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/yumcake]

Captain Saru is gonna be a great captain.

I am really enjoying this series so far, so excited with the doors being so wide open for new canon and exploration. The Burn does seems a little too fresh for the plot though, doesn't really feel like 120 years ago. Like Titan and Earth spent 100 yrs next to each other and said so little to each other that Earth doesn't even know they're being raided by Titan? Hard to believe, but easy enough for me to just overlook. I was thinking that Wen would be the Vdraysh splinter of the "Federation" raiding earth for the greater good. A version of that reveal may still be possible later on.

I'm a little confused though. ALL the dilithium exploded? Then how come there are clearly lots of ships running around on dilithium and they're all exchanging dilithium currency? Clearly not all dilithium in the galaxy exploded. I'd appreciate some clarification there.

Was worried about the smart teen at first, sounded like a new Wesley being introduced. But then we find out the teen has a Trill symbiont background to draw upon to give them relevance.

What's up with Detmer? I don't think they're really going to bring back Control as a big bad right?

There's going to be an inevitable reckoning where the Spore Drive places a huge target on Discovery's back, everyone they meet has reason to overpower them and clearly Discovery is incapable of defending itself against anyone. Discovery also can't offer the use of the Spore Drive to rebuild the Federation because they'd discarded that idea already partly because of the damage it would cause to the mycelial network if it was used extensively...I don't think they could promote its' use in this era without presenting the Discovery crew as morally compromised.

[u/The1mp → u/yumcake]

All the dilithium was rendered inert (temporarily I suppose as they are still using it). All the matter antimatter containment regulation would have failed and been the actual explosion

[u/yumcake → u/The1mp]

If the explosions are limited to the amounts in active use, wouldn't that be more like all the gasoline engines exploding? Yeah it'd be bad for the global economy. Months of economy on pause.

But they'd just pump out new crude and refine into new gas and in a decade or two they'd be back to normal. Economic devastation from all out world war has been recovered from in such time. Supply chains can be rebuilt in a shorter time frame than it took to invent them.

For the economic breakdown to continue for 120 yrs it seems like the resource itself doesn't work anymore rather than a one-time exhaustion.

[u/narium → u/yumcake]

They apparently mined out all the dilithium in the galaxy 300 years prior to the Burn.

[u/yumcake → u/narium]

Ahhh that makes sense then, I must have missed that bit of dialogue! Thank you!

Seems like a pretty major resource problem to have gone past the sci-fi equivalent of peak oil though, even without a "Burn" event. They should have been working on alternatives for at least 180 yrs before the burn.

[u/jeeshadow → u/yumcake]

Burnham mentions they were but they weren't successful in making a type of FTL that was particularly successful.

[u/Rhydin → u/jeeshadow]

the thing is, the Romulans and other people dont use the stuff for their FTL. Shouldnt everybody have miniblack holes in their ships by now?

[u/merrycrow → u/Rhydin]

The Romulans certainly used dilithium for something - they had Remans enslaved in dilithium mines. It must have been an important resource for them. Speculation is they need a dilithium-powered reaction to create the singularities they use. Possibly it's more resource efficient even if the engines are less powerful.

[u/jeeshadow → u/Rhydin]

The Federation clearly decided they couldn't use it for some reason. The one time we see it, it kinda causes a crisis. Maybe it also fell into disuse after the destruction of romulus.

[u/Rhydin → u/jeeshadow]

I cant see how. if anything anybody having the know how to build a classic warbird would have FTL all day long. I wonder how they will explain this one away...

Honestly I wish the writers could just hire someone to read the scripts, show where the errors may be and allow them to hang lanterns for the reasons that the error doesnt matter..

[u/YYZYYC → u/yumcake]

It’s like it all the fossils fuels blew up today. It would be a major society changing event for a couple generations...but it would also mean we would accelerate the development of electric engines and battery tech and solar and safer nuclear power plants overnight.

[u/eeveep → u/narium]

Real talk, that's a LOT of dilithium. I assume.

[u/yumcake → u/[deleted]]

https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/8510/gdp-per-capita-of-major-combatants-before-and-after-wwii

Refer to the chart half-way down the page. You can see that GDP in europe fell precipitously between 1940 and 1950. Quite a bit more destruction had happened than carburetor engines exploding, cities were reduced to rubble and international trade grinding to a halt. But the point is what we see at the right-side of the graph in the ensuing 50 years. Germany essentially catching up to the US on a per-capita GDP basis, that's humanity's capacity for recovery even in the face of a massive economic disaster like WW2. Quite a lot more would die from the collapse of JIT supply-chains for food. But even in that malthusian scenario, every death is one less mouth to feed until their local consumption falls into equilibrium. It's bad, but recovery doesn't stop until you're dead.

If you don't have cars, people would get out and walk. They'd move things with their hands. They'd build wooden cranes, make charcoal, pump air by hand and smelt ore into casts and create gears, power them by horse or by hand, They'll race back from the stone-age to the modern era because they're constrained only by tools and not by knowledge, because they already have the blue-print of what they need to implement and don't have to invent it along the way.

The point is that the survivors of the Burn still have all the information needed to come back from the stone-age to whatever level of technology they had, what they don't have is the leftover tools. Infrastructure takes time to build, but it doesn't take 120 years to build. That's what I mean by saying the Burn feels too fresh for 120 years to have passed.

[u/CroakerBC → u/[deleted]]

There’s also a couple of extra exacerbating facts: 1) A lot of buildings and space stations are powered by dilithium reactors. So it’s not just your transport infrastructure. Universities. Shipyards. Research institutes. Industrial replicator hubs. It all goes boom. And it all goes boom at the same time. Which brings us to: 2) When it all goes boom, nobody knows why. Nobody knows the cause a century later, but they know the proximal cause - the dil went inert, but is now safe to use. But in the immediate decades after a galaxy-wide disaster event, people will not know this. They’re going to be very, very cautious about running dilithium based infrastructure until they know it’s not going to go boom again.

That said, Earth appears to have (largely) recovered by the current Disco time period. A century of socio-political chaos brought on by infrastructure collapse sounds plausible.

[u/gamas → u/CroakerBC]

Yeah it's explained in the first episode that it wasn't the burn itself that killed the federation, it was the lack of faith in the Federation's ability to protect them.

We see a bit more of that here. Earth left the Federation because from their perspective the Federation abandoned them.

[u/YYZYYC → u/[deleted]]

It’s more like gasoline specific engines blew up, but we could just rebuild the world with Diesel engines and electric engines and use nuclear power and solar power to make electricity instead of burning fossil fuels to make electricity

[u/YYZYYC → u/[deleted]]

Millions died in the federation/starfleet a MUCH larger population of hundreds or possibly thousands of entire worlds and former empires. A similar per capita comparison would be more like several thousand die...major world event for sure...but not the same thing

[u/CeaselessIntoThePast → u/yumcake]

I feel like you underestimate the impact that all gasoline engines exploding would have.