Scientific Anomalies in the Star Wars Universe

Fascinating thread. Some of the scientic explanations are a bit over my head, but nonetheless this is quite interesting stuff.

I won't even mention that in the vacuum of space there is no such thing as sound as sound requires a medium to travel thru.

 

If you're looking for Bob Brown's lightsabre page, try this: lightsabre

All I can say is that if you know the address of a lost site, Internet Archive is your friend.

On the issue of planetary homogenity, at several times in the past, including the Carboniferous and mid-Cretaceous periods, the Earth's atmospheric oxygen and carbon dioxide levels were much higher, and plant productivity was much higher in turn. The drawback, of course, was a somewhat more stifling world climate, unless you dig jungles. Forests were much more extensive.

However, there is another drawback. Too much oxygen in an atmosphere can lead to spontaneous combustion of that atmosphere, which is undoubtably unpleasant. I think the cutoff is somewhere around 30% oxygen. We're at 21% now, so no worries on that front. It could be a bother on Dagobah or Endor, though.

I don't see anything wrong with ice worlds or water worlds; one's just a colder version of the other, and we had pretty decent coverage during times like the mid-late Cretaceous, for example. What I want to know is how the Sarlacc maintains a pit of loose sand for hundreds of years, considering the actual film crew had trouble doing it for a matter of weeks!

 

What I want to know is how the Sarlacc maintains a pit of loose sand for hundreds of years, considering the actual film crew had trouble doing it for a matter of weeks!

Good point. There's no way the sarlacc could only come out to eat once every thousand years, because it would get buried fast. I'm curious how it digs itself out, or how it would have dug that hole in the first place.

Come to think of it, how would a sarlacc even evolve? It only gets to eat if something walking across the desert manages to not notice the huge hole in front of it and falls in!

 

Well, Banthas do have poor eyesight.

 

there is an insect (cant remember its name) that eats ants and builds small little 'sarlacc pits' it seems to have evolved waiting for things to fall into its hole.

 

Our deserts are actually filled with 'lil creatures, but they tend to only come out at night when it's a little cooler.
Tatooine may be the same way. Still, I wonder if the Sarlaac simply digests sand or it simply pops up out of the ground and resubmerges to keep the whole there.

 

there is an insect (cant remember its name) that eats ants and builds small little 'sarlacc pits' it seems to have evolved waiting for things to fall into its hole.

I believe you're talking about the "ant lion".

 

Maybe it spits up the sand it eats, and spends a lot of time grooming its pit with its tentacles.

 

Maybe it smells like something the wild animals of tatooine would like to eat, thus attracting them from afar.


While we're talking about rather improbable wildlife, explain to me Tauntauns that die of the cold, mynocks, Watto's ability to fly, and the dianoga.

 

Whats the prob with the TaunTauns and Watto?

I'd imagine on Endor, the temperature, cold as it is during the day, would absolutely plummet at night. Its entirely possible that while Tauntauns are fine during the daytime, the cold at night gets too much for them. Its possible that they'd be hiding in a cave at night, or something, but if they're forced to be outside, they'll die. I'm more concerned with how Han can live, but the Tauntaun dies.

As with Watto....the main issue I can see is the fact that the wings are so small, and kinda weirdly positioned...if they're on his back, and most of his weight is on his front, you'd expect him to be pretty horizontal, and lucky to fly at all.

 

You know Watto's kind of a round guy...well, put a lot of lighter than atmosphere gas in there, make sure he's really structually light, and there you go. I can only imagine his species is titanically gassy, though.

How are his wings positioned vis-a-vis a hummingbird, which is the mode of flight he seems to be closest to?

 

> I'm more concerned with how Han can live, but the Tauntaun dies.

Ja, that's sort of the point. Also, it's not even dark when the Tauntain dies. And there's not much obvious plantlife on Hoth, and the animal is clearly a vegetarian. Though, I guess, there could be big fields of grass off camera, and we don't see wild Tauntauns anyway.

As for Watto - yes, it was his aerodynamics I was calling into question. A helium filled belly was an option I hadn't considered, but I like it very much. His cenre of gravity must be in an odd place, as Dagsy points out.

 

I like the idea of Watto having ballast, although he seems to be able to control pretty well how high he flies, implying the wings still play in.

As for the dianoga: I can't tell you how it initially got in a trash compactor, unless it was released there intentionally - or the DS crew kept a store of dianogas on hand for releasing into aqueous environments to deal with resistant prisoners. But it doesn't seem so strange that something could survive in a trash compactor once it was there. Trash is going to have biomatter in it (even though we didn't see any in ANH for some reason), so the dianoga should be able to eat. It can also escape being crushed because it's small and might be able to fit into some out-of-the-way nook. The only question is how it manages to not get ejected into vacuum when the trash is dumped. The best solution is if the garbage compactors are all interconnected and the dianoga is free to move between them. (That would also make the first two problems about eating and not getting crushed much easier to solve.)

 

> The best solution is if the garbage compactors are all interconnected and the dianoga is free to move between them.

That's why the thing lets Luke go as soon as it hears the first groan of the walls moving - it must have a corrodor it can slip through.

Now, another question - are Dianoga strictly aquatic? If so, then all the interconnecting tunnels must be filled with liquid.

And THAT makes me wonder why there was so much liquid in the Trash Compactor in the first place? It makes no sense.

 

Anything could go into a garbage can. If you go look in a dumpster, your gonna see some liquid...ew...just ew.

My only question is how it got there in the first place.

I have heard of Watto being filled with a lighter than air gas before, I just don't recall where. There was once a theory that lightweight, gas filled creatures could hover in the atmosphere of Jupiter and travel about in the wind currents.

 

> If you go look in a dumpster, your gonna see some liquid...ew...just ew.

Normally from rain. I wasn't aware it rained inside the Death Star.

 

Good point. What if they do not recycle water and urine abord the Death Star? That'd be kinda dumb for such an advanced technology. I guess you could fall back on the Empire not needing or caring to recycle and such. Or perhaps it was built in a bit of haste and skipped basic recycling to cut corners.

 

I doubt the trash compactor also doubled as a sewer, because it had vents that lead straight to the 'public' corrodors...

Unless that explains why Vader & stormies have respirators - and Chewie did comment about the smell before diving through the grating.

You can't compress liquid anyway, so it would ruin the efficiency of the moving-wall compactor insofar as how crushed the solid matter could get.

 

You can't compress liquid anyway, so it would ruin the efficiency of the moving-wall compactor insofar as how crushed the solid matter could get.

That could explain how the dianoga escaped, there are pipes that allow the water to escape.

 

Escape where? The trash compactor itself needs a grate for runoff?

 

I haven't read the entire thread (yet) so forgive me if I'm repeating myself:

Regarding binary stars with planets - two stars of relatively equal mass orbiting each other will, for all intents and purposes, appear as a single gravitational mass. Therefore, it is perfectly possible that a planetary system would be able to orbit binary stars with relatively circular orbit paths.

 

Certainly, if two stars were close enough together, a planet's orbit could be at a greater radius than both. But I believe there are difficulties in getting the stars close enough together. A lot of binaries are separated by huge distances - greater than that between the Sun and Pluto.

 

Of our closest neighboring system Alpha Centurai A and B orbit quite close to each other while Proxima Centurai orbits far enough from the pair that a planet could circle the pair of Alpha stars.

A recent and vigorous computer model has showed that binaries have a better chance of allowing a stable orbit than previously thought which increased the possible number of planets in the Milky Way by orders of magnitude.

 

Nice thread (though much of it went over my dimwitted head).
The obvious real answer for all of these problems (aside for the ones Lucas did for dramatic effect), is Lucas himself is no scientist. In the end, it doesn't matter what science knows so much as what the author knows and what the audience is willing to accept.
But yeah, you guys knew that
But that's also why I sort of cringe at tech commentaries and such. Lucas never approached the ideas from a scientific probability prospective, and if you think to much about it, it all falls apart.
Just like getting scientific about a fairy tale

 

How about this one: Han Solo refers to "parsecs" as if it's a measure of time rather than distance. That's not so much a scientific anamoly but rather an incorrect usage of a scientific term. Perhaps that why Luke and Ben were unimpressed!