10 Background Star Trek Items More Important Than You Think

The starship Discovery received a ton of advanced upgrades after travelling to the 32nd century. One new technology they were introduced to was programmable matter.

Programmable matter was made up of millions of tiny nano molecules which could be programmed to assume any shape. When it was introduced, this tech was used to create flexible computer interfaces, and beautiful artwork, but we didn't know just how important it would prove to be.

When the Discovery crew learned that the creators of the DMA, Species 10-C, lived outside of our galaxy, they realised that they would need to devise a way to pass the galactic barrier. The only problem was that the galactic barrier was composed of deadly negative energy that would prove fatal to the ship.

The Discovery crew (as well as Booker and Tarka) realised that they could repel the negative energy using constantly adapting programmable antimatter, a rare version of programmable matter with opposite charge. Since the concentration of dark energy was higher than expected, Discovery also had to ride in a spatial cell bubble, but it's likely that even that would've been too deadly, were it not for the programmable antimatter shields.