There is a rock formation in Owen's River Gorge, California called The Dilithium Crystal.

Dilithium is a fictional crystalline mineral in the universe of Star Trek. A beam of matter and antimatter colliding in dilithium generates a plasma that is used to power the warp drives that allows starships to travel faster than light. This function of dilithium was officially established with the Star Trek: The Next Generation series; in earlier works its properties were not clearly defined.

In the original series, dilithium crystals occurred only naturally, making the search for them a major plot element for a number of stories. In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Spock discovered a method of recrystallizing dilithium that allowed the crew to regenerate the crystals on board their captured Klingon Bird-of-prey. This involved using 20th century fission reactors to collect high energy protons which would cause the crystals to regenerate.

To avoid plots based on searches for dilithium crystals, the backstory of The Next Generation has dilithium synthesized artificially. These crystals can also be recrystallized using technology that had been developed during the time between the original series movies and the events of The Next Generation.

It has been established a large amount of dilithium can cause a planet to become geologically unstable, leading to a number of planets that had broken apart. The crew of the Enterprise-D found a method of eliminating the dilithium from such planets in order to save them.

See also

• Trilithium

External links

• "The Mineralogy of Star Trek" [1]