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Old 10-07-2019, 06:40 AM   #21
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Default Re: Why can’t these things be done in Star Wars?

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(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.)
Rather reminiscent of Larry Niven's story "The Green Marauder".
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Old 10-07-2019, 06:56 AM   #22
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Default Re: Why can’t these things be done in Star Wars?

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I don't think that Frank Herbert thought of it as a convention, and I'm fairly sure that Isaac Asimov and John W. Campbell did not. I think the hard science of the era had not figured out the harsh realities of planetary atmospheric chemistry fully, and what they did know had not gotten as far as the Astounding stable of writers, not even the ones with a scientific education. It's like E.E. Smith giving us planets with chlorine atmospheres, which goes flat against the cosmic abundance of the elements. Of course for writers who do them now they're a genre convention.
I think that what Agemegos is saying is that the original authors did not logically deduce these things from principles, they just said "my galactic empire needs a capital planet supplied by spaceships" and "desert planets are cool, Burroughs' Mars was like that, Herbert's Dune was like that, there were lots of deserts on 'In Search Of', and of course desert planets have a breathable atmosphere" (in Empire Strikes Back the characters can even walk around with just face masks in a cave on an asteroid, and there is a giant asteroid worm, you can rationalize all these things but they tell me that George Lucas was not starting out with science principles or "one impossible thing" he was starting out with a bunch of things he thought were cool). These are not settings like Known Space where show Larry Niven that the Ringworld is harmonically unstable and he will add attitude thrusters, ask him why all the topsoil is not in the sea bottoms and he will add robots which dredge the seabeds and dump the earth out of holes near the peaks of the rim mountains.

Writers like Isaac Asimov had to work very fast and please their markets, and they did not have the benefit of 80 years of fandom joyfully criticizing things, just friends at parties and the few fanzines and science fact columns they had time to read.
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Old 10-07-2019, 09:08 AM   #23
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Default Re: Why can’t these things be done in Star Wars?

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I think that what Agemegos is saying is that the original authors did not logically deduce these things from principles, they just said "my galactic empire needs a capital planet supplied by spaceships" and "desert planets are cool, Burroughs' Mars was like that, Herbert's Dune was like that, there were lots of deserts on 'In Search Of', and of course desert planets have a breathable atmosphere" (in Empire Strikes Back the characters can even walk around with just face masks in a cave on an asteroid, and there is a giant asteroid worm, you can rationalize all these things but they tell me that George Lucas was not starting out with science principles or "one impossible thing" he was starting out with a bunch of things he thought were cool). These are not settings like Known Space where show Larry Niven that the Ringworld is harmonically unstable and he will add attitude thrusters, ask him why all the topsoil is not in the sea bottoms and he will add robots which dredge the seabeds and dump the earth out of holes near the peaks of the rim mountains.

Writers like Isaac Asimov had to work very fast and please their markets, and they did not have the benefit of 80 years of fandom joyfully criticizing things, just friends at parties and the few fanzines and science fact columns they had time to read.
Some of these things are not like the others.

While Arrakis IS a cool and exotic setting, it was not purely rule of cool. Frank Herbert was admired when he wrote it for his efforts at creating a detailed planetary ecology, and he really was trying to address things realistically, as can be seen in the storyline about the Fremen painstakingly harvesting and accumulating water to transform their planet, and the discussion of the role of sandtrout in maintaining its desert climate. Even Burroughs was not going purely off of "rule of cool"; he was working from Lowellian Mars, a model published by a professional astronomer (if a somewhat uncritical one).

I'd also note that Asimov didn't just read science fact columns. He had a degree in chemistry, specializing in biochemistry, and he got his master's in 1941 and his doctorate in 1948.
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Old 10-07-2019, 09:52 AM   #24
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Default Re: Why can’t these things be done in Star Wars?

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Some of these things are not like the others.

While Arrakis IS a cool and exotic setting, it was not purely rule of cool. ... Even Burroughs was not going purely off of "rule of cool"; he was working from Lowellian Mars, a model published by a professional astronomer (if a somewhat uncritical one).
Of course, and whether those differences are relevant depends on the questions you are asking. I and Agemegos am interested in the difference between something that you deduce from false premises ("the lines on my photos of Mars are canali, canali implies made by purposeful work"), and something you just take for granted.

Writers like Asimov and Herbert put a lot of thought into making some parts of their settings scientifically plausible (which George Lucas certainly did not), but I am not sure they spent time thinking about the logistics of Trantor or oxygen atmospheres. At the time, these were just not yet generally accepted by fans and writers as things which needed justification.

Presented with good arguments that desert-planets or city-planets are bad planet science, Asimov and Herbert would probably have corrected or hand-waved things, while Lucas would have looked at you like you were speaking Swahili.
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Old 10-07-2019, 10:44 AM   #25
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Default Re: Why can’t these things be done in Star Wars?

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Writers like Asimov and Herbert put a lot of thought into making some parts of their settings scientifically plausible (which George Lucas certainly did not), but I am not sure they spent time thinking about the logistics of Trantor or oxygen atmospheres. At the time, these were just not yet generally accepted by fans and writers as things which needed justification.

Presented with good arguments that desert-planets or city-planets are bad planet science, Asimov and Herbert would probably have corrected or hand-waved things, while Lucas would have looked at you like you were speaking Swahili.
Of course. But also, part of the reason Asimov, and at least Campbell if perhaps not Herbert, didn't think about oxygen atmospheres is that mainstream science wasn't doing so either. James Lovelock published his paper about the effects of life on planetary atmospheres in 1965, the same year that Dune was published, and long after Asimov's Foundation series. The implications of the difference between chemical equilibrium and dynamically maintained nonequilibrium atmospheric chemisty weren't much considered before then; nonequilibrium thermodynamics went back a way before then but wasn't widely known, and I suspect that many analyses found it convenient to tacitly assume that planetary atmospheres would be at equilibrium and thus their composition would be stable—or didn't consider the implications of instability.

In other words, I don't think that "oxygen atmospheres need to be constantly restored by photosynthesis" was that big a part of scientific thinking when those stories were written. Of course Burroughs had an oxygen plant on Mars (just one for the entire planet, I think!), but he seems to have been concerned with leakage of oxygen into space, not with chemical processes.
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Old 10-07-2019, 11:44 AM   #26
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Default Re: Why can’t these things be done in Star Wars?

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Right! The oxygen and moisture in the air on Tatooine and Hoth (and Arrakis), and the urbanisation of Coruscant (and Trantor) are impossibilities but they are not errors. They are genre conventions, no better to be "corrected" than FTL travel.
I don't think so. There is no reason for it. Explaining the oxygen on Arrakis is easily done by some handwave or other (it is produced by spice, or sandworms or whatever), and in any case there are photosynthetic plants and an icecap there. It just wasn't done. Similarly the sand-sinks, even though it would really crush into sandstone at the bottom as indeed anyone seeing the effects of gravity on a bag of potato chips can testify. And anyone who reads Bagnold.

FtL is necessary plotwise. It is only needed for the desert to be anywhere on the planet that is relevant to the plot.
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Old 10-07-2019, 12:12 PM   #27
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Default Re: Why can’t these things be done in Star Wars?

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I don't think so. There is no reason for it. Explaining the oxygen on Arrakis is easily done by some handwave or other (it is produced by spice, or sandworms or whatever), and in any case there are photosynthetic plants and an icecap there It just wasn't done. Similarly the sand-sinks, even though it would really crush into sandstone at the bottom as indeed anyone seeing the effects of gravity on a bag of potato chips can testify. And anyone who reads Bagnold.

FtL is necessary plotwise. It is only needed for the desert to be anywhere on the planet that is relevant to the plot.
I have always been perfectly content to say that Tatooine has, say 20% hydrosphere. It's easy to stereotype a planet when you never got more than a hundred miles away from the landing field. Tatooine is a planet that has a lot of desert. That's fine. It doesn't have to be all-desert.
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Old 10-07-2019, 12:26 PM   #28
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Default Re: Why can’t these things be done in Star Wars?

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I have always been perfectly content to say that Tatooine has, say 20% hydrosphere. It's easy to stereotype a planet when you never got more than a hundred miles away from the landing field. Tatooine is a planet that has a lot of desert. That's fine. It doesn't have to be all-desert.
I think it was in GURPS Adaptations that I had suggestions for how much hydrosphere a planet should have to be called "a desert planet" or "a swamp planet" or "an ocean planet." Earth has a really huge amount of hydrosphere, but we don't call it "the ocean planet," so it's not a simple statistical sampling.

I'm thinking of Kingsbury's Geta, which is portrayed as a harsh desert planet, but has something close to a dozen small seas here and there. It's still possible to walk around the planet, though, with a few detours.
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Old 10-07-2019, 04:08 PM   #29
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Default Re: Why can’t these things be done in Star Wars?

Also, I am sorry I implied that the Star Wars universe, Dune, and the Foundation are all the kind of carelessly-built setting. My point was that not every aspect of these settings got close attention, because writers are human and the body of professional knowledge for worldbuilders was smaller then.

I have no idea whether Isaac Asimov or Frank Herbert could have known that they needed photosynthetic life for an oxygen atmosphere if they had looked at that aspect, and I have no idea where Arrakis fits on the rational-to-rule-of-cool spectrum (I read one of the books but it did not grab me).
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Old 10-07-2019, 07:07 PM   #30
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Default Re: Why can’t these things be done in Star Wars?

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Also, I am sorry I implied that the Star Wars universe, Dune, and the Foundation are all the kind of carelessly-built setting. My point was that not every aspect of these settings got close attention, because writers are human and the body of professional knowledge for worldbuilders was smaller then.

I have no idea whether Isaac Asimov or Frank Herbert could have known that they needed photosynthetic life for an oxygen atmosphere if they had looked at that aspect, and I have no idea where Arrakis fits on the rational-to-rule-of-cool spectrum (I read one of the books but it did not grab me).
Herbert might have. Dune was as much an ecologists novel as Lotr a Philologists. Which doesn't necessarily mean that it was reliable, only that the writer was interested in such things.
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