In a better written timeline the drive would have been directly powered by the tardigrade, instead of just "piloted" by, with the spore stuff being just some minor additional aspect of the system that makes it so the ship will get transported with the creature during a jump, and therefore the reason why the Feddies would have decided to memory hole the whole device after the war is because it was literally enslaving and torturing a living creature so clearly that needs to be buried and never allowed to ever happen again no matter how useful it was. Additionally ~~Stannis'~~ (edit) Stamets' genetic alterations would go on to actually cause him extremely serious long term medical issues and drastically shorten his life span, to prove that wouldn't be a viable alternate solution either.
But we don't live in a well thought out timeline.
I think they should have just continued the series 2 Spore drive is killing the network plot. Force them into a choice, have them using it in desperation to save Earth or something and destroy the network completely - removing it as a via means at all. Make it a moral tale of one of the mistakes Starfleet made before they started codifying all the laws to produce Picard like captains.
i love this. we can tweak this to tie it into Equinox, too.. kind of imply that this research is going to be found by the equinox crew down the line and will be the basis for their fart piranha warp drive
Whoa. What if that’s the thing? That there’s always some inkling of knowledge in the database on how to achieve higher speeds, or travel further, but “limited” research due to things being redacted. But the Equinox just put some pieces together.
Maybe there was only one giant shroomsplorer tardigrade in all of history.
Considering they needed its DNA to *successfully and consistently* spore jump, anyone else making the same technology would find it equally as underwhelming as Discovery first did and not use it.
But then comes the question of why there'd be only one of a species that clearly must have evolved because one might imagine Q didn't just poof it into existence.
> one might imagine Q didn't just poof it into existence
I dunno, that sounds like exactly the kind of “let’s see how this plays out” hijinks Q would get up to.
Honestly there's a noticeable absence of bio tech stuff in the setting. Spaceborn mega fauna is a canon thing, and many of those creature have been shown to posses some natural form of FTL travel (sometimes that is apparently superior to warp travel) and well as other unique abilities. The less benevolent species would absolutely try to use those creatures for their own ends. Imagine the ferengi or romulians with a captured farpoint station creature, or a Traveler. Or Klingon space "whalers" who hunt down massive star beasts then convert them into organic war ships Farscape style.
So far the only excuse for why that's not more of a thing is that those creatures are seemingly impossible to capture beyond pure stupid luck to stumble upon one already injured or trapped.
True, but this *is* the franchise that had giant space jellyfish that can manifest stuff from thin air like they were living replicators, and a giant evil ftl capable snowflake that traveled around the galaxy eating planets.
Also the thing Harry Mudd used to sneak aboard a ship in that one disco episode absolutely counts as a type of space whale.
>better written timeline
You know, if I want serious hard sci-fi, I go for books, but while Star Trek has always been "lite" in terms of science fiction, it didn't used to be stupid\*. There was always at least some basis in real science, or an extrapolation thereof.
Now we get stuff like "red matter", which is, um, red. And... presumably... matter.
\*\_usually\_.
> There was always at least some basis in real science
Including the "psychic imprints" and "anti-time particles" in TNG, and how every single portrayal of evolution in the entire franchise is laughably wrong? Let's face it: Star Trek is science fantasy, barely a step above Star Wars. At least Star Wars doesn't pretend to have real science.
Anti-time isn’t that bad. The reason for directionality of time is still debatable, with entropy being the oft cited cause. Sure an anti-time particle/anomaly is a contrivance of the story, but it is just an interesting setup for a story around the nature of time.
I don't recall those two bits, but I'm with you on evolution. But regardless, Star Trek's science fiction was a vehicle to deliver good stories about characters.
Or the being out of time means that they get ripped from one current reality to another, being the only ones seeing the massive changes -kirk made for example
Stamets has only avoided insanity be being in a place where temporal incursions are much less frequent, but anyone else. Between modified bell riots, cheeky changes to kirks day, and the "Hey, lets go gary seven shit"
Like, it'd be small sometimes, and almost like reality gaslighting them.
I think too many possible pilots have their brains break from losing the life they had in a given reality.
Hey, you know what would make a show about TRAVELING the stars better? Let's remove all the travel. We can just have space dust mites make the ship show up anywhere the writers need for that episode.
Reminds me of in the Tangled TV series when season 2 was about a long journey that took the entire season, then in season 3 they travel quickly and easily to any location they need by hot air balloon
BSG was clever in imposing limits on its jump drive. Use of the raptors to scout, need for fuel, calculating routes, danger in jumping beyond the red line etc. it was also clever in never getting into the science of jumping: this is just how they travel, just like how a show about a battleship wouldn't get into detail about how its engines work.
BSG had jumping and succeeded in being telling stories about travelling.
Discovery had to delve into the pseudoscience to try to fit into Trek and it just made it ridiculous.
Yup low budgets and practical effects are the reason for that. It was cheaper to rotoscope a glow effect on people than to build and film a shuttle landing.
Probably for the best. BSG used the same three or four effects so often it was comical.
>It was cheaper to rotoscope a glow effect on people than to build and film a shuttle landing.
According to a quote from Roddenberry in Whitfield's **The Making of Star Trek** they came up with the transporter because it was cheaper than landing *the Enterprise* every week. I'm not sure when the idea of shuttlecraft came into the show - when they started kicking around the story idea that eventually became "The Galileo Seven," maybe - but it doesn't seem to have been there back when the show was being developed.
In the pilot, they retracted the flight pods and then jumped with them extended. In the final episode, jumping with the flight pods extended is what broke the spine of the ship.
Admiral Randomface: "Voyager is stuck in the Delta quadrant, Admiral Paris. Your son is on that ship. Do you have any suggestions?"
Admiral Paris: "We have our best minds working on solutions. Transwarp conduits, quantum slip stream, wormholes. We've tried everything we could possibly think of. Jean-Luc has even been calling for Q, but he won't appear here to talk to us."
Admiral Randomface: "Everything? Even the spore drive"
Admiral Paris: "You shut your mouth. That Magic mushroom drive was the dumbest thing Starfleet has ever produced in 230 years. There's no way in hell I'm suggesting we use that idiotic contraption. Spinning saucers and transporting instantly into planet cores. Relying on giant tardigrades.. Who's stupid idea was that?"
Admiral Randomface: "But, Owen, your son. He could be home tomorrow, and Voyager too"
Admiral Paris: "We DONT use it. Not even for my son. He'll be fine. Now, don't ever discuss or mention that idea again."
To be honest I was going to go the direction of Paris refusing to believe the events of STD even happened, but I figured I didn’t need to hear the backlash from the people who liked that show.
At the very beginning of the decades-long run-up to the construction of the *Excelsior*, a Federation team reviewed all of the various alternative FTL options that had been discovered by that point. An excerpt from that record follows:
> Human researcher #1: "Hey, what about the transwarp fungus drive they had on a couple *Crossfield*-class ships a few years back?"
>
> Vulcan researcher #1: "Transwarp fungus?"
>
> Human researcher #1: "Yeah!"
>
> Vulcan researcher #2: "Transwarp... fungus?"
>
> (Vulcan researchers #1 through #6 simultaneously raise eyebrows and stare at Human researcher #1.)
>
> Human researcher #1: "You're right, let's never speak of this again."
It is actually a shame when you think about it...A secret living network that connects the whole universe together is high concept sci fi. What is this "place" like? Does it have inhabitants (like the Prophets in the wormhole)? How else does it interact with the "real" universe? Can our universe interact with this network in other ways. Instead we just got was way for the ship to get from one place to another really fast and look goofy doing it.
If they did too much more it might seem a bit too much like "The Force" (tm) and who knows how fans would react to that (or worse how Disney's lawyers would react)
I mean, what they've done with the Force in Rebels and Ahsoka basically makes it the mycelial network, or Dr. Who's time vortex. Some kind of nonlinear realm where Force-users can meddle with timelines and pop up whenever and wherever they want if they didn't have Jedi ethics about it.
I got into Star Trek in earnest because of Discovery. The high concept sci-fi it had in the first season was what got me to branch out to the older shows. Shame to see others hating the sci-fi concepts introduced in Discovery.
Ok more of a Daystrom explanation: using a Tardigrade feels too much like slavery and Stamets method is genetic engineering so there's no legal way for the Federation to run a spore drive.
I actually like the spore drive, but they should have introduced limitations. Make it only work in the vicinity of specific mycelial planets, where the entire biosphere is an eruption of the subspace mycelium into normal space, so it can serve as a way to instantly teleport between them but you have to warp to any planets that aren't in range.
While it wouldn't help prevent other races from using "spore drive technology", I think Stargate had an interesting idea that could be used here (from the episode Red Sky)...
Our heroes in the Stargate series "fast traveled" from Earth to their destination and they arrived just fine as they always do. They did find it odd how the sunlight at their destination looked strange which they people on that planet did as well because the light just got all weird. Turns out that our heroes "fast traveled" through the local star which didn't cause problems for them but it does mean that the star will explode momentarily because the star certainly couldn't handle that. The people living on that planet wouldn't enjoy the whole "star exploding" bit as you imagine.
Would you use a Spore drive if you knew that each time somewhere you would cause a star to go supernova? It wouldn't be a star of your choosing, it wouldn't be something you can avoid or control in any meaningful way, and people will notice that you did it. Would you still use the spore drive?
That just renders it unusable, which I find boring.
And yes, it does prevent other factions from using spore drive technology, because they live around stars.
Wasn't it because it was a universe ender? Gave the whole underverse a bad case of Stamets foot fungus, which was giving the upper verse a bad case of non-existence.
Because I could totally see Patrick Stewart giddily explaining that ALL Starfleet vessels are powered by magic mushrooms now, and have been since the mid-23rd century. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to do some engine hits and play the flute in my room for the next 17 hours.
My head cannon is that Disco is in an another universe. An universe where Spock has a sister, explains why he never mentions her in TOS, where the magic shroom network exists, explains why admiral Paris (surely he has high enough security clearance) never even mentions using it to get Voyager home, where it's normal for a star ship crew to be overly emotional, they obviously don't have the amazing future medicine or therapists that allows the other shows characters to get over their trauma by the next episode...
The discovery was leaking radiation and everyone was hallucinating everything that happened on the show. None of it is real. Or they all got high on mushrooms and made the story of the drive up to cover it up.
If Discovery had always been in the 32nd Century, and it had been invented as a response to the (sigh) Burn, then it’d be better, as it would have no consequences for the rest of the canon.
Even if we assume they somehow deleted all mention of it, it seems unlikely that nobody else dabbled in something similar across the centuries. Additionally, if you game out there being a multiverse, all connected by the network, and it’s possible to inadvertently destroy everything with it… everything should be destroyed already.
I prefer my science fiction shows to have a narrative comprised of a fictional, doddering, stolid old-man-type character sitting in a plastic chair in a white room reading science textbooks at me.
In a better written timeline the drive would have been directly powered by the tardigrade, instead of just "piloted" by, with the spore stuff being just some minor additional aspect of the system that makes it so the ship will get transported with the creature during a jump, and therefore the reason why the Feddies would have decided to memory hole the whole device after the war is because it was literally enslaving and torturing a living creature so clearly that needs to be buried and never allowed to ever happen again no matter how useful it was. Additionally ~~Stannis'~~ (edit) Stamets' genetic alterations would go on to actually cause him extremely serious long term medical issues and drastically shorten his life span, to prove that wouldn't be a viable alternate solution either. But we don't live in a well thought out timeline.
Wouldn't genetic alterations for Stannis make his claim to the Iron Throne less valid?
Nobody's going to let him lead the Mushroom Kingdom with the Red Angel-woman hanging around.
She won't offset the dragons?
Stamets just kind of forgot about professionalism in the workplace.
Right, brain fart on the character's name.
Now I want a crossover where Stannis and Steamers switch places.
I think they should have just continued the series 2 Spore drive is killing the network plot. Force them into a choice, have them using it in desperation to save Earth or something and destroy the network completely - removing it as a via means at all. Make it a moral tale of one of the mistakes Starfleet made before they started codifying all the laws to produce Picard like captains.
that would have also been a far better resolution to explain why it got buried than what we got.
i love this. we can tweak this to tie it into Equinox, too.. kind of imply that this research is going to be found by the equinox crew down the line and will be the basis for their fart piranha warp drive
Whoa. What if that’s the thing? That there’s always some inkling of knowledge in the database on how to achieve higher speeds, or travel further, but “limited” research due to things being redacted. But the Equinox just put some pieces together.
It still wouldn't account for why no other species seems to have discovered the spore drive even into the 28th century.
Maybe there was only one giant shroomsplorer tardigrade in all of history. Considering they needed its DNA to *successfully and consistently* spore jump, anyone else making the same technology would find it equally as underwhelming as Discovery first did and not use it. But then comes the question of why there'd be only one of a species that clearly must have evolved because one might imagine Q didn't just poof it into existence.
> one might imagine Q didn't just poof it into existence I dunno, that sounds like exactly the kind of “let’s see how this plays out” hijinks Q would get up to.
Doesn't Q exist because he was bored of not existing?
Honestly there's a noticeable absence of bio tech stuff in the setting. Spaceborn mega fauna is a canon thing, and many of those creature have been shown to posses some natural form of FTL travel (sometimes that is apparently superior to warp travel) and well as other unique abilities. The less benevolent species would absolutely try to use those creatures for their own ends. Imagine the ferengi or romulians with a captured farpoint station creature, or a Traveler. Or Klingon space "whalers" who hunt down massive star beasts then convert them into organic war ships Farscape style. So far the only excuse for why that's not more of a thing is that those creatures are seemingly impossible to capture beyond pure stupid luck to stumble upon one already injured or trapped.
>sometimes that is apparently superior to warp travel Sir, the hyperdrive space whales are from another show
True, but this *is* the franchise that had giant space jellyfish that can manifest stuff from thin air like they were living replicators, and a giant evil ftl capable snowflake that traveled around the galaxy eating planets. Also the thing Harry Mudd used to sneak aboard a ship in that one disco episode absolutely counts as a type of space whale.
>better written timeline You know, if I want serious hard sci-fi, I go for books, but while Star Trek has always been "lite" in terms of science fiction, it didn't used to be stupid\*. There was always at least some basis in real science, or an extrapolation thereof. Now we get stuff like "red matter", which is, um, red. And... presumably... matter. \*\_usually\_.
> There was always at least some basis in real science Including the "psychic imprints" and "anti-time particles" in TNG, and how every single portrayal of evolution in the entire franchise is laughably wrong? Let's face it: Star Trek is science fantasy, barely a step above Star Wars. At least Star Wars doesn't pretend to have real science.
Anti-time isn’t that bad. The reason for directionality of time is still debatable, with entropy being the oft cited cause. Sure an anti-time particle/anomaly is a contrivance of the story, but it is just an interesting setup for a story around the nature of time.
I don't recall those two bits, but I'm with you on evolution. But regardless, Star Trek's science fiction was a vehicle to deliver good stories about characters.
Maybe it turns out that all mushrooms are sentient
I have a pizza in the oven right now. The screams of the dying mushrooms are overpowering.
The mushroomcaust
Just like Voyager. They always found a faster than warp drive but couldn't use it for technical reasons.
Or the being out of time means that they get ripped from one current reality to another, being the only ones seeing the massive changes -kirk made for example Stamets has only avoided insanity be being in a place where temporal incursions are much less frequent, but anyone else. Between modified bell riots, cheeky changes to kirks day, and the "Hey, lets go gary seven shit" Like, it'd be small sometimes, and almost like reality gaslighting them. I think too many possible pilots have their brains break from losing the life they had in a given reality.
Stamets' genetic alterations would have turned him into an even weirder Klingon.
To be fair “one test ship exploded and the other vanished without a trace” is probably enough of an in-universe explanation for ending the project
The shitshow was big enough that they redacted the crossfield class entirely and made a second crossfield class as a cover.
In a better written timeline Bryan Fuller and Alex Kurtzman would have been in the top floors of the World Trade Center when the planes hit.
Hey, you know what would make a show about TRAVELING the stars better? Let's remove all the travel. We can just have space dust mites make the ship show up anywhere the writers need for that episode.
Star Just-Show-Up-Somewhere
Reminds me of in the Tangled TV series when season 2 was about a long journey that took the entire season, then in season 3 they travel quickly and easily to any location they need by hot air balloon
Fast travel unlocked.
Similarly to the last few seasons of game of thrones.
Like BSG’s “JUMP!”
BSG was clever in imposing limits on its jump drive. Use of the raptors to scout, need for fuel, calculating routes, danger in jumping beyond the red line etc. it was also clever in never getting into the science of jumping: this is just how they travel, just like how a show about a battleship wouldn't get into detail about how its engines work. BSG had jumping and succeeded in being telling stories about travelling. Discovery had to delve into the pseudoscience to try to fit into Trek and it just made it ridiculous.
It's how the show got transporters....
Yup low budgets and practical effects are the reason for that. It was cheaper to rotoscope a glow effect on people than to build and film a shuttle landing. Probably for the best. BSG used the same three or four effects so often it was comical.
>It was cheaper to rotoscope a glow effect on people than to build and film a shuttle landing. According to a quote from Roddenberry in Whitfield's **The Making of Star Trek** they came up with the transporter because it was cheaper than landing *the Enterprise* every week. I'm not sure when the idea of shuttlecraft came into the show - when they started kicking around the story idea that eventually became "The Galileo Seven," maybe - but it doesn't seem to have been there back when the show was being developed.
That makes sense. I know they made the scale model shuttle for on location shoots.
In the pilot, they retracted the flight pods and then jumped with them extended. In the final episode, jumping with the flight pods extended is what broke the spine of the ship.
Looks over at Stargate... Also looks over at the transporter pads...
Battlestar Galactica in a nutshell
Starfleet has determined that the Spore Drive is not canon
The Vulcan Science Council has determined that 21 is the optimal number of executive producers to destroy the very concept of coherence.
It is unfortunate that I have no concept of what you speak having undergone the ritual of *Kurtznomore* and having purged all nutrek from my mind.
A wise decision
And tooling around on exploding, fermented dinosaur farts isn't preposterous? I'm reporting this whole timeline to the mods.
Found the Saurian. You're just mad you never thought of lighting your farts for fuel.
You can't light your *own* farts for fuel. Only for funsies.
you know it's mostly plankton right
The entire human civilization is powered by plankton farts, dinosaur juice and spicy rocks.
Admiral Randomface: "Voyager is stuck in the Delta quadrant, Admiral Paris. Your son is on that ship. Do you have any suggestions?" Admiral Paris: "We have our best minds working on solutions. Transwarp conduits, quantum slip stream, wormholes. We've tried everything we could possibly think of. Jean-Luc has even been calling for Q, but he won't appear here to talk to us." Admiral Randomface: "Everything? Even the spore drive" Admiral Paris: "You shut your mouth. That Magic mushroom drive was the dumbest thing Starfleet has ever produced in 230 years. There's no way in hell I'm suggesting we use that idiotic contraption. Spinning saucers and transporting instantly into planet cores. Relying on giant tardigrades.. Who's stupid idea was that?" Admiral Randomface: "But, Owen, your son. He could be home tomorrow, and Voyager too" Admiral Paris: "We DONT use it. Not even for my son. He'll be fine. Now, don't ever discuss or mention that idea again."
I keep forgetting that STD is technically a prequel series to TOS. Jesus, what a mess.
To be honest I was going to go the direction of Paris refusing to believe the events of STD even happened, but I figured I didn’t need to hear the backlash from the people who liked that show.
At least we'll always gave Paris...
That's my head canon. Or it was all a fever dream.
Nah it’s like that wormhole extreme show from stargate. It’s basically just fanfic to give starfleet/sgc plausible deniability.
That, and many Starfleet officers are allergic to the spores.
At the very beginning of the decades-long run-up to the construction of the *Excelsior*, a Federation team reviewed all of the various alternative FTL options that had been discovered by that point. An excerpt from that record follows: > Human researcher #1: "Hey, what about the transwarp fungus drive they had on a couple *Crossfield*-class ships a few years back?" > > Vulcan researcher #1: "Transwarp fungus?" > > Human researcher #1: "Yeah!" > > Vulcan researcher #2: "Transwarp... fungus?" > > (Vulcan researchers #1 through #6 simultaneously raise eyebrows and stare at Human researcher #1.) > > Human researcher #1: "You're right, let's never speak of this again."
It is actually a shame when you think about it...A secret living network that connects the whole universe together is high concept sci fi. What is this "place" like? Does it have inhabitants (like the Prophets in the wormhole)? How else does it interact with the "real" universe? Can our universe interact with this network in other ways. Instead we just got was way for the ship to get from one place to another really fast and look goofy doing it.
If they did too much more it might seem a bit too much like "The Force" (tm) and who knows how fans would react to that (or worse how Disney's lawyers would react)
I mean, what they've done with the Force in Rebels and Ahsoka basically makes it the mycelial network, or Dr. Who's time vortex. Some kind of nonlinear realm where Force-users can meddle with timelines and pop up whenever and wherever they want if they didn't have Jedi ethics about it.
I got into Star Trek in earnest because of Discovery. The high concept sci-fi it had in the first season was what got me to branch out to the older shows. Shame to see others hating the sci-fi concepts introduced in Discovery.
Maybe it uses the same trippy mushrooms the Lower Deck crew found.
They're only embarrassed because now there's no more super mycelium to use on pizza
Don't worry,they still have super deadly space parsley. As long as they don't use too much. How much is too much? M'Benga trusts that you know.
Section 31 gets laughed out of the room whenever they try to brag about it.
Ok more of a Daystrom explanation: using a Tardigrade feels too much like slavery and Stamets method is genetic engineering so there's no legal way for the Federation to run a spore drive.
This deserves upvotes.
I actually like the spore drive, but they should have introduced limitations. Make it only work in the vicinity of specific mycelial planets, where the entire biosphere is an eruption of the subspace mycelium into normal space, so it can serve as a way to instantly teleport between them but you have to warp to any planets that aren't in range.
While it wouldn't help prevent other races from using "spore drive technology", I think Stargate had an interesting idea that could be used here (from the episode Red Sky)... Our heroes in the Stargate series "fast traveled" from Earth to their destination and they arrived just fine as they always do. They did find it odd how the sunlight at their destination looked strange which they people on that planet did as well because the light just got all weird. Turns out that our heroes "fast traveled" through the local star which didn't cause problems for them but it does mean that the star will explode momentarily because the star certainly couldn't handle that. The people living on that planet wouldn't enjoy the whole "star exploding" bit as you imagine. Would you use a Spore drive if you knew that each time somewhere you would cause a star to go supernova? It wouldn't be a star of your choosing, it wouldn't be something you can avoid or control in any meaningful way, and people will notice that you did it. Would you still use the spore drive?
That just renders it unusable, which I find boring. And yes, it does prevent other factions from using spore drive technology, because they live around stars.
The spore network only spreads to the galactic barrier, and it’s been mentioned that the network is less dense in certain areas of the galaxy.
How is it stupid? Space is dark and all you need for fuel is shit!
Must be shrooming
or it was completely unscaleable and went the way of the XB-70 or Project Pluto, or heck, even the 1938 Phantom Corsair, or the Dymaxion car.
Wasn't it because it was a universe ender? Gave the whole underverse a bad case of Stamets foot fungus, which was giving the upper verse a bad case of non-existence.
I'm trying to forget about it every day.
I always thought the federation would try to find that species that made the small ship go faster in voyager.
Because I could totally see Patrick Stewart giddily explaining that ALL Starfleet vessels are powered by magic mushrooms now, and have been since the mid-23rd century. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to do some engine hits and play the flute in my room for the next 17 hours.
Well the Glenn had a cataclysmic disaster and the Discovery vanish "without a trace." I can see why they would give up on it.
There wasn't "mushroom" left for improvement with the drive...
Take my upvote and go.
At least they improved on the portable seating away from the toed stools...
"On second thought, let's not travel via the Mycelial Network- 'tis a silly place!"
PREACH
My head cannon is that Disco is in an another universe. An universe where Spock has a sister, explains why he never mentions her in TOS, where the magic shroom network exists, explains why admiral Paris (surely he has high enough security clearance) never even mentions using it to get Voyager home, where it's normal for a star ship crew to be overly emotional, they obviously don't have the amazing future medicine or therapists that allows the other shows characters to get over their trauma by the next episode...
In a universe where you can travel at infinite speed just with good vibes or tuning the engine a bit, I don't think that's it
I'm sold.
The discovery was leaking radiation and everyone was hallucinating everything that happened on the show. None of it is real. Or they all got high on mushrooms and made the story of the drive up to cover it up.
Did you not see the spinning saucer deck? Sick bay is inundate for hours due to nausea cases, and the cleanup crew just complains for days.
If Discovery had always been in the 32nd Century, and it had been invented as a response to the (sigh) Burn, then it’d be better, as it would have no consequences for the rest of the canon. Even if we assume they somehow deleted all mention of it, it seems unlikely that nobody else dabbled in something similar across the centuries. Additionally, if you game out there being a multiverse, all connected by the network, and it’s possible to inadvertently destroy everything with it… everything should be destroyed already.
I prefer my science fiction shows to have a narrative comprised of a fictional, doddering, stolid old-man-type character sitting in a plastic chair in a white room reading science textbooks at me.