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Old 09-27-2019, 01:27 AM   #1
Maximum7
 
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Default Can their still be a science revolution in Star Wars?

Ive been told and read on many forums that technological development plateaued in the Star Wars galaxy and that the society has been stagnant for hundreds of years. Logically it makes sense that everything has a limit and their is only so much science and technology that can be achieved but then again no. Isn’t science and technology endless and as long as their is civilization; their will be progress. Here on Earth; we’ve progressed more technologically in the last 100 years then the previous 10,000 years! Perhaps that is happening in Star Wars but on a much longer timeframe. From the year 32 BBY, when the Phantom Menace takes place to the Rise of Skywalker in 35 ABY, a lot changes in terms of government but not much in terms of tech. Is it just a low period? Is it possible that something could happen post-35 ABY that ushers in a new age of profession and scientific revolution. Like a domino effect; what do you think has to happen breakthrough wise in order to jumpstart a massive shift?
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Old 09-27-2019, 06:39 AM   #2
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Default Re: Can their still be a science revolution in Star Wars?

The psychology and sociology of the Star Wars universe seems to argue against that. They aren't really big on the scientific method, with the good guys especially reliant on The Received Wisdom of the Ancients; also, when there are multiple sapient species whose lifespans are measured in centuries (Yoda lived to be over 900, even with the last decades spent in the rather unpleasant environment of Dagobah's swamp country), innovation tends to become stunted. ("It was good enough for me as a lad, it's good enough for you!")

Depending on the source material, the stagnation is worse than you thought. In the Knights of the Old Republic games, the tech level is pretty well identical to that in the movies, and in some cases superior (a holdout blaster in KotOR II can make a Stormtrooper's carbine look like a toy) - while the games are set four thousand years earlier.
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Old 09-27-2019, 07:50 AM   #3
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Default Re: Can their still be a science revolution in Star Wars?

You can certainly set a scientific revolution in the star wars universe. I suspect the resulting setting would no longer be star wars.
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Old 09-27-2019, 07:55 AM   #4
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Default Re: Can their still be a science revolution in Star Wars?

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Originally Posted by Maximum7 View Post
Ive been told and read on many forums that technological development plateaued in the Star Wars galaxy and that the society has been stagnant for hundreds of years. Logically it makes sense that everything has a limit and their is only so much science and technology that can be achieved but then again no. Isn’t science and technology endless and as long as their is civilization; their will be progress.
Absolutely not. There is no guarantee that there is an unlimited amount of learnable stuff in the first place, and *certainly* no guarantee that a civilization will continue to look for it even if there is. Based on what we are shown there is zero evidence the Star Wars universe has science *at all*, and precious little evidence even for engineering innovation if you don't count "build a bigger one" as innovative. Maybe it's there and we just don't see it, but it doesn't have to be.

Actually quite a lot of space opera is like that. Sure the fact anybody made it into space implies somebody had an era of scientific progress at some point in the past, but often that seems to have been a brief fad - and nobody has cared about science, or even delivering a broad education to a substantial slice of the population in quite a long time.

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Is it possible that something could happen post-35 ABY that ushers in a new age of profession and scientific revolution.
Sure it's possible, but by no means inevitable. I honestly think the inertia of the Galaxy is so strongly against it that the most plausible cause would be some planet nobody's ever bothered visiting just happens to have a native civilization that's having a scientific period, and it arrives on the scene in the starships they've just built for themselves. Bonus points if said ships travel by some method other than the familiar mechanics of hyperdrive.

Edit: Don't overlook the possibility that the none of the species in the setting may have ever engaged in science at all. It's perfectly possible the species who invented all this technology in the first place is long extinct, and everybody got it as a fully developed package when starfarers arrived on their worlds. If nobody even has an ancient history of scientific research to serve as a model of how to do it, it's hard to say how difficult it is to think of the idea in the first place. But given that most human cultures didn't think of it and quite a large proportion of people living the modern culture science has utterly transformed for the better both misunderstand how it works and have a somewhat negative opinion of it, it's probably pretty hard.

Incidentally the rapid recent pace of innovation is fundamentally deceptive. My history of technology professor summed it up as the reason there's been so much technological progress recently is that the majority of all the scientists and engineers who have ever lived are *still alive*. That's maybe not quite true anymore - he did after all say it a generation ago and had been saying it for about another generation even at that point - but it's still pretty close.

Science is progressing rapidly lately because we have thrown a lot of man-hours at it. In the fairly common sort of space opera setting where scientists are apparently rare enough for the ones that exist for the sake of the plot to be notable celebrities - rather than people only the most esoteric specialists have ever even heard of - it presumably crawls even if a little science is still happening.
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Old 09-27-2019, 11:45 AM   #5
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Default Re: Can their still be a science revolution in Star Wars?

The lack of development in SW is pretty much purely meta. SW is Fantasy in Spaaaaaace, and generic Fantasy typically involves technology and magic staying at a single level of development for millennia, or particularly for magic even slowly declining. A wizard can develop a new spell, but he doesn’t do it scientifically, and there’s no guarantee the result is actually new, rather than just being a recreation of a spell some other wizard created ages ago but didn’t proliferate and was thus lost to time (but could be rediscovered in an ancient tome).

In SW, new superscience is occasionally created, but is either a one-shot Macguffin type deal (like the Death Star) or ultimately has no real impact (like the twin ion engines if the TIE series, which basically perform just like Separatist fighters from the Clone Wars, which in turn perform just like Sith fighters from thousands of years ago). And honestly, I’d be surprised if the above examples were original at all - it’s entirely possible they are somehow based on ancient Sith designs, and of course the Sith who originally “designed” them got the ideas themselves from extra-ancient Sith holocrons (which may render the user insane, depending on how much of a Lovecraft fan the author is).

It’s certainly possible to abandon this premise, and start having actual scientific research that produces meaningful results, but at that point you’ve moved from Space Fantasy to Science Fiction. This isn’t a bad thing, but advance the calendar far enough forward and you probably end up with a setting quite distinct from Star Wars. At that point, you may be better served just creating your own setting with liberal stealing from SW.
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Old 09-27-2019, 01:07 PM   #6
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Default Re: Can their still be a science revolution in Star Wars?

About the only things I can think of that have advanced in SW are hyperdrives and the scale of engineering feats. The Old Republic battlecruisers are half the size of the star destroyers we see on screen, and the fluff for hyperdrives has their speed and reliability improving slowly over millennia. Despite the games moving at Speed of Plot, hyperspace travel in the Old Republic era is said to take weeks to months, as opposed to the hours to a few days implied in the movies.

Part of what's held them back is that planets with even common resources have been tapped out over 20,000 to 25,000 years of mining and debris getting spread out in millennia of war they're more interested in finding new sources of iron and titanium - not to mention unobtaniums like cortosis, neutronium, adegan, and beskar - to support the current infrastructure than they are figuring out how to mass-produce new technologies for widespread distribution.

Star Wars is a (mostly) SafeTech setting. Stray outside that SafeTech zone, and it stops feeling like Star Wars. (Look at how the nanotech - in the way of nanotech explosives - at the end of Clone Wars S5 was received. It was one of a few things that arc that left a bad taste in fans' figurative collective mouths, and has basically not been used since.)

They have widespread cybernetic prostheses, to the point of mostly-cyber reconstruction (Vader, Grievous), but no brain uploading to droid bodies. Of course, droids have Social Stigma (Subjugated), being property, not free beings. Brain uploads would change that wildly. Widespread nanotech would change things wildly.


And I'm sure the Jedi over those 25,000 years of the Old Republic ("over a thousand genertions", with 25 years being a single human generation) actively worked to help stagnate the tech, in part because certain processes are in their minds "unnatural" and therefore of the Dark Side they fear so much.
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Old 09-27-2019, 03:54 PM   #7
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Default Re: Can their still be a science revolution in Star Wars?

Oh Hell yeah. There's a ton of technology in Star Wars that makes no sense to be so primitive. They have holographic communication but half of the universe are using walkie-talkies and a lot of them are pretty big. There's a lot of examples where technology could be made smaller or more portable and it would revolutionize how things are done. Based on how technology regresses in a lot of ways you could probably just re-brand old technology that was superior and cause a revolution.
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Old 09-27-2019, 04:55 PM   #8
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Default Re: Can their still be a science revolution in Star Wars?

I consider the most likely reason for the pinpoint accuracy in hyper jumps manifested in the sequel triology to be some kind of improvement in hyperspace. The hyperspace tracking modules were new technology too. Ion cannon were introduced canonically for the first time during the Clone Wars cartoon. Shield generators small enough to fit on a droid seen in the prequel trilogy seem like a new technology as well.

What I'm saying here is that while there might not be room for a "science revolution" and the Republic might have been technologically stagnant it does seem like the crumbling of the Republic has stimulated a certain amount of technological progress in the canon universe.

Also I don't think Obi Wan's thousand generations line can be taken seriously. More recent indications are that the Republic is only a thousand years old, although the Jedi are likely much older. He may be tracing the Jedi back to before humanity left its home planet in the galaxy. Even then, it's too even a number to take literally.
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Old 09-27-2019, 07:25 PM   #9
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Default Re: Can their still be a science revolution in Star Wars?

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Originally Posted by David Johnston2 View Post
I consider the most likely reason for the pinpoint accuracy in hyper jumps manifested in the sequel triology to be some kind of improvement in hyperspace.
Possibly. I don’t know if there was ever an instance in the plot prior to this that such accuracy would have been useful; if there was, and the lack of it caused problems for the characters, I’ll agree it’s new (albeit possibly “rediscovered”) tech.

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Ion cannon were introduced canonically for the first time during the Clone Wars cartoon. Shield generators small enough to fit on a droid seen in the prequel trilogy seem like a new technology as well.
Ion guns and personal field generators existed in the KotOR games - set millenia before Phantom Menace, and both appeared more advanced than those in chronologically later stories (the former were explicitly modified to work effectively against flesh, the latter were usable by both the living and droids).
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Old 09-27-2019, 07:42 PM   #10
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Default Re: Can their still be a science revolution in Star Wars?

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Ion guns and personal field generators existed in the KotOR games - set millenia before Phantom Menace, and both appeared more advanced than those in chronologically later stories (the former were explicitly modified to work effectively against flesh, the latter were usable by both the living and droids).
Well yeah. I wrote off KOTOR as a parallel universe long before the books were definitely excluded as having happened in movie continuity and the video games were always lower level than the books. The only way to fit KOTOR into the same universe would be to assume that interstellar civilization collapsed into a Long Night so drastic that they had to reinvent their tech from scratch and still hadn't achieved the same heights.
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