Starfleet Academy, the latest installment in the Star Trek franchise, is already making waves across the Trek-verse and beyond. 

Set on a nebulous stardate somewhere in the 32nd century, the show follows Caleb Mir (Sandro Rosta), a troubled youngster whose search for his mom lands him in and out of jail before he is offered a chance to join Starfleet Academy. In this part of the Trek timeline—around the back half of Star Trek: Discovery—Starfleet is still reeling from the effects of the Burn, a galactic disaster that nearly shattered the Federation. Mir and his fellow cadets are the first to return to the hallowed halls of Earth’s Starfleet Academy in over a century.

The show is off to a solid start, with its first three episodes introducing a cast of feisty young students alongside seasoned heroes like Discovery engineer Jett Reno (Tig Notaro) and Star Trek: Voyager’s holographic Doctor (Robert Picardo), who reprises the role with all the wit and snark of his 30 Earth years-younger counterpart. Starfleet Academy is taking the franchise into uncharted territory—namely, the YA drama genre—and elder fans might find it shockingly irreverent to the point of being (gasp) un-Trekkie at times.

But at its core, Starfleet Academy is still very much a Star Trek show. If you look past the hormonally-charged back talk and frequent swearing, you’ll find earnest reflection on the morality of a Federation that is rebuilding and reinventing itself for the next generation.

But in order to understand the interstellar politics that animate Starfleet Academy, you need to know a bit about how we got here, cosmically speaking.

The short answer is that around 3069 in the Trek timeline, all of the dilithium in the galaxy suddenly went inert, triggering a rash of warp core failures across the galaxy. Millions of lives were lost, Starfleet was decimated, and warp travel—the FTL glue holding the Federation together—became impossible. This event, known as the Burn, unraveled the galactic order.

That is pretty much all the context you need to start watching Starfleet Academy. But if you’ve read this far, chances are you are a nerd who craves the technobabble-laden details. So let’s get into them—starting with the (semi-real) science of warp drive before moving on to the (entirely fictional) science of dilithium.

In Star Trek, warp drive is the propulsive technology that allows ships to travel faster than the speed of light, enabling a galaxy-spanning Federation to exist. While it sounds pretty far-fetched, scientists consider warp drive one of the most plausible sci-fi ideas for moving great distances quickly—more so than teleportation, wormholes, or time travel. In fact, physicists are currently developing the theory that could one day allow us to build one.

The premise is straightforward enough.

According to Einstein’s theory of relativity, no object can be accelerated beyond the speed of light. But that galactic speed limit does not apply to the fabric of the universe itself. Spacetime, as physicists call this fabric, can change at any speed. So, if you want to move a starship faster than the light, you’ve simply got to warp the space around it into a bubble, and get that bubble moving very, very fast.

The only problem (ok, there are a few) is finding an energy source capable of bending the fabric of the universe into a bubble—and then accelerating that bubble beyond the lightspeed barrier. 

In a seminal 1994 paper on warp drive, physicist Miguel Alcubierre found that in order to generate a spacetime bubble just a few meters in diameter, you’d need an amount of energy comparable to the mass of our Sun.  For context, Star Trek science advisor Erin MacDonald recently told me that a hydrogen bomb releases the energy equivalent contained in roughly a teaspoon of mass upon detonation.

“If we wanted to distort space time to be able to wrap it around our ship, we're just going to need a *** of energy — I almost used an expletive to emphasize how much energy we're going to need to use,” MacDonald said.

In the Star Trek future, this problem has been solved with the help of a fictional substance known as dilithium. Dilithium is often misunderstood to be the fuel inside Starfleet’s warp drives. Instead, MacDonald says, dilithium is “like a control rod” that keeps the reactions inside the warp core—collisions of matter and antimatter—from going critical. With dilithium at the helm, the energy produced as matter and antimatter annihilate one another can be harnessed to create, sustain, and accelerate a warp bubble around a starship.

Dilithium dates back to Star Trek’s original series from the 1960s. But the science underpinning it was unknown until about seven years ago, when the team behind Discovery hired MacDonald to come up with a technical explanation for the Burn.

To explain why all of the galaxy’s dilithium suddenly stopped working the way it should, MacDonald realized she first needed to explain what dilithium is.

And so, in a scientific ret-con for the ages, MacDonald decided that in the future, humans would discover that dark matter—the mysterious substance that makes up over 80% of the matter in our universe—is made up of “complex” subatomic particles that exist in the Trekkian realm known as subspace. (Subspace, MacDonald explained, is mathematically analogous to a complex plane, which you might recall learning about during the imaginary numbers unit of your high school algebra class.) 

In this future, solving the mystery of dark matter becomes key to understanding dilithium. That’s because dilithium is made up of those same complex subatomic building blocks, along with regular matter. Essentially, dilithium has one foot in our dimension and one foot in another. And it’s the unique crystalline structure of this reality-straddling substance that enables dilithium to regulate the energy released during matter-antimatter collisions.

But that structure is shattered in the 31st century by a Kelpian alien named Su’Kal, who developed a unique connection to dilithium owing to changes in the expression of his genes that occurred growing up in a stellar dilithium nursery. (These epigenetic high jinks come courtesy of MacDonald’s partner in intergalactic crime, biologist and Trek advisor Mohamed Noor). On that fateful day of the Burn, Su’Kal screamed at the resonant frequency of dilithium, creating a subspace shockwave that traveled across the galaxy and severed the link between the crystal’s normal and subspace components.

Eventually, the crew of the USS Discovery solve the mystery of the Burn when they find and rescue Su’Kal from isolation on the dilithium-rich planet of Theta Zeta in the Verubin Nebula. (Fun easter egg: the nebula is named after Vera Rubin, the real 20th-century astronomer who discovered dark matter.) Luckily for the Federation, Theta Zeta’s abundant dilithium resources allow Starfleet to begin rebuilding.

If that feels like a lot of invented science to explain a big kaboom, well, yes. But it’s telling of the fact that in Star Trek, and especially in the current crop of shows, science matters. Sure, some of it is made up on the spot to explain other stuff that was made up 60 years ago. But by leaning on experts to flesh out the details—MacDonald holds a PhD in astrophysics—Star Trek is able to tie the future to our present and the fantastical to the real, creating a veneer of plausibility that’s absolutely irresistible for a certain swath of science-inclined fans. 

Some of those young fans will eventually pursue careers in science. Others will develop a lifelong interest in, and respect for, science. In today’s world, that couldn’t be more needed.