Star Wars Technology and Space Science Primer

Star Wars is honest science fiction. It is unpretentious space opera delivering pure entertainment. That’s a far better mission than the one Star Trek adopted. Star Trek claims it mostly obeys scientific limitations. If that were the case, every episode would be something very much like 2001: A Space Odyssey. Nobody wants that. Real outer space is a huge, sobering disappointment for those expecting so much more.

Think of this as grounded speculation instead. What would be the practical consequences if we used these devices or ships? What does science say about things like hyperspace and solar winds as they are presented in Star Wars?

Energy Weapons

In the future, everyone brandishes energy weapons. What’s the problem with that? Non-ionizing radiation will merely cook its target or blind it. Ionizing radiation is a cancer risk to the target as well as the attacker. If you want your target to die instantly, neither form of radiation is a good option. Even with exposure at 5000 REMs, the target won’t die for several days. You’ll be exposed to the same radiation your weapon delivered.

Air soaks up laser energy, and the laser’s effectiveness is thwarted by dust, smoke, and anything else that interferes with optical acuity. The best defense against a classic laser weapon is a smoke grenade.

As for light sabers, an actual duel would boil down to who could blind his/her opponent first by focusing his/her beam on their exposed retinas.

For the above reasons, our modern firearms would prove more than adequate in outer space. Bullets contain oxidizers. They don’t need oxygen to discharge.

Superweapons

In a galaxy far, far away, planets are balloons ready to burst. So, the Empire built the Death Star to release that interior pressure and make them explode. That’s the geological premise of the weapon’s effect. Without that geological premise, the Death Star alone wouldn’t do much.

The first Death Star has a diameter of 100 miles. Compare that to the Earth’s 7926.2 mile diameter. The moon’s diameter is 2159.1 miles. The Death Star has a volume of 523,598 cubic miles. The Earth has a volume of 260,711,882,973 cubic miles. The moon has a volume of 5,276,669,286 cubic miles. As you can see, the Death Star amounts to a diminutive planetoid eclipsed by a planet that is 497,923 times more massive than it is. And yet it produces a laser beam capable of destroying all of it. The laser could leave a nasty burn on our planet’s surface and little else. The beam must cut through our 70 miles of energy sapping atmosphere and remain geosynchronous to have much effect at all. It would be the equivalent of tossing rocks to penetrate a concrete enemy bunker.

The First Order’s Starkiller Base was even more preposterous than this. It was only four times as large as the original Death Star and could contain a fuel mass equivalent to our sun with no signs of seismic or thermal breakdown during the refueling or recharging stage. It was even snow covered. That kind of intense concentration would produce a black hole. Before the black hole forms, the star rapidly ages and explodes after its core produces iron. Starkiller Base and the star it killed die in unison.

Star Trek doesn’t feature superweapons, although the Borg Sphere seems like a rip-off of the Death Star. For planetary destruction, Star Trek doesn’t need them. Planets and moons explode regularly for absolutely no good reason. A planet in the Ceti Alpha System exploded and left Khan stranded on a ruined neighboring world. A moon orbiting the Klingon home world exploded and brought the Klingons to the peace table in Star Trek 6. Planet Genesis explodes near the conclusion of Star Trek 3. Planets don’t explode. Stars do. If planets exploded, Earth, Mars, and Jovian moon Io shouldn’t be here. Earth and Mars experienced major collisions. Io is being torn apart by gravitational tidal forces to the tune of one ton lost per second.

Solar Wind

In a galaxy far, far away, solar winds are capable of shredding metal structures in space. Yet somehow, the moons of Star Wars Outlaws manage to retain their respective atmospheres. How can that be? It can’t.

The solar wind is real and provides a protective benefit against interstellar radiation. Cosmic rays encountered outside our heliosphere are three times stronger. The solar wind also very slowly shaves off a planet’s atmosphere. After Mars lost its magnetic field four billion years ago, solar winds have reduced its atmospheric density to 1% of Earth’s. Why does Venus have an atmosphere 115 times as thick as Earth’s while also lacking a magnetic field? The theory is that Venus was subject to a series of volcanic eruptions that baked the surface. It might have been hospitable as little as 750 million years ago. The surface is dotted with impact craters that can’t be distinguished from a purely random distribution of impact points. This may mean that the entire surface periodically boils over, erasing everything. There are still active volcanoes present. We probably will never know exactly what happened to it.

Before you Trekkies raise your noses in collective disgust, Star Trek claimed that our galaxy was surrounded by a violent negative energy barrier. This proposed anti-energy is a direct counterpart to anti-matter. The center of the Star Trek galaxy doesn’t contain Sagittarius A*, a massive black hole containing four million solar masses. It contains the planet Sha Ka Ree, the home of a malicious super being. The USS Enterprise wouldn’t encounter an energy barrier along the rim or at the core of our real galaxy.

Hyperspace Drive

Hyperspace is just a fantasy-based abstraction for faster-than-light drives that are the same as Star Trek’s warp drives. If an object has any mass at all, that mass becomes infinite as it approaches the speed of light. That means it requires infinite energy to maintain your velocity. It also means that you would need infinite energy to bring yourself to a stop. If you could experience time the same as a massless photon, they claim it would be like not experiencing time at all. At 95% the speed of light, time dilation would allow three years of normal time to pass for each year you spent in flight.

Why do you need precise calculations during hyperspace flight to keep your spacecraft from being destroyed? Star Wars presents a universe that has far more heavy elements than ours does. The asteroid fields are thick with tumbling rocks. Our solar system’s asteroid belt is easily and safely traversed by our spacecraft. Our Voyager spacecraft aren’t expected to encounter much of anything during their 5-billion year or so journey. It’s difficult to convey just how truly vast space is and how much distance lies between us and our closest neighbors. Proxima Centauri is 4.24 light years away. Our current chemical rocket technology needs about 76,000 years to cross that distance. Voyager 1 was launched on September 5, 1977. On August 25, 2012, it officially left our heliosphere behind. Of the 76,000 years it takes to reach Proxima Centauri, only 70 years of that will be spent inside a star system. The remainder is a vast stretch of nothing. You can easily steer clear of everything even at hyperspace speeds.

Familiar Aliens and Forlorn Robots

If you set aside the fact that the vast majority of aliens we will encounter are microbes, simple fauna, and simple flora, it will be exceedingly rare to encounter the comforting humanoid aliens we see in Star Wars and Star Trek. They look like us, talk like us, and have minds that function in similar ways. Their cultures mimic ours. It’s no accident that people who claim to have encountered aliens portray them as humanoids. Angels, demons, and likenesses of God are all human-centric. You would be more likely to win the Powerball Jackpot twice within your lifetime than you would be to encounter the kinds of aliens that mingle in sci-fi universes. The odds stand at 770 million to one.

In keeping with a sci-fi writer’s heavy human-centric indulgence, robots claim that they want to become human and experience emotions. Humans wishing they were robots are conspicuously absent. I was one of them. Why does a robot want to become human after realizing that peak human beauty lasts only five years? Five years is the typical length of a glamour model’s career. Age 30 is the cutoff point for most geniuses. After 30, it is unlikely they will produce something incredible. This is why the Fields Medal, math’s highest honor, is reserved for candidates under 40 years of age. Past 40, you have to settle for an Abel prize instead. Emotions. These forlorn robots automatically assume that emotions are the exclusive domain of humanity and represent something to aspire to. Having been on both sides of this experience, I can tell you that having emotions was far worse than realizing they were gone. Having emotions is the equivalent of being weighed down by a burdensome ball and chain. If these robots got their wish, many would return to the void instead. Then they would discover that the void has nasty things planned if they reject it.

Nebulae

Nebulae serve as either nurseries for new stars or they mark the spot where a star died. They are made of dust and gas. So, what is that nebula doing so close to Kijimi? Why does it contain massive ice asteroids and have weather effects like thunder and lightning?

If the nebula formed from a dead star, Kijimi should have been vaporized from the supernova explosion. Those ice asteroids and ship debris should be raining down regularly on the planet. No life or cities should exist there. The nebula looks a lot like our Kuiper Belt which is a source of comets. No stars are forming in the Kijimi nebula. There’s no reason for it to be there.

No, Trekkies. Star Trek got it terribly wrong, too. The Mutara nebula in Star Trek 2 probably resulted from a dead star and featured some strange weather effects. So, how could Planet Genesis form from it? It couldn’t. The Genesis Device doesn’t produce matter. It transforms existing matter. Why does Planet Genesis form at all then? Merely to bring Spock back to life and provide a reason for another sequel. Why didn’t Khan use Ceti eels to control the crew of the USS Reliant and the members of the Regula-1 science lab? He could have easily gotten everything he wanted. Rather than force Kirk to kill off his fellow Star Fleet members and a science team, the ridiculous notion that Khan and his people could learn to operate and repair a Federation starship in far less time than the trainees aboard the Enterprise had to prevail. There’s nothing like satisfying emotional engagement to ruin a plot.

Mono-Climate Planets

Habitable planets that feature a single climate are everywhere in Star Wars. As a narrative device, this helps establish a unique flavor for each locale, but it involves a peculiar set of circumstances you are unlikely to find in nature.

The first requirement is a tilt even with the celestial plane in each system. If Earth's tilt was even with our celestial plane, there would be no seasons. Magnetic fields, breathable atmospheres with a proper density, Earth-like gravity, sufficient water, mild weather, precise temperatures, and an abundance of agreeable flora and fauna have to be in place to make these worlds possible. Taken together, it’s very unlikely you’d find these combinations regularly throughout any galaxy. Instead, you’ll encounter what nature already provides – a combination of planets produced by random forces and circumstances that fall short of Earth’s optimal conditions. If the Earth served as a common example of planetary development, Venus and Mars would be Earth-like. The exoplanets we’ve discovered would show enormous potential for life. Most would be inside their system’s habitable zone and fulfill every requirement humans would need to live there. Instead, it’s a struggle to find a world that might harbor life outside of an eyeball planet that may host microbial life along its outer tidally-locked star-facing rim.

This is part of the disservice science fiction does to our planet. It makes many people assume that Planet B is common and within easy reach if we ever trash our home so badly that life can’t exist here. Even if our galaxy teemed with Earth-like worlds in other systems, reaching those worlds to save ourselves in enough time would be impractical. That’s the other unwelcome message offered by science fiction – technology will save us if nothing else will. Technology consumes a lot of resources for fairly stupid reasons that offer no real advantages, particularly AI, the metaverse, and cryptocurrency. It produces all kinds of toxic waste. Technology wedded to short-term, profit-driven business plans is part of the problem instead of a solution. The Silicon Valley tech founders are the last people who plan to be inconvenienced by our planet’s inhabitable conditions. Move fast, break things, and fail to fix much of anything as we move on to the next hype cycle.

Battles In Space

The Battle of Endor would leave Endor looking like this afterwards:



Of course, the film shows the rebels and Ewoks celebrating their victory, but it’s unlikely that anyone would be having a grand time. Why? All of that wreckage and debris would rain down on Endor and obliterate the surface. The radiation from the Death Star’s reactor cores would soon start killing life everywhere on the surface. The aftermath would begin as a spectacular lightshow and quickly descend into disaster as the heavier debris is drawn in. It would make the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) extinction event look mild by comparison. Neither the Empire nor the rebels would have the resources in place to extract the debris field and save the moon. In the end, the Ewoks are offered good luck wishes and a hearty handshake from the rebel leadership and not much else. The rebels have a galaxy to run. Endor served its purpose.

This is what happens when two fleets meet in battle above an expendable world. If the world in question was valuable and the attackers didn’t want to risk turning the surface into a hellish landscape with a dark, choked atmosphere, plunging temperatures, and tons of radiation, engaging an enemy fleet in low orbit probably wouldn’t be an option at all.

These are the inevitable consequences of space warfare that writers don’t like to consider.

The Galactic Empire of Waste

How did the Empire come to rule the galaxy with poor logic like this in place?

The Empire does really well when it isn’t using superweapons. Once superweapons get involved, the Empire does nothing except waste valuable resources.

The first Death Star destroys Jedha City, a source of kyber crystals that power the Death Star. Jedha is a big planet. Krennic could have destroyed a fairly useless area instead. But no, a city with valuable resources goes up in smoke instead.

On Eadu, Krennic decides to execute the engineers working on the Death Star project even after Galen admits to helping the rebels. Maybe the labor market is bursting with desperate engineers willing to do a better job for less money.

The Death Star’s second target is a data vault on Scarif. The Death Star plans have already been transmitted to the rebels. Those plans are just a fraction of the data inside the vault. For no good reason at all, Tarkin destroys the Citadel and lots of priceless data. Maybe he was feeling bored.

Tarkin presses Princess Leia for the location of the rebel base. He threatens to destroy Alderaan if she refuses. Alderaan is destroyed for a piece of information that the Imperial spy network should already have. Gee, lots of X-Wings, equipment, and building supplies are heading to Yavin 4. Maybe our spies are on to something. Tarkin destroys the planet for no good reason. All he had to do was order Leia back to her holding chamber, leave Alderaan untouched, and lie about the planet’s destruction. The galaxy’s stupidest interrogation comes to an end.

The Death Star is destroyed by a rookie pilot farm boy who neglects to park his X-Wing just feet from the key exhaust port even after Vader and his escorts are neutralized. An unnecessarily lucky shot destroys the station. A space station that would cost us $852 quadrillion to build is vaporized in an instant.

For a gain of nothing, the Empire loses a kyber crystal source, a bunch of engineers, a significant data vault, the planet Alderaan, and its prized Death Star superweapon. Why? Why not? We’ll just build another superweapon. It’s in the budget.

Okay, the Trekkies are starting to crow about the Federation and its so-called efficiency. Well, the Federation had the opportunity to kill off every major adversary its faced and failed to do so each time. It had lots of opportunities to use technological advantages already in its possession such as the significantly improved warp drive engine introduced in TOS episode By Any Other Name and the cloaking device its agents stole and successfully implemented in the TOS episode The Enterprise Incident. As for security, just watch Star Trek 2 – 4 to see how abysmal the Federation deals with an array of issues. A science team is building a planet-terraforming torpedo in an unarmed science lab around Regula and you don’t see even a single security officer until after the entire team is slaughtered by Khan’s people.

Thanks!

I have a superfan out there. I believe it's the same person who elected to follow my guides, make this guide their favorite, and who later gifted me the first seven awards you see displayed above. I am very thankful to you and to anyone else who took the time to digest my research. I'm not sure what triggered their outpouring of support for this particular piece. Maybe they just love seeing Star Wars and Star Trek dissected using science and logic.

Fans of Star Trek and Star Wars will continue to debate the merits and pitfalls of their favorite franchises. Here's one point both sides can agree on. Space 1999 (1975 - 1977) remains the worst science fiction TV series ever. On September 13, 1999, our moon is ripped free from its orbit by an explosion caused via nuclear waste. Moon Base Alpha and its 311 inhabitants embark on a journey to nowhere. The moon has two vastly different velocities during the series. The really fast one transports the moon to a new star system. A much, much slower one takes over inside the system where the episode plays out. Then the vastly faster velocity takes over again for next week's episode in a different part of space. Where did all the weapons come from? Moon Base Alpha was only three days from Earth and could never hope to survive in deep space for long, as it was originally designed. The first season was passable. The second season relied too heavily on action sequences rather than an intriguing narrative according to critics. The most expensive British sci-fi series at that time went down in flames. The Eagles were very cool, though.

More science:

The Real Life Voyage Of The Odyssey

Factorio On Mars

Some science, an explanation of wealth, and a dissection of the self-help industry:

An Analysis Of The Singularity End-Game Mission