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posted by CoolHand on Saturday April 25 2015, @08:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the light-reading-for-the-weekend dept.

The Star Wars franchise always has been long on imagination. Fantastic creatures, giant spaceships, man-made death moons—the galaxy far, far away has them all. It also contains a rich array of planets, each with a unique environment. But one thing about those celestial bodies always stood out: the singular adjective—desert, ice, etc.—describing each of them.

Whereas Earth hosts a wide diversity of biomes, the planets of Star Wars boast far fewer climates and topographies. The ice planet Hoth never thaws. The desert planet Tatooine seems to never see rain or cold. Meanwhile, the forest moon Endor orbits the temperate zone of a gas giant and a diminutive Jedi master trains in a world covered by an unchanging bog.

While a world of sorcerers, faster-than-light travel, and fussy robots may not meet the standards of the hardest of hard sci-fi (why was the T-65 X-wing starfighter a long-range vehicle but the TIE Fighter wasn’t?), seeing the mono-ecosystem worlds of Star Wars raises the question: Is a world with a single, homogenous weather pattern the exception or the rule? Earth has many environments, but does the rest of the universe look more like our home or Luke Skywalker’s?

http://www.wired.com/2015/04/star-wars-planetary-science/

 
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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Saturday April 25 2015, @10:13AM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Saturday April 25 2015, @10:13AM (#175011) Journal

    Any place you have ever been, you remember for your own unique, but limited experiences in that place. Take the continental US as one example. Some kid who grows up in Tulsa, and never travels anywhere outside the region, will be used to the idea that the earth is rather dry, and warm, with a mildly wet cool season. Sure, he knows academically that much of the world is cooler and wetter than his home, but he hasn't experienced it. If/when he begins to travel, THEN he begins to get a true(er) picture of the world.

    I've always ASSumed that each of the worlds depicted in Star Wars (or any other story or movie) were simply being portrayed from one individual's personal experience of that world. Any world with an earthlike atmosphere is going to have warmer spots, cooler spots, places where rain seldom falls, and other places where rain falls almost all the time. This is what an atmosphere DOES! Any moon or planet without an atmosphere is going to have more uniform conditions over it's surface. Planets with unearthly atmospheres are going to have different rules, of course. All the same, today's astronomers observe vast storms on the gas giants. Just ask yourself, "What's going on there?" Well - despite the fact that the conditions and the rules are surely different than on earth, the same thing is happening. Energy transference between regions of relatively low and high energy.

    Meaning, of course, that if/when men and/or his machines arrive on those planets, they will find that some regions are more hospitable than others.

    Only dead, airless planets are going to exhibit the same conditions all over their surfaces. Living planets are going to exhibit a wide range of conditions, no matter how different those conditions are from anything on earth.

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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday April 25 2015, @10:15AM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Saturday April 25 2015, @10:15AM (#175012) Journal

    Damn - I was thinking "Phoenix" when I wrote my post, but I typed "Tulsa". Tulsa is cooler and wetter than Phoenix, of course, but the idea stands for any location.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 25 2015, @10:30AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 25 2015, @10:30AM (#175016)

    Sure, he knows academically that much of the world is cooler and wetter than his home, but he hasn't experienced it.

    Yes, because even though he knows, he doesn't really know because, since he only knows, he doesn't really know.

    It's not like it's subjective, or that memory distorts things, is it?