Lit What’s something that should be in Star Wars but strangely isn’t?

If you search Wookieepedia, there is tons of fringe advanced tech and there are reasons why Star Wars uses analog computers and close-ship to ship combat.

Yet are there some things that haven’t been developed in Star Wars that honestly just don’t make sense that they aren’t there?

 

1 - universal basic income

2 - Even after all these years, the concept of "wireless" seems ambiguous in the GFFA. It's there, but we still have too many instances of people needing to go to a physical machine/datapad/location/etc to download data. Even charging requires connection (have we EVER seen a wireless charger? Sith electricity jokes aside... )

 

I was about to say "Me!!!!" but then remembered, too late, I am already in...

 

**** *** after a *** ****** *******

 

Maybe its a security thing? Making things "non-wireless" makes it harder to hack.

 

AI intelligence but for me Jedi and Sith holocrons are made with something similar to AI intelligence also the Holoshows of the Star Wars galaxy are made by something similar to the AI

 

What are droids if not AI?

 

There are also non-droid AI's, like Mistress Mnemos.

"The city's central computer told you? Artoo-Detoo, you know better than to trust a strange computer!"

 

I can definitely see that for military installations. (though that is kind of undermined by a r2 being able to cut off all of a ship's vital systems from its secondary cargo dock or something. Suppose wireless computers would just make all space battles r2 hacker fights, so it is still a step up...just not much of one.)

I also imagine on some backwards planets there also might just not be the infrastructure to support that kind of thing. It can be easy to forget that wifi phones and computers can't do any of that without a lot of towers and cables and satellites and other stuff - at least unless you travel to the kind of places that don't have that infrastructure.
It is easy for me to imagine that in the core worlds there are locally set up wireless local datanets and even have some some relatively easy access to holonet, but many outer rim worlds don't have diddly or squat. Might even be a fun bit of characterization for a coreworlder to come out to the rim then wonder why they can't holostream on their datapad all of a sudden.


........at least until I remember that handheld comm-units seem to have no problem calling people in real time across the galaxy even when the user is on an uninhabited world, so never mind.

 

Regarding AI and Droids... its fun that regular computers if talking too much to droids become like droids themselves. Aka Luke's X-Wing thx to R2. Maybe not with same capabilities but at least some streaks of it, which is why memory wipes are neccessary and ships never feel the same after some maintenance downtime. AI in the GFFA is infective!

Given the GFFAs nanotech and medtech levels, AI and else is kinda obvious and so advanced it only looks retro but isn't! Same must account for the controls of ships and tech and other stuff that seems retro.

 

Why should that be in Star Wars?

 

Aside from droids, AI in the general sci-fi sense seems to exist but only on the periphery. The GFFA never went as far as to have a Butlerian Jihad, but the general consensus seems to be that droids and artificial intelligence are unreliable at best. Between the Droid Revolutions, the G0-T0 droid secession, and the trauma of the Clone Wars, thinking machines were definitely viewed with suspicion. The CIS gave droids much autonomy in helming cruisers and leading armies, but their actual war record is quite mixed. The closest we ever got to seeing effective machines in charge would probably be the more seasoned tactical droids. The Seperatist defeat has certainly not helped in propagating the technology. The winners write history after all, and Rebel and Imperial alike don't want to see the return of the droid armies. AI seems to exist only for more menial tasks like translation, running onboard ship systems, and supervising databases. The consensus seems to be that AI is insufficient to even advise in decision making. Star Wars has always been rooted in the spiritual over hard sci-fi logic. Judging by factions like the Fel Empire, it seems like galactic governments are more inclined to run on the augury of force users over any sort of advanced machines. I don't think it's hard to imagine the galaxy could do away with thinking machines in their entirety. A deadly enough droid revolt like the kind IG-88 had planned could've led to this.

 

For me, the canon should be using the years as a calendar, example, the destruction of the Death Star happened on may 25, 1977 in a galaxy far far away, for know reasons.

 

Between droids, supercomputers, hyperspace, and the resources of an entire galaxy, there really should be no poverty. I know that would make it too unrelatable. And with how easy it is to build a droid, there really should be no slavery either (unless it’s ideological species supremacy). The Solar System alone could support trillions of humans for millennia, even with slow space travel. And you can still have war out of ideology and pride, but the poverty and the economic reasons for war just make no sense.

Life extension is another one. An old EU book stated most humans live to be centuries, especially the mega rich. But we don’t see it. And again, it would make sense for everyone to afford it too. With the exception of violent deaths, there should be humans possibly living as long as Yoda.

We finally saw a Ringworld with Din Djarin on one during the BOBF, but those and other artificial space habitat should be much more common.

And with their technology, and inspiration from fantasy and other sci-fi, there should be more personal invisibility tech and personal levitation/flight tech. They have the technology, between speeders and cloaking devices.

 

I know Wookieepedia states that (in Legends) humans live on average to be 150 years old.

Are ringworlds any better or worse than some other space station design? Also, most planets in the GFFA are pretty sparsely populated relative to IRL Earth, so why build artificial space habitats if you don't need them?

 

It doesn’t make sense for artificial habitats to be the majority in the GFFA, but they should be more common. And like I said, not just ringworlds - there are so many possibilities that can capture the imagination and be fantastical. O’Neil Cylinders, flat discs like Asgard in the MCU, there’s so much potential for cool visual storytelling.

 

For (1), it's strange we haven't seen any world yet that has a system like this. For (2), wireless technology is becoming extremely common, and yet we still have a dependence on cables and physical connections for data exchange in most GFFA cultures. I don't particularly mind it and the "security" explanation sort of makes sense, but sometimes it's becoming increasingly awkward (there is still overuse of exchanging datapads to share information, rather than sending it electonically, for instance).

 

Do we know that we haven't? Most of the books don't dwell on the exact nature of the safety nets on various planets unless it's related to something more exciting.

I remember Alderaan in the Han Solo Trilogy being described in ways that really gave me vibes of future Earth from Star Trek. I would assume that they for example had, if not necessarily UBI, then at least a welfare state that's strong enough that it's unusual for an Alderaanian to go wanting on his home planet.

 

True. I particularly like the idea of some worlds moving much of their industry to space to reduce pollution on the planet itself, something mentioned in star wars but not seen that often.

I especially remember really liking the imagery of the Azzameen home base in X-Wing Alliance.

Though, on the flipside, I liked the worldbuilding bit from Dark Empire and Tales of the Jedi that talked about how there used to be a lot of space cities until improving hyperspace technology allowed people to bypass them and go directly from planet to planet. I would like to see that used more to make star wars ghost towns.

 

If welfare is something delegated to individual planetary governments, then that would mean that citizenship at the local level is much more important than we previously thought.

 

I'm just responding to the OP's question about what we haven't seen. We could theoretically respond "do we know we haven't seen XYZ?" to most responses in this thread, but that sort of defeats the purpose. Maybe someday future authors will introduce this stuff into the GFFA and say it's been there all along.

 

Wasn't there a world in the last season of the Mandalorian that had no money, the one maintained by droids?

 

I find it strange that there are no outright Socialist civilizations (as far as i know), considering we have plenty of monarchies, fascist states, theocratic empires, and capitalist democracies.

 

I think the Republic does contain some elements of it, given what Padme talks about in some TCW arcs. But it seems to be more on the system-level, like the planet I just mentioned above seems pretty socialist overall.

 

The Gran of Kinyen are described as a socialist civilization.