Spore drive

The spore drive, formally known as the Displacement-activated spore hub drive, is a fictional spacecraft propulsion system introduced in the 2017 television series Star Trek: Discovery. It enables instantaneous travel across interstellar and interdimensional space via a subspace network of fungal spores produced by a space-dwelling organism, Prototaxites stellaviatori. This network is depicted as existing simultaneously across all points in space and time, allowing starships to transition between locations or parallel universes without traversing intervening space.

In contrast to conventional Star Trek propulsion technologies such as impulse drive and warp drive, the spore drive relies on biologically mediated navigation via a "mycelial network", depicted as a separate space outside of normal reality. It is presented as a classified project developed by Starfleet Intelligence and tested aboard the USS Discovery, but ultimately withheld from broader implementation due to ethical, biological, and strategic constraints.

Inspired in part by the work of real-world mycologist Paul Stamets, the spore drive has been analyzed by scholars as a representation of posthuman connectivity, ecological interdependence, and speculative theoretical physics, with conceptual roots in mycology and environmental allegory.

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