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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 26 2015, @02:41AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 26 2015, @02:41AM (#175238)

    As I read in a book (I think it was called "The Science of Star Wars", to presume that Tantooine was the native home of giants slugs is just silly, a desert is the wrong environment for such a creature.

    On the other hand, a remote desert planet that is outside republic/empire rule, might just be a great place for a notorious gangster to live (even if the desert could kill him).

  • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Sunday April 26 2015, @06:14PM

    by TheRaven (270) on Sunday April 26 2015, @06:14PM (#175405) Journal
    He's the only one that you see on that planet, so it's probably a safe assumption that he's from elsewhere. Various extended universe books make this explicit.
    --
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