The Science of Star Wars 538
anonymous lion writes "National Geographic has an interesting interview with a couple of scientists on the scientific reality of Star Wars. For example, related to the cohabitation of humans and Gungans on NabooSeth Shostak states, "So maybe it's possible to share, as long as neither species has the technology to obliterate, enslave, or merely cook and eat each other.""
Already been done before... (Score:3, Interesting)
Better option (Score:1, Interesting)
Technological developement (Score:5, Interesting)
In 10,000 the technology gap of a community of star systems that communicate with each other woudl also close. So it's not such a huge issue. Technology doesn't have to spread directly, even the rumor of something being possible can send other cultures into a frenzy to find out how. The stories marco polo brought back from china were more useful then the inventions and products he brought back. It sent europe into a frenzy into trying to mimic these items.
In the proccess of trying to mimic these products they derived their own innovations and advanced further. Over 10,000 this would equilize the technologies of the various intelligent life forms. As for the robots, perhaps innovation in robot designed leveled off long ago and even 100 year old droid are useful. Or AI requires some rare material that is now in short supply so even old droids must be maintained.
Re:Better option (Score:1, Interesting)
500 y ears (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Cohabitation (Score:4, Interesting)
Survival will be the primary goal of any form of life, and survival will require consumption of resources.
Unless the resources required for two life forms is remarkably different or there is a truly symbiotic relationship, it is quite likely that the two forms of life will be fighting with each other for resources. It may not even be intentional, but survival would require a fight at least at a very abstract level (deer and zebras sharing the same grasslands). And when you introduce complex factors into the equation, you can be rest assured that there will be a need for survival as you move up the food chain.
If you do not kill, you will be killed - this is a very likely scenario, and if sentience is to evolve, it would need safe and secure surivival first and foremost.
Learning to share resources is possible in only one scenario - symbiosis. Otherwise, it is quite unlikely given the nature of life, at least as we know it.
Wrong. (Score:3, Interesting)
The other is stating that an advanced civilization would shun planets for artificial habitats. For an astronomer, he seems unfamiliar with the fact that the universe is largely cold, empty space with nasty hazards and such. Why would a race automaticly want to go live in space?
Humans??? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Already been done before... (Score:4, Interesting)
Betts: This is the one planet I have the most trouble buying. There are, of course, examples of gas giants surrounded by moons. We have that in our own solar system. But a "band of habitable atmosphere"?
Assuming we take that to mean temperature and oxygen without there being anything noxious or dangerous, that's certainly beyond our current expectations or measurements. Making this particularly tricky, molecular oxygen that we breathe does not occur easily in a planetary environment. Almost all the oxygen on Earth comes from life.
Shostak: I don't know what Tibanna gas might be. Gas-giant planets seem to be swathed in ammonia, methane, and other vapors that, frankly, are neither rare nor particularly valuable. They are useful for cleaning the bathroom or cooking dinner, of course.
Two major possibilities spring immediately to mind.
1) Life either evolved or was seeded to the gas giant. In this case, Tibanna gas may well be a biomolecule of significance that has built up in huge quantities over the years on the gas giant. An oxygen-rich layer is quite easily explained in such a case, obviously, assuming that photosynthesis is occurring in the upper layers.
2) The gas giant has a small amount of residual brown dwarf-activity going on in the core - Dt-Dt fusion, that is. As solar wind can ionise water and split it into hydrogen and oxygen (leaving a tenuous oxygen atmosphere around at least two gas giant moons), having your own low-scale fusion in the deep core should do plenty to split up water in the planet. How quickly it would recombine, of course, is beyond me - and you couldn't have too much energy being produced, or the colony would be fried even in the outer fringes of the atmosphere. A small, old brown dwarf could possibly pull it off (an average-sized, young dwarf will be about 1000K at 1atm), although I don't have the numbers on me.
In either case, Tibanna gas could be He3. In the second situation, it's all the more likely: Dt-Dt fusion can directly produce He3, or can produce tritium which decays to He3.
Personally, I have the most trouble buying Hoth. Regularly bombarded, and yet has complex animal life? Not a sign of greenery, and yet has a dense oxygen atmosphere and animals? I have trouble with that one, unless there's some sort of massive subsurface biome there.
Cognitive gaps are more signficant (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree with king-manic that technological gulfs, while huge, could be reduced significantly through interstellar trade. What is more signficant -- and I never see mentioned in these types of discussions -- are the huge gulfs in intelligence and mental abilities. There are going to be species out there that are vastly more intelligent or have incredible memories. In the movies and TV shows, all aliens have pretty much the same brainpower. That's just unrealistic.
Consider the following scenario: a race of technologically advanced reptiles are being attacked by intelligent insects from another world. The insects are more intelligent than the reptiles and have the same level of technological development. The reptiles are fucked unless they can get some help. They approach a world called Earth that contains intelligent bipedial mammals named humans. These mammals show promise but are relatively young and do not have sophisticated technology. They also are highly unpredictable and warlike. Knowing the risks, the reptiles make an offer: if the humans agree to enter the war by serving as tactical officers onboard their warships, the reptiles will provide the humans with advances in medicine, communications, power generation, and warp drive. Humans, eager for a chance to obtain technologies necessary to solve problems on their planet, leap at the chance. The highly-logical insects are used to the methodical, logical battleplans of the reptiles and are baffled by the unconventional tactics of the humans. They are quickly and easily defeated. Fearing they have created a monster, the reptiles quickly sever ties with the humans but not before they have transfered a signficant amount of technological know-how. Within a few decades, humans become a threat to the very reptiles who kick-started their space exploration.
Technology gaps are easily solved. Huge gaps in cognitive function are what make long-duration star wars unlikely.
GMD
Re:Can the Death Star travel at lightspeed? (Score:4, Interesting)
1) They're trying to conceal themselves from us. Of course, the questions of A) How, and B) Why immediately come up. They're furthered by the questions of "if one species is concealing itself, why are the others as well?", "how are they blocking all life-indicating radio signals/etc from us that originated hundreds, thousands, or millions of light years away?", etc. In short, it's possible, but raises questions.
2) We're the first. Yeay for us - we'll be the evil aliens invading the planets of others to colonize or strip them of their resources (until one of them uploads a macintosh virus into our computer). Of course, the odds against this seems quite extreme.
3) FTL is, sadly, impossible, and all other signs of life (radio, light, death stars blowing up planets, etc) are either taking too long to get to us, or are too weak to be received by the time that they reach us.
4) Life is extremely rare, and we're freaks of the universe. May raise questions about the existance of a deity (or not).
All of these are pretty big issues with a lot of questions associated with them. I'd love to know the answer, although all possibilities are a bit disturbing to me.
P.S. - I don't want to post AC (and am trying first as a different IP, about to give up), but I get this:
Slashdot requires you to wait 2 minutes between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.
It's been 19 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
A Long Time Ago, In A Galaxy Far Far Away (Score:1, Interesting)
The story is being told in the future. Therefore, "a long time ago" isn't referring to our past, but the past of the narrator.
The "galaxy far, far away" is our own. But in the future, when the story of Star Wars is being told, humanity has moved to distant galaxies.
Re:Cool article, but a few issues. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Cool article, but a few issues. (Score:2, Interesting)
Asimov makes the exact point, in fact a whole lot of the plot in some books is about, the problems of supplying the population.
I guess the idea of many sci-fi writers is that a dyson sphere or segment of such would make for a much more likely galactic capital. Certainly a more impressive use of resources than covering a grotty planet with metal and so much more efficient.
Still give London enough time....
Re:Fighters make sound in a vacuum. (Score:5, Interesting)
Wrong. The space between stars in Star Wars is not a vacuum. There is evidently some background gas suffusing all of it, although probably not breathable.
Evidence:
1. Vehicles are audible even far from a planet's surface.
2. When the Falcon landed in a "cave" inside a smallish asteroid (1 km radius), Han Solo got out and wandered around without a pressurized space-suit.
3. Small fighter-ships in space combat manuver as if they were airplanes, slicing through a medium which imposes a maximum speed to their movement, rather than being able to accelerate indefinately (until stopped by lightspeed or fuel exhaustion).
Absurd plot holes (Score:3, Interesting)
And Leia, Obi-wan puts her where she'll become a princess, because her mother was a queen. Fer crying out loud, a princess is a princess only because she can document her lineage and everyone will know it! Way to hide her, Obi-wan!
Re:Cohabitation (Score:3, Interesting)
This begs the question whether all the "humans" in the SW universe are the same species. Unless you're a rabid creationist, the answer must be yes, and so the Naboo were colonists sometime in the not too distant (in evolutionary terms at least) past. The Gungans may be non-native too for that matter. So "co-evolving" doesn't really apply. Further, the Gungans may actually be human in ancestry, just engineered to fit an aquatic lifestyle. That in general could explain a big problem (mentioned in the NG FA), that all the intelligent species are at a very similar level scientifically; they're all human and all descended from the same planet and culture, and some have undergone radical genetic engineering (or less likely, customarily wear rubber prosthetics and furry body suits). You just can't have wars if one species is decades, let alone millions of years, ahead of the others.
Re:Can the Death Star travel at lightspeed? (Score:2, Interesting)
Don't remember where I read that, I think it's in one of the Star Wars dictionaries or encyclopedias.
Re:it isn't so much the science as the plot holes (Score:3, Interesting)
**minor spoiler**
Notice how fear of loosing Padme is THE reason he falls victum to Palpatine manipulations. Anakin is trully fuds biggest victum. It's even possible Yoda and the other masters got some hint of this through thier views of the future.
Mycroft
Re:it isn't so much the science as the plot holes (Score:3, Interesting)
Luke spent many months on Dagobah (in essentially non-stop training with Master Yoda), and even more time tracking down what happened to Han.
If you read the books there are a few years (I've heard 5 quoted often) between episodes V and VII. I haven't read to many of them but this seems a pretty clear element to all the ones that mention it.
Also it's pretty clear Yoda stuck to the core elements and didn't cover much else such as Jedi history, obscure powers of the Jedi, Proper ettiquite when giving reports to the Jedi Council durring a holliday. In other words Luke got the Tech School version from a True Master determined to teach him hard and fast.
My impression from the books I've read is that Luke later realized Yoda pared down his teaching to strictly that Luke needed and could use and skipped a lot of the less critical skills and ones Luke didn't have much talent for. In one scene I remember Luke is shown to have an active pursuit of anything related to the Jedi in order to help with what he now percieves as the holes in his education.
Mycroft
Re:Cohabitation (Score:4, Interesting)
What I find extremely odd is that the Gungans breathed atmosphere, yet lived underwater in a seemingly unnatural (i.e. gungan-made) underwater city. Are they just the evolution of a penal colony?
Re:Absurd plot holes (Score:4, Interesting)
> figured out Leia was his daughter when he captured her
You might as well argue that Yoda, hanging out in Papatine's office in Episode II, should have been able to notice that Palpatine was the Sith Lord. As Mace and Yoda said in Episode II, the Jedi were blind to the Dark Side. Maybe the deal is the dark side and the light side (being "opposite" sides of the Force) cannot see the other without knowing for sure where they should look, and one cannot sense someone with the Force until one has actually met the person.
That would explain why the Jedi would have to have a physical blood test to search for Force-sensitive individuals (Episode I). But once they know who that individual is, they can find them easily (e.g., Yoda finding Obi-Wan and Anakin in Episode II, foreseeing they were in danger from Dooku; Palpatine finding Vader in Episode III foreseeing he was in danger from Obi-Wan; Vader sensing Obi-Wan in Episode IV, etc).
In Episode VI, Vader says that Luke is on the moon of Endor, while Palpatine says that he didn't sense it -- and he questions Vader's "sight". Vader knew that Luke was his son and he had met him before (in Episode V). Vader couldn't "call to" Luke in Episode V until he actually met him; that's why he had to torture Leia, Han, and Chewbacca in Episode V to draw Luke to him.
So until Vader knew that Leia was his daughter (learning this from Luke in Episode VI), he wouldn't have known about it even with her standing right in front of him.
Re:Cohabitation (Score:1, Interesting)
Jedi fear of Anakin was their downfall (Score:2, Interesting)
Anakin was born as a slave on Tattooine, conscripted into a Jedi slavery where he could not rescue or even visit his mother, and finally sucked into Sith apprenticeship under Sidious. He was always somebody's slave, never free to follow his dreams and wishes. Luke may have felt tied down on the farm, but at least he wasn't a slave. He lived with family, had friends, and got to fix and fly spaceships for fun. Yoda never sensed fear in Luke, only recklessness: a fearlessness that comes from living free.
Obi-Wan totally let Anakin down. Qui-Gon would have let Anakin rescue his mother, the Council be damned. Then Obi-Wan lies to and manipulates Anakin's innocent children to try to undo his mistakes. I'm surprised he waited for Luke to grow up, rather than taking him to Dagobah at age 3.
Re:Star Wars is Philosophy & Star Trek is Tech (Score:1, Interesting)
Give us a break! Why don't you watch cowboy movies then?
American philosophy seems to be that Americans will always 'win', where 'win' consists of shooting the baddie in the last reel. Then the film ends, so you don't need to think any more.
I wouldn't mind so much, only American Foreign Policy is exactly the same.