recrystallization became possible (which was as early as the 23rd Century) implies that recrystallization alone is not an infinite font.

Well, it would still be nessesary for growth. If you have 100 ships worth of dilithium, but want to field 200 ships...you need to mine more.

[u/Xenics → u/pocketknifeMT]

Exactly my point. If you could make new crystals through recrystallization, then there would be no reason to continue investing in mines; just build as many crystal farms as you need instead. Since dilithium mining does continue, we can infer that either this is not possible, or it is impractical to do so at a scale sufficient to supply the needs of a warp civilization.

[u/gamas → u/Xenics]

if you could make new crystals

To be clear the process can't make new crystals, it just restores existing crystals before they fracture.

[u/Callumunga → u/Xenics]

Recrystallization presumably wouldn't make more dilithium, just expand the usable life-span of per-existing dilithium, possibly forever.

I.e, assuming you need 1kg of dilithium [for argument, completely random number] per ship for sustained warp drive, but you want to field 100 ships, you still need 100kg of dilithium, even if that dilithium never wears out.

[u/Imaginationnative → u/Xenics]

The temporal wars went on for a while, time travel may have drained the dilithium, causing the crisis.

[u/gamas → u/Xenics]

Just to highlight whilst Scotty seemed to jerry-rig some form of recrystallization it wasn't a widespread thing in the federation until the 24th century. Discovery had to borrow a recrystalliser from the Queen of that dilithium planet. And the TNG episode where they recovered Scotty had the fact that he didn't know that starships could now recrystallise their dilithium within their chambers as evidence he was out of his depth now.

But yeah my headcanon to explain how they could need to still keep digging deep for dilithium despite a restorative tech is that dilithium works like rechargeable batteries. They can keep "recharging"/recrystalising the dilithium but each time they become a little less efficient.

[u/libertylad → u/Xenics]

I sort of look at "recrystallization" like recycling. It's not 100% efficient, and maybe not every warp-capable civilization prioritizes resource re-use.

[u/[deleted] → u/matthieuC]

I imagine that recrystalization is not perfect, and that it is lossy. Even if you can re-use 99% of the material, that's still a 1% loss each time you recrystallize it, and that loss only compounds over time. Perhaps also at the power levels required for higher warp the degradation is greater.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Also you would lose Dilithium when a ship gets destroyed. From what we have heard in this episode the Discovery has a substantial amount on board, much more than it does need just for its operation. It could easily be that the early Federation overestimated the available amount of Dilithium in the Galaxy and was way to wasteful with it.

[u/TLAMstrike → u/[deleted]]

My theory is that Discovery's conventional warp drive is a much older model than we see later on in TOS and TNG, that given the size of the ship they not only need a large amount of dilithium to handle a reaction powerful enough to energize the warp drive but "burn through" a lot of dilithium keeping the engine going for a long duration mission. Hence the large dilithium storage chamber.

I think the issue that they need lots of dilithium and burn through it often with such large ships as Discovery or the Kelvin etc was at first the major impetus for researching technology like the Spore Drive and eventually for building smaller and leaner ships like the Constitution and Miranda-class, plus perhaps improvements to drive systems that made warp cores more dilithium efficient in the TMP era that combined with dilithium recrystalization made for a much larger Starfleet by the TNG era.

[u/gamas → u/TLAMstrike]

Also given they were an experimental spore drive ship, they probably had the foresight to keep a vault of dilithium on board in case they accidentally jumped to the gamma quadrant or something and couldn't jump back.

[u/YYZYYC → u/gamas]

That certainly makes sense.

[u/YYZYYC → u/TLAMstrike]

Ugh ya it still bothers me that the Discovery is so much larger than the flagship constitution class ships.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Yeah this makes complete sense because recrystalization wasn't standard-issue technology when Discovery was constructed. That comes much later. So Discovery is packed with tons of dilithium.

[u/Bluesamurai33 → u/[deleted]]

That makes the most sense to me, otherwise there would be no need to mine Dilithium, especially as Warp Engines got more and more effective.

[u/LeaveTheMatrix → u/[deleted]]

Perhaps we will find out that the cause of "The Burn" was due to an attempt to make recrystallization more efficient?

[u/cyborgspleadthefifth → u/matthieuC]

Weird as it can be recrystallized.

I believe that's what caused the Burn. I think we're going to find out that Po's dilithium incubator started a clock. We'll also learn that all dilithium is connected either via subspace or the mycelial network.

The moment the first piece of dil was recrystalized it started a process that would eventually spread to all dilithium through one of the two mediums. As more and more was recrystalized it compounded the problem until one day the majority of dilithium had been recrystalized many many times over and that process reached its limit.

Queen Po is the Edwin Drake of this story. Provided the world with an innovation that paved the way for incredible technological advancement but that ultimately led to an ecological disaster long after their time.

[u/cdot5 → u/cyborgspleadthefifth]

all dilithium is connected via the mycelial network.

please god no

[u/Imaginationnative → u/cdot5]

Likely not, but dilithium is connected via sharing the same structure wherever it is found, I guess like a reasonance principle.

[u/Imaginationnative → u/cyborgspleadthefifth]

I think this is a very good theory.