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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: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday April 25 2015, @08:28PM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Saturday April 25 2015, @08:28PM (#175154) Journal

    But there's a Stargate episode where they played with that concept: The team gets back through an hitherto unknown second star gate on earth which happens to be in the polar region (don't remember whether north or south). When they arrive, they have no idea where they are, and from the surrounding conclude they are on an ice planet.

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