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: 4, Insightful) by GungnirSniper on Saturday April 25 2015, @09:07AM
Stop trying to shoehorn science into the tragic tale of Anakin Skywalker simply because it takes place in space.
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by wonkey_monkey on Saturday April 25 2015, @10:01AM
...because they're fictional. They're just locations.
Whereas Earth hosts a wide diversity of biomes, the planets of Star Wars boast far fewer climates and topographies.
Because it's a space opera, not a planetary romance. The scripts don't call for days spent wandering across planets. There's no "six months later." Action takes place in relatively small areas accessible by foot, land speeder, or speeder bike.
You'd say the same about Earth if you watched... well, 90% of films, probably.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 25 2015, @11:16AM
tl;dr
It's just a movie people, it's not real. It's entertaining, but it's just.a.movie.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by TheRaven on Saturday April 25 2015, @12:36PM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Saturday April 25 2015, @01:38PM
Exactly; we never see the other parts of these planets. For all we know, Dagobah has icy polar zones, but it's irrelevant because Yoda doesn't live there. Hoth might have been a warmer planet at one time (which is why it has some life), but it got plunged into an ice age somehow, and most stuff has died off except a few really hardy animals like the taun-tauns.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 25 2015, @06:00PM
...because they're fictional.
You're wrong. And Darth Vader isn't Luke's father, either!
(Score: 3, Funny) by maxwell demon on Saturday April 25 2015, @08:20PM
But Han [canoe.com] shot first.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Mr Big in the Pants on Saturday April 25 2015, @07:18PM
I agree.
Even if you don't dismiss the premise because its a pointless and ridiculous speculation of things that don't exist (and what true geek would ever do that!?) it is a terrible argument.
> The ice planet Hoth never thaws
Who says? Maybe it was in an ice age? Maybe that is what winter looks like? Maybe there were humans belching fossil fuels into the air like there was no tomorrow and then there wasn't...
> The desert planet Tatooine seems to never see rain or cold.
Again, where the FUCK did you get that from? We see ONE locale of Tatooine the PLANET and on for a very short time. You are now inferring an entire ecosystem and climate from a few minutes of footage.
Who's to say they don't have monsoons??
>forest moon Endor orbits the temperate zone of a gas giant
Which could mean ANYTHING. Scales are relative and you cannot go off ground shots since they are necessarily taken on earth. Endor could be the size of earth for all we know.
> Jedi master trains in a world covered by an unchanging bog
Same as for Tatooine. And furthermore any planet "teeming with life" is going to change no matter what so I don't know where the "unchanging" part came from...
So while I love the concept of discussing fictional scenarios, as a geek discussion this falls FAAAR short by making completely unsupportable premises and then attempting to wow the reader with their "clever" and "scientific" conclusions.
Pathetic...
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Sunday April 26 2015, @02:43AM
Whereas Earth hosts a wide diversity of biomes, the planets of Star Wars boast far fewer climates and topographies.
That is because the "planets" of Star Wars are just small, in some cases artificially created, places on Earth.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by M. Baranczak on Sunday April 26 2015, @04:35AM
You'd say the same about Earth if you watched... well, 90% of films, probably.
Reminds me of "Death Race 2000". The race is supposed to go from one side of the USA to the other, so you'd expect to see a wide variety of landscapes - but it all looks like southern California, for some reason.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Saturday April 25 2015, @10:13AM
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.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday April 25 2015, @10:15AM
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
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?
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Saturday April 25 2015, @10:29AM
Not to mention the entire planet that's a big city. No plants? At all? No water? Not likely.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Saturday April 25 2015, @06:36PM
Coruscant Water company provides the majority of purified water to the planet.
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Coruscant_Water [wikia.com]
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 4, Funny) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Saturday April 25 2015, @07:31PM
Hot tip: Dubrillion Water Supply is moving in to undercut Coruscant Water. Queen Risha sees a big opportunity here. Invest now before everyone else gets in. I've already called my broker on Nar Shaddaa.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(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
(Score: 4, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday April 25 2015, @10:31AM
... where the climate was significantly different at different parts of the planet.
For a science fiction character to travel to a distant planet is like a human of today to fly on an airplane to a vacation destination. You wouldn't expect on part of Paris, say, to be desert, another part covered with ice, a third part jungle.
But I did read one Star Trek Novel in which the Federation was attacking a planet that was heavily defended by death ray guns. Each gun was at a different part of the planet, so the climate at each location was quite different.
Just that one.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 25 2015, @05:02PM
First, a novel is short. If the story doesn’t imply a great travel, the action (and the descriptions) is restricted to a relatively small area and the rest of the planet is left unknown to the reader.
Look at earth-bound stories: are all the different climates shown?
Second, broaden your readings.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Tork on Saturday April 25 2015, @05:04PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 4, Interesting) by dexcheque on Saturday April 25 2015, @11:34AM
What if that Galaxy Far, Far Away isn't a galaxy the way we reckon it? Without the cold, hard vacuum of space, but something a little more like the philogistron in Spelljammer -- with it's own inherent gravity and atmosphere? And those worlds aren't "planets" as such?
Might go a long way toward explaining a few other things:
Why everyone hears the pew-pews and booms of "space" battle.
Why everyone walks around in any vessel large enough to merit a hallway.
Why the cockpits of X-wing fighters and Corellian freighters seem to be lined with pencil-thin panes of glass for windshields (you know, to keep space bugs out of your teeth).
Why those semi-psionic space rangers can use their druid spells.
In other words, what if it's the Narrative that serves as Starwars' foundation and not something as shifty, and untrustworthy as Spacetime?
Just a thought.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Covalent on Saturday April 25 2015, @11:55AM
Many people have commented on the fact that it's only a movie, or that it's not possible, but let's pretend for a moment these places were real.
Tatooine: Mars is a similar analog. It's really dry, and it's more or less uniformly red and sandy. But it is impossible for a whole planet to be a desert like that for the one factor in which the two differ: Temperature. If Mars were as warm as Tatooine, it would be significantly wetter. Recent data from the planet confirms that despite the bone-chilling cold, Mars still manages to be a bit damp: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2015/04/13/mars-might-have-liquid-water-according-to-new-findings/ [washingtonpost.com] There's clearly moisture in the air (see the "moisture vaporators" that look is so loathing to work on), but on a planet that warm the water would evaporate. Winds would blow that air to a cooler place (the poles must be cooler...that one is simple physics), where it would rain (or snow). Simply put, at least small areas on Tatooine would have liquid water on them. Ironically, the one type of life I think would be nearly impossible on such a world is a giant slug...
The breathability of the atmosphere is another major issue. A planet without significant plant life would quickly become anoxic. It's hard to fight with a light saber when you can't breathe. But then we don't really know what kind of atmosphere Luke needs.
Endor: Endor is, on the other hand, much more plausible. A planet with an exceedingly thick atmosphere would have much more uniform temperature distributions than Earth has, and could be very tropical over huge expanses. Even Earth has had periods of almost uniform warmth: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hottest-earths-ever-been [climate.gov] The breathability of the air seems most likely here.
Hoth: The climate here is most plausible. Earth also went through a phase wherein it was essentially frozen over (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_Earth) and Europa is frozen in this way now. But the idea that large mammals could find enough to eat there is pretty unlikely.
The uniformity of climate is not that unrealistic, though my guess it's the exception rather than the rule. The life on Hoth and Tatooine, though, seems unlikely. Endor seems most possible.
You can't rationally argue somebody out of a position they didn't rationally get into.
(Score: 4, Informative) by coolgopher on Saturday April 25 2015, @12:25PM
I think you're confusing Endor with the forest moon of Endor. ;)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 26 2015, @02:41AM
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
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by SrLnclt on Saturday April 25 2015, @01:27PM
Most Sci-Fi involving other worlds have this issue. Take a trip through the stargate, and run around for a few hours. You now know everything there is to know about that world. The people living within a few miles of the stargate may be the only people you meet - everyone else is either the same or irrelevant. Same thing with a Star Trek shuttle craft visiting a planet. Or the aforementioned galaxy far, far way.
The problem is they need to put everything in bite size pieces (about 42 minutes for a TV episode, or 2-3 hours for a movie). How long would it take for someone from another world to learn and understand international politics on Earth? Or religion? Or cultural history of everyone? Having a planet be a single destination if far easier to write about.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday April 25 2015, @08:28PM
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.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Monday April 27 2015, @12:16PM
Stargate typically has the caveat that the majority of the civilisations share a common ancestor and were spread around the galaxy through the stargate system. This would typically lead to the primary settlement being nearby to or build around the stargate. It did often bother me that in so many episodes there was only a single village or city on some planets, despite the apparent spread of people happening around Egyptian times. They would have had a couple of thousand years to have multiplied and spread around their globe. So many times the SG-1 team had to evacuate a planet of "a few thousand people" annoyed me.
(Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Monday April 27 2015, @12:18PM
What would the Earth look like without human intervention? Would it be a predominantly forested planet? A lot of the open area was caused by us cutting down trees, though I guess a lot would also be too mountainous for trees. Are the great plains a natural thing?
(Score: 2) by looorg on Saturday April 25 2015, @04:11PM
I find it quite amusing, and slightly annoying, when they are trying to bring and apply "reality" to "fantasy" (or sci-fi). As if there always is some deep and hidden meaning behind the stories that will somehow help us here and now. In this particular case it is Star Wars, the reason for it is probably that we are about to see a new batch of movies. The problem is then that the eco-system of the planets are "unreal", nothing about the technology or that there are little green aliens with magical force powers. It has yet to reach the bullshit-levels of when LOTR was at peak-popular and there was a similar bunch of quasi-academic papers on everything from the geology of Middle Earth, the sociological studies of the structure of Orc-society and other races to the political views of Sauron and "international" relations in middle earth as a tool to understand international politics on our own earth. I seriously don't know what they think they'll get from this or if they believe JRR Tolkien had fantastical insights into to the modern world of politics when he wrote a fantasy epic in the 1930s. But apparently there was enough information there for a 250 page book spanning topic such as the feminist analysis of conflicts in Middle-Earth (I'm not even kidding, that is an actual chapter in the book -- someone actually read Lord of the Rings and then applied various feminist theories to the content -- I have not read it but without doing so I'm fairly sure they found that the entire realm of Middle-Earth is under the crushing boot of the patriarchy and if Galadriel had just been more of a woman things sure would have been different. If only there had been some more female hobbits around Frodo would have been better off). What is next? Sauron wasn't hugged enough as a child so he turned to necromancy and became evil? The people that write and "study" this clearly have to much time and grant money on their hands.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 26 2015, @12:47AM
What is next? Sauron wasn't hugged enough as a child so he turned to necromancy and became evil? The people that write and "study" this clearly have to much time and grant money on their hands.
Alright, Saruman the Many Colored, we hear you!
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday April 25 2015, @08:39PM
Which planets are diverse of climate and topography, and which are more or less monoworlds?
Earth is by far the most diverse, probably followed by Jupiter (given its bands and spots of weather). Conversely our own moon varies only by "cratered" and "not so cratered". Mars is only slightly more varied. Lack of gas/liquid to react to solar input makes for a dull climate.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday April 26 2015, @07:18AM
It also makes for no support of life.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday April 26 2015, @01:47PM
Exactly my point. :)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.