Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Paul Stamets

10. Stamets In The Sky With Fungi

You can take the 'astro' out of 'astromycologist' — the 'stella' out of 'stellaviatori' — but you can't take the fungi from Paul Stamets. Star Trek: Discovery's galactic mycelial traveller had down-to-Earth, in-the-Earth, inspirations — the real-life Paul Stamets, a longtime purveyor, and mostly self-taught scientist of all things fungal.

When spawning Discovery in the first place, creators wanted to inject a bit of science-based sci-fi magic with mushrooms into the show that was destined to bring Star Trek back to the small screen. Series co-creator Bryan Fuller, still on staff at the time, already had previous with the fungi guy — 'Eldon Stammets' was the name of a mycelial serial killer in Fuller's so-delicious-you-could-almost-eat-it TV hit Hannibal.

For permission and pointers in creating the on-screen version of Paul, Discovery producers got in touch with the real Stamets, who just so happens to be quite the Star Trek fan, having built a holiday home on Cortes Island (part of the Discovery [!] Islands off the coast of British Columbia, Canada) "in homage to the Starship Enterprise," according to CBC News. The real Stamets also informed producers about the real Prototaxites — a giant genus of fungi that went extinct several million years ago — which was then used (with added 'star traveller,' stellaviatori) as the basis for Discovery's spore drive.