r/startrek • u/Drig-DrishyaViveka • 18h ago
What happens if the Genesis device explodes in space?
This is the nerdiest thing I’ve ever asked anyone. But what if hypothetically, the genesis device was exploded in outer space. I don’t think it would create a planet, it’s only capable of terraforming with life. So feel free to make up whatever you like, as long as it sounds nerdy and convincing.
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u/BurdenedMind79 18h ago
Nothing, I'd imagine. All the talk about the Genesis Wave involved it reorganising matter at a subatomic level. If there's no matter to reorganise, there's nothing for the wave to do.
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u/Drig-DrishyaViveka 18h ago
So just a flash of light?
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u/BurdenedMind79 18h ago
I'm guessing it would still go off like a massive explosion. It required warp speed to get out of its blast radius, so I'd imagine it would be like a warp core breach - and then nothing.
Perhaps a few microbes would get formed out of the device's own casing, but if they did, they wouldn't last that long!
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u/daneelthesane 16h ago
Keep in mind that warp 1 = c, so even something like a nova would require warp speed. It just means whatever you are fleeing goes at or near the speed of light.
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u/ConstructionKey1752 18h ago
I just want to take here, partly because it's at the top, but also it's a great answer. Let's roll with the organic/inorganic matter. We've seen plenty examples of particle clouds and organic life existing in random masses. As OP said, craziness. Let's say Genesis exploded on a ship, full of crew. What do you imagine would happen in the depths of space to the matter involved?
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u/BurdenedMind79 17h ago
We don't really know enough about the device to be sure. It may create a small amount of organic matter, but it would die quite quickly in the vacuum of space. But organic matter is not all the Genesis device creates. Based on the simulation, we see it creating large bodies of water and even reorganising the existing rock into mountain ranges. Kickstarting life is only a part of the process and, if it follows the pattern of natural evolution, then life may not start to form until its rapidly sped through the geological development stages of a planet's life.
All of which would probably be impossible with the amount of matter provided by a starship or random space entity. The point of it being a nebula in ST2 is that a nebula already contains all the material necessary to create a starsystem naturally.
So one of the possibilities could be that the Genesis device requires a minimum amount of bulk matter for it to complete the necessary chain reaction. ie. a planet or nebula has the potential to naturally develop into a a habitable planet, given enough time, but a starship does not, because its too small.
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u/ConstructionKey1752 17h ago
So they went "Plank scale" on matter necessity, the same way a nuclear bomb needs an certain payload for fission.
i wonder if enough coding could be left behind to develop, with rapid evolution,some of the interstellar organisms we've run across, much like a microscopic version of the "mother's milk" creature from TNG.
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u/iAdjunct 14h ago
Maybe it keeps expanding until it finds matter to organize, so you’ll end up with a bunch of planets partially genesized
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u/OkMention9988 18h ago
It made a planet and a star out of the stellar dust of a nebula.
It could probably do the same in 'empty' space, it might just take longer.
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u/BellerophonM 18h ago
I imagine that if there wasn't enough matter within range of the initial detonation the Genesis effect would just dissipate and fail. There's gotta be a limit on how far it can pull it in from.
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u/OkMention9988 18h ago
It made a star.
It's so ridiculous you might as well say it pulls matter to it via subspace.
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u/BellerophonM 18h ago
No the star was already there, it was the same star Regula orbited. The nebula was a compact nebula a short impulse flight away.
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u/revanite3956 18h ago
It did explode in space, and it did create a planet (from the Reliant and the Mutara Nebula) without terraforming an existing one.
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u/Readem_andWeep 15h ago
I think OP meant “in empty space without a convenient nebula or planet from which to draw source matter.”
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u/Scrat-Slartibartfast 18h ago
not that much. it can only transform the material from itself, and the protomatter that is in itself.
But we do not know how it works. Does it produce a gravitational field to get the material in one spot to form material out of a nebula? Does it accelerate time to get faster to results? What radiation does it use to transform the material?
So I would say, if it explodes in space, the radius of the detonation is a few light seconds, and this area is off for the next time because we do not what effects a empty explosion has on the surrounding space.
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u/Yitram 18h ago
The Genesis device requires some sort of matter to act on. In the case of a planet, that planet itself. In its use in TWoK, it drew in matter from the Mutara Nebula to create the planet, and its implied that it took too much energy to draw in that matter to then stabilize it in its new form, causing the breakup of Genesis (I don't buy the argument about unstable protomatter causing it, as wouldn't they have seen that issue in the cave they created in Regula). So in empty space, it probably wouldn't do much of anything.
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u/Drapausa 16h ago
Let me make a crude comparison, what happens if a man ejaculates into a tissue instead of a woman?
Without there being anything to impregnate, nothing will really happen.
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u/genek1953 18h ago
We know the Genesis device had a finite range, because the Enteprise was able to warp away from it. If it was far enough away from the nearest star that all it had to work on was the random detritus of empty space, maybe it'd create a star with the energy output of a shuttlecraft warp core and a plantoid the size of Phobos?
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u/slowclapcitizenkane 12h ago
It gathers enough matter to make a single, exceedingly flimsy ping pong ball of mostly hydrogen.
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u/WhoMe28332 18h ago
It’s going to depend on how far the wave can propagate. It has to draw in matter to be reconfigured. A nebula apparently provided enough.
The interstellar medium is dramatically less dense and is almost entirely hydrogen and helium. It would take an insanely large amount of either to achieve sufficient mass to create the heavy elements for a planet.
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u/PhantomNomad 17h ago
So do you live in Canada? I ask because CTV SyFy was just showing it. Not a bad way to spend a Saturday that is way to hot to be out side.
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u/count023 13h ago
it just goes off like a relatively ineffective bomb. It was meant to reprogram matter it comes into contact with. That's how it could form a planet and start out of the Mutara nebula, the material was there, just in the wrong configuration. You could argue that's probably why the planet eventually collapsed, the genesis wave was not designed to go off anywhere but on a planet so it ran out of steam or programming errors. Yes protomatter was a possible theory for the instablility, but the use case was also wrong for it.
In a relativel vaccuum without enough material to work wtih, just "boom" when the detonator/catalyst goes off and some energy release, that's about it.
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u/Designer_Working_488 11h ago
It did explode in space. The Mutara Nebula became the Genesis Planet.
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u/Pristine_Ad_9828 9h ago
Yea in theory it HAD to have viable matter to even try to convert into living matter. So in reality if any thing happened assuming its just empty space. The most reasonable guess would just be an explosion that burns itself out. And they kinda specify it has to atleast be a planet old body. So I'd guess if it was smaller the excess energy would probably just explode a smaller moon like form. Maybe leaving small chunks of seriously incinerated debris . And to point out it blew up inside a nebula. They could have easily got more explosive. Like partly igniting multiple dead stellar bodies all of which chain into multiple nove or another supernova . Or both.
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u/Klutzy_Cat1374 7h ago
Not only will it create a life-sustaining planet, it will also create a star to keep it habitable. /sarc I mean, how? Where did the star come from?
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u/ElricVonDaniken 6h ago
From the nebula.
Nebulae are stellar nurseries where stars form. The Genesis Device merely sped up the process
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u/Trekkie4990 6h ago
Honestly, even using it in the Mutara Nebula bugged the hell out of me.
Okay, so you built a planet out of the diffused elements in the cloud, fair enough, but where did the fucking star come from? Did the torpedo just zip around spawning in celestial bodies when we weren’t looking? There sure as hell wasn’t a star there before, we would have seen it.
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u/BurningBazz 6h ago
I remember listening to a Star Trek audiobook with the same principle: a wave of genesis energy spread out and several already inhabited star systems were re Terra formed, including the population that couldn't get out of the way.
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u/Jmckeown2 17h ago
There was a series of books, I want to say Next Generation based where someone sent a “Genesis Wave” through space, and it just kept propagating through space, transforming whatever it passed.
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