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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?
(Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Sunday April 26 2015, @03:17AM
Issac Asimov didn't think it was too outlandish of an idea....remember Trantor from the Foundation Trilogy?
Trantor is depicted as the capital of the first Galactic Empire. Its land surface of 194,000,000 km² (75,000,000 miles², 130% of Earth land area)[2] was, with the exception of the Imperial Palace,[3] entirely enclosed in artificial domes.[4][5]
From the Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trantor [wikipedia.org]
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Sunday April 26 2015, @06:12PM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 3, Insightful) by urza9814 on Monday April 27 2015, @02:14PM
It's not at all different from a modern city except in scale. Does NYC grow all its food locally? Does it get the water it needs locally? Hell no -- absolutely everything is imported from other parts of the state/country/world. Sure, moving food between *planets* may seem absurd and expensive...but at one point people would have said that about shipping food across a country or across an ocean, yet that's something we do every day now. Asimov was just extrapolating pretty basic patterns. One of the key points in Asimov's worlds is near infinite energy -- the promise he saw in nuclear power. If the energy is cheap enough, you can pretty much ship anything anywhere.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheRaven on Tuesday April 28 2015, @11:22AM
We ship some food across the ocean, but far from all. If you really need to evacuate NYC and get people closer to farms, then you probably can before the food runs out. It's not a failure mode that you want, but it's available - New York State contains enough arable land to support them. Trantor simply could not grow enough food for the population, even if you devoted the entire surface area to it.
That said, some other things in the same universe by other authors have implied that the importing of food was a propaganda thing and that most people on Trantor ate vat-grown food produced in high-density factories (Prelude to Foundation also contained a subplot about some of this food production). That makes a bit more sense - as long as energy is available (via geothermal / fusion power), people can eat and the imported food is purely a luxury item.
If the energy is cheap enough, you can pretty much ship anything anywhere
Not necessarily. There's a limit to distribution. I think there was a space elevator in Foundation, but I don't recall there being more than one. Or possibly I misremember and it was just the elevator to the roof. Either way, there's a limit to the amount of the planet that you can use as docking space for the incoming food transports. Eventually they'll become a bottleneck. New York can have food arriving through the docks and on delivery trucks from a number of arterial roads, but it's fairly small (in comparison to a planet). As the size of the city grows, the surface area grows at the square root of the area (and the cube root of the volume, if you're talking about very small things).
sudo mod me up