Voyager S5 E26 Equinox

  • Norgur@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Starship running on mushrooms? Yeah, why not
    The mushrooms are some omnipresent thing connecting all space and time together and giving some special super powers somehow? The force stolen you have. Integration of science fantasy into science fiction unasked for was.

      • Bonehead@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Countercounterpoint:

        The Q know about the mycelial network, likely because they created it for their own purposes. That’s how they can seem to transport anywhere in the universe. Quinn essentially admitted as much when he said that their “magic” is simply very advanced technology. A mycelial network permeating subspace would be right up their alley.

      • Melmi
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        1 year ago

        I’m confused how something could connect all of time and space together without being omnipresent. It seems to me that the network is omnipresent by definition, because it exists everywhere.

          • Melmi
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            1 year ago

            That’s true, it spans the entire multiverse but only within one galaxy. It’s odd, but it’s cool that the network is so deeply tied to the Milky Way, just in every reality.

            It makes me wonder what the network is actually feeding off of. Life? Some sort of nebulous “energy”?

            Not something that they need to (or should) answer, but it’s just so cool to think about the mystery of it. I love fungi, and I love the mycelial network as this truly cosmic-scale organism living in subspace, holding the multiverse together. It’s beautiful.

              • Melmi
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                1 year ago

                Well, the question still remains of “symbiotizing what”? Fungi on earth range from saprophages, which decompose dead matter into nutrients, to mycorrhizae, which form symbiotic relationships with plants which produce nutrients. In either case, they’re feeding off of things, it’s just the source that varies. All living things need to gain energy somehow.

                The mycelial network is spooky and probably feeds off something more abstract, since sci-fi and all that. That said, maybe it’s in some sort of symbiotic relationship with the multiverse itself? There’s so much energy in a galaxy, let alone a multiverse worth of galaxies, that it’s not hard to imagine a fungal network feeding off just a tiny fraction of that energy. And interstellar space has relatively low energy, so it makes sense the network wouldn’t build hyphae there.

                You’re right that they never said it only works in the Milky Way, I had just assumed that since it peters out at the border of the galaxy that it ends there. And if it resumes in another galaxy, it seems like it would be discontinuous and thus a separate organism. But I suppose if you imagine it as a wholly separate subspace realm, with hyphae that connect out wherever there is sufficient “energy” of whatever sort it feeds off of, it makes sense. And jumping to another galaxy could be a cool twist indeed!

                I would give anything to be an astromycologist

        • agent_flounder@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Like I tell my kid who is constantly asking “how” whenever we watch Star Trek^1, it’s best not to think too hard about all that lol. I mean, I don’t love the Tuvix episode for the science


          1 Somehow this never happens when watching anime 🤔

      • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Now he has the ability to see time a little differently due to that DNA

        Which is kind of weird given that DNA is carbon, hydrogen, etc, moving and forming bonds based on physics. It’s why folding at home can simulate proteins.

        So anything DNA does can be simulated on a computer.

          • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            “Living” is a chemical process. Since Stamets was able to transfer the DNA into himself, he had identified the segments that coded the particular proteins.

              • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                Proteins that could not be adequately replicated by a computer

                Yeah, but that requires a strange alternate future where computers are simultaneously both faster than today’s computers and also not any faster.

                And yes the simulation needs a compatible physical interface.

                  • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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                    1 year ago

                    living organic link

                    And you are ignoring my first post that said it’s just atoms moving and bonding. “Living” is only a chemical process. I believe it was Robert Hook who when looking at a living cell under the first microscope powerful enough, commented on his disappointment that “cells were just machinery”

                    Yes their simulation failed because somehow there computers aren’t any faster than today’s computers.

                    The writers knew it didn’t make any sense which is why they lampshaded it-

                    Stamets: “At the quantum level, there is no difference between biology and physics. No difference at all.”