10-06-2019, 02:02 AM | #11 | |
Join Date: Jan 2006
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Re: Why can’t these things be done in Star Wars?
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10-06-2019, 08:31 AM | #12 |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Why can’t these things be done in Star Wars?
At least if we're talking about oxygen 1800 may be too early a date. I don't think it was clearly recognized until James Lovelock's work in the 1970s or so that it was explicitly recognized that oxygen atmospheres are chemically unstable and have to be constantly replenished by photosynthetic energy capture. Science fiction in the 1940s and 1950s seems just to treat "oxygen atmosphere" as an option on a list.
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10-06-2019, 09:10 AM | #13 |
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Re: Why can’t these things be done in Star Wars?
Wasn't Luke a moisture farmer? That would mean that if there's enough water vapor to actively gather, it had to have been coming from somewhere.
Numerous but small salt seas wouldn't change the desert planet status even in a more realistic setting, IMO.
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10-06-2019, 11:27 AM | #14 |
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: Why can’t these things be done in Star Wars?
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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10-06-2019, 12:32 PM | #15 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Why can’t these things be done in Star Wars?
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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.)
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10-06-2019, 01:06 PM | #16 | |
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Re: Why can’t these things be done in Star Wars?
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10-06-2019, 02:43 PM | #17 | |
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Central Europe
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Re: Why can’t these things be done in Star Wars?
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Probably its reasonable to assume the worldview of a high-school graduate in the 1940s, although if Lucas had felt inspired he might well have had human-alien hybrids (in Edgar Rice Burroughs but not 1890s biology). So blasters and turbolasers are not so different than the heat rays in "Red Nails" (1936) and work like guns in a WW II film. Its a mix of the cool things in pulp magazines, WW II films, and Akira Kurosawa.
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10-06-2019, 05:36 PM | #18 |
Join Date: Jul 2007
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Re: Why can’t these things be done in Star Wars?
There is a bit on this in Harry Harrison's Bill, The Galactic Hero.
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10-06-2019, 07:30 PM | #19 | ||
Join Date: May 2005
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Re: Why can’t these things be done in Star Wars?
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10-06-2019, 10:47 PM | #20 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Why can’t these things be done in Star Wars?
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Certainly past writers have often disregarded scientific issues, though. I've read a passage from one of H.G. Wells's letters where he discussed handwaving the issue of "how does he see?" to write The Invisible Man.
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science fiction, science!, star wars, technology, technology level |
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