If they're reading this, here's my plea: Ditch the DASH drive and find something to replace it – and for god's sake, hire a competent science consultant.Star Trek Star Trek Discovery season 5: What you need to know I don't know how the Star Trek writers can get themselves out of this one, but if they don't, then Star Trek Discovery is finished. I'm willing to suspend disbelief for the sake of a good story (warp drive!), but I can't accept obviously bogus claims. The DASH drive is.Īnd now the entire series seems to be based on a combination of magic (an intergalactic mushroom network in subspace) and scientific errors (horizontal gene transfer by tardigrades). Although physically implausible, warp drive isn't laughably ridiculous. Star Trek has had faster-than-light warp drives for 50 years. And how would the space-traveling tardigrade take the entire ship with it? Are we supposed to assume it's creating some kind of mushroom-DNA field? This is no more plausible than asserting that people could connect to the mushroom network by eating a plate of mushrooms. Even if tardigrades could absorb foreign DNA (they can't), how the heck is this supposed to give them the ability to tap into the (wildly implausible) intergalactic spore network? DNA that's been taken up through HGT isn't connected to the source any longer. The idea of using horizontally transferred DNA for space travel is so nutty, so bad, that it's not even wrong. Apparently one of them heard the tardigrade story, perhaps someone who'd had a bit of biology in college (I'm guessing here), and got so excited that they turned it into a wildly implausible premise for an intergalactic space drive. Until, that is, one of the Star Trek writers got their hands on it. So: a minor scientific controversy, quickly debunked. This rapid correction of the record was a win for science I've used this example to demonstrate to my undergraduate class how sloppy science (the first paper) can lead one astray. That, plus a third paper, showed that the original paper had mistakenly identified contaminating DNA as part of the tardigrade's own genome. Surprisingly, the same journal (PNAS) that published the bogus HGT claim published a second paper just a few months later showing that tardigrades do not absorb foreign DNA into their genome. That paper was instantly controversial in the scientific community, and not surprisingly, its findings were being disputed in the Twittersphere within days of its appearance. Animals can't do HGT, but rather infamously, a paper was published in December 2015 that made the bold claim that tardigrades had a unique ability to absorb all kinds of DNA. It's a process through which bacteria sometimes take up DNA from the environment and integrate it into their own genomes. Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is a real thing. When Ripper borrows DNA from the mycelium, he's granted an all-access travel pass.Īnd just like that, not only the tardigrade but the entire spaceship jumps across the galaxy. Like its microscopic cousins on Earth, the tardigrade is able to incorporate foreign DNA into its own genome via horizontal gene transfer. Here's how the space tardigrade accomplishes this remarkable feat of interstellar travel, as explained by Michael Burnham, the show's central character ( in Episode 5, "Choose Your Pain"): Thanks to a unique biological property that the show's writers apparently misunderstood, the space tardigrade can access the mushroom network to travel throughout the universe, wherever and whenever it chooses. On the show, they call it a "giant space tardigrade."īut that's not all. It looks a bit like the picture shown here, but it's about the size of a large grizzly bear and is incredibly strong and extremely fierce. Star Trek Discovery's tardigrade is, shall we say, rather different. "Space bears" comes from their ability to survive in extreme environments, possibly including interplanetary space. They are also surprisingly cute for a microscopic animal, and they are colloquially known as water bears, moss piglets or space bears. Tardigrades are a real thing: They are microscopic animals, only 0.5 millimeters long, that live all over the planet. ( Mycologists might love this, but how big a fan base can they be?) The problem for the Discovery, in the first few episodes, is that the experimental drive will let them jump only short distances. To power its DASH drive, the Discovery maintains a large greenhouse full of spore-producing mushrooms.
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