Quote:
Originally Posted by Agemegos
I doubt that the writers put any more thought into where the moisture on Tatooine came from than they did into where the oxygen came from. Star Wars is just not the kind of work from which it is sensible to ask that much detail in the background and attention to science.
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Remember the classic example of Trantor, capital of Isaac Asimov's Galactic Empire. We are told that it had an enormous population, maybe up around a trillion, that it was all one huge city, and that food was shipped in from many surrounding solar systems in vast fleets. Of course this was all a reference to ancient Rome importing wheat from the Nile Valley and Sicily! But Rome was in the same atmosphere as the rest of the Earth and benefited from gaseous diffusion to make up its oxygen deficit. I remember reading one satiric short piece that envisioned the huge air fleets carrying oxygen to Trantor. . . .
And this was from a Ph.D. in biochemistry! Really back in the day everyone, not just handwavy movie makers, took oxygen/nitrogen atmospheres for granted. I think it was the discovery of how hostile Mars and Venus were during the 1960s that started people like Lovelock thinking things through.
(There was a storyline in Swamp Thing that contrasted the benevolent Green with the malignant Gray of fungi. And the first thought I had was, "Yes, when photosynthetic organisms evolved they started flooding the atmosphere with a toxic gas that exterminated most of the biosphere that existed then!" But of course now we've evolved to depend on it.)