The Science of Star Wars: The Scientific Facts Behind the Force, Space Travel, and More!

by Mark Brake

Star Wars is a response to this cultural shock—the shock of finding ourselves in an increasingly marginal position in a hostile cosmos. The stories of Star Wars help us come to terms with this new universe unveiled by science. Star Wars works by conveying the taste, the feel, and the human meaning of the findings of science. Star Wars puts the stamp of humanity back onto the universe. It makes human what was once alien.

On a simpler level, Star Wars is all about the relationship between the human and the nonhuman. So that’s how this book is structured. It’s divided into five conceptual themes: space, space travel, tech, bio-tech, and aliens. Each of these themes is a way of exploring the relationship between the human and the nonhuman. Taking a closer look at these themes will illuminate the genius of Star Wars, as if a vibrant lightsaber were being held to it. It will show the way in which the franchise functions.

Space. Space in Star Wars is a vast arena in which the stories unfold. But it’s also a facet of the nonhuman, natural world, replete with stars and habitable planets. Space Travel. Having the vast arena of space is one thing. But how do you get from one star system to another? This theme deals with nonhuman questions of journeying to the stars, including faster-than-light travel, hyperspace, and a certain gargantuan space station. Tech. What will the future bring in the form of machines? Star Wars has plenty to say about the rise of the robot, and the prospect of artificial intelligence. And what of the tech of social engineering and the surveillance culture of the Empire? Bio-tech. What might humans one day become? Whether through genetic design or bio-tech enhancement, Star Wars peeks at our wetware evolutionary future. Aliens. If space truly is a vast arena of habitable planets, what kind of creatures lurk in its depths? Star Wars has created some of the most famous alien life-forms in all of film and fiction.

“[Science fiction] had been disapproved of for a long time. At one point I took a top official aside and asked him what had changed? ‘It’s simple,’ he told me. ‘The Chinese were brilliant at making things if other people brought them the plans. But they did not innovate and they did not invent. They did not imagine. So they sent a delegation to the US, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the future about themselves.’” They found a common link: all had read science fiction when they were young, and Star Wars had inspired many.

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When we make choices, we normally deal with likelihoods rather than certainties. Probability is a measure of the likelihood that some event will happen. In this case the event is successfully navigating an asteroid field.

Recently, there has also been the Breakthrough Starshot initiative, which is supported by Stephen Hawking. It hopes to use a ground-based beam of light to propel light sails attached to ultra-light nanocrafts. The crafts could theoretically reach speeds of one hundred million miles per hour and reach a nearby star system such as Alpha Centauri in twenty years. It could then beam back images and other information. Clearly, these aren’t good enough options for manned interstellar travel, but we’ve only really been in space for little over half a century.

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A red dwarf is a small, cool star. Such stars have masses less than half of the Sun’s. Red dwarf stars were once thought unable to support habitable planets. However, scientists now think that old theory is wrong. Red dwarfs do have planets, but they have curious orbits. Planets in the Goldilocks Zone of a red dwarf would be so close to the parent star that they would be tidally locked. Just like the Moon in orbit about the Earth, the red dwarf’s planets always show the same face to their sun. So, red-dwarf worlds are locked by the parent star’s gravity. One half of the planet is always in darkness, the other half always bathed in light. They are strange and exotic worlds. On the dark side, there is a vast frozen waste. On the light side, oceans, a temperate climate, and land. However, there is also a “Twilight Zone,” an in-between place. Here, between the contrasting half-worlds, strange creatures may compete for food and light—if there are any creatures at all in such an alien world. But even if a red dwarf exoplanet doesn’t harbor life, its exomoon may. Imagine an Earth-sized moon, in orbit around a Jupiter-sized giant. The giant may be locked in its orbit around the red dwarf, suffering extremes of climate. Yet, the moon in orbit around the giant may be habitable. It would circumvent the tidal lock problem by becoming tidally locked to its planet. This way there would be a day/night cycle as the moon orbited its primary, and there would be distribution of heat.

From what is currently hypothesized about dark energy, there are two forms. The first form, the cosmological constant, uniformly permeates all of space. There’d be no point looking specifically to the stars for this first form of dark energy. Real scientists know the second form of dark energy as quintessence. That’s because it, allegedly, represents the fifth “known” contribution to the total mass-energy content of the universe, along with baryonic matter, radiation, cold dark matter, and gravitational self-energy. Unlike the cosmological constant, real quintessence doesn’t uniformly permeate all of space, but is a scalar field, which means varying values at every point in space. More common examples of scalar fields include temperature and pressure.

What Kepler found is quite incredible. When the Kepler observatory completed its primary mission objectives in 2012, it had detected nearly five thousand exoplanets. Perhaps its strangest discovery is a so-called Styrofoam planet, a world with just one-tenth the density of Jupiter. And its most stunning discovery is the first confirmation of a rocky planet outside our solar system. In 2015, Kepler scientists announced the discovery of the Earth’s “closest twin.”

Tatooine certainly sits in the circumbinary sweet spot of the Tatoo system. Not only has Kepler-16b been discovered, but new research also shows that far from being only merely possible, Tatooine-type planets may actually be quite common. It seems there might also be similar sweet spots in other systems. Recent research has shown that in the region near a binary star, a rocky or gas-giant planet can form in much the same way as around a single star. In other words, planets are just as prevalent around binaries as around single suns. The conclusion? Tatooines may be common in the universe.

In addition to water, we know that all known life is based on carbon. Carbon forms a wider variety of bonds than any other element. This allows a multitude of different molecules to be made. Carbon forms the backbone of all organic molecules, which are essential for life. Other important elements of life are hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorous, and sulfur.

Somewhere amongst all of these chemicals, life managed to emerge. This process of life emerging from non-living matter is called abiogenesis. Although it’s still not known how that happened exactly, there are some things that do seem evident.

The life-forms that were around first appear to have been tiny bacteria and Archaea. They were also hyperthermophiles, which means they had the ability to...

Mars is thought to have lost its water due to bombardment from solar winds, which stripped away its atmosphere. Earth has avoided this fate due to the presence of a large magnetic field called the magnetosphere. This field is much weaker on Mars partly due its smaller size and not being able to sustain the mechanisms for a strong magnetosphere. Over time it’s been speculated that Mars’s field got weaker due to changes in the activity of its iron core. Having two suns means that Tatooine’s atmosphere has an increased threat of degradation from solar winds. However, Tatooine is much larger than Mars, so its magnetosphere could be stronger. Considering Tatooine appears to have an identical gravity to Earth, we can work out its mass and then its average density.

Photosynthesis is how plants get their energy. They take in carbon dioxide (CO2) and strip off the carbon to combine it with water (H2O). This produces carbohydrates such as glucose. The remaining oxygen (O2) liberated from the CO2 escapes away into the atmosphere. It’s this escaping oxygen that eventually led to the formation of the ozone layer, which protects land-based life from the Sun’s UV rays. The presence of the ozone layer enabled life on earth to leave the seas and spread over the land.

Humans are made of only about 9.5% hydrogen by mass. We don’t contain helium. The rest of us is made up of 65% oxygen atoms, 18.5% carbon, and varying amounts of more than fifty other elements. All of these heavier elements weren’t present in the first few hundred thousand years of the universe. They needed to be made by a process other than The Big Bang. They were made in stars.

So let’s assume we develop the technology to visit other star systems within the next thousand years. We can say it took roughly 3.5 billion years for life to become star-worthy after a star appeared that had all the necessary stuff for life. Considering this was as early as ten billion years ago, this means that potentially one or more galactic life-forms could have developed star travel as long as 6.5 billion years ago.

Now, 16.7 hours for light to get to the heliopause might seem like a long time, but consider the distance to the nearest star other than our Sun. It’s called Proxima Centauri and it's 4.2 light-years away. At this distance, kilometers and AU stop being useful, so astronomers may resort to using the parsec. A parsec is used to measure distances between stars and is equivalent to a distance of 3.26 light-years. As such, the Milky Way is 33,726 parsecs across, meaning it takes 110,000 light-years for light to cross our Galaxy. The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, which is how the Star Wars galaxy is also portrayed. More than two-thirds of the known galaxies in our universe are spiral galaxies. The nearest to the Milky Way is called the Andromeda Galaxy, which is a staggering 2.5 million light-years away. This is almost twenty-three times the width of our Galaxy. So how many galaxies are there that could be suitable locations for the Star Wars galaxy? It’s been estimated that there are well over one hundred billion galaxies out there.

In 2004, NASA unveiled the deepest image of the observable universe ever made by mankind. Called the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (HUDF), it focused on a dark area of the sky, roughly one-tenth the diameter of the moon, and took a one-million-second long exposure. It revealed ten thousand galaxies in that area alone. When looking into space, we are limited to what we can observe. This is called the observable universe and is limited by how far light has been able to travel to us since the beginning of the universe. Even so, since the early twentieth century we have known that galaxies are moving away from each other in what is referred to as the Hubble Expansion, named after American astronomer Edwin Hubble. It is now well-documented that the universe is expanding, so much so that the furthest galaxies are much further away than they appear to be. In the time it has taken the light to reach us from them, they have moved further away. The current estimate for the proper size of the observable universe is about ninety-three billion light-years across.

If we want to defy gravity by hovering, we’re currently limited to technologies such as lighter-than-air crafts, vehicles with ducted fans (like toy drones), rotary wings, or jet propulsion. These technologies only work up to a maximum altitude or ceiling, above which there isn’t enough air pressure for them to function properly. The operational ceiling of repulsorlift technology isn’t based on air pressure, though. It’s meant to work by pushing against a planet’s gravity. So it’s operational ceiling would be the altitude at which the gravity is too weak for the repulsorlift engines to support the city’s weight. This antigravity technology is ubiquitous in the Star Wars universe, but nothing like it exists in the real world. In recent years, some organizations have given it some serious thought, though. This includes BAE Systems, which supported an antigravity project called Greenglow. As of right now, though—until a breakthrough in antigravity technology—it looks as if the idea of a floating city just isn’t feasible.

On a gas giant like Bespin, to get a layer of atmosphere that contains enough oxygen is a major problem. On Earth, the oxygen supplies come from life-forms that use photosynthesis to obtain carbon from carbon dioxide (CO2), leaving the oxygen to enter the atmosphere. By volume, oxygen is only about 21% of the air we breathe. Nitrogen makes up the majority at 78%. Bespin would need to have similar photosynthesizing life-forms such as algae to oxygenate its Life Zone, unless it has another way of obtaining oxygen. However, the algae would need access to water, which is only in the clouds. They would also need a source of CO2 which, if present on the planet, would just sink to the lower atmosphere due to its weight. Astrophysicist Mathieu Hirtzig, who now works at Fondation La main à la pâte in Paris, has spent a significant amount of time studying Saturn’s moon Titan. He proposed some possible alternatives for oxygen production based on stellar flux (energy from the local star) and technology. “Photolysis (the breaking of molecules by UV rays) is an option: the water molecule could be broken down by the stellar flux, to keep only Oxygen,” Says Hirtzig. However, because Bespin is massive enough to hold onto any freed up hydrogen, the oxygen would just reform into water or even more reactive molecules. The technological option is to use electrolysis where the water is split using electricity. “The Cloud City could well be producing its own Life Zone, by keeping the hydrogen an...

The thinking goes something like this: If carbon and silicon are so similar, and carbon begets life, why shouldn’t silicon also do so? Those who resist the temptation to be seduced by the silicon argument are often called “carbon chauvinists.” However, perhaps there’s a good reason to admire carbon. Carbon is cosmic. It forms the basis of life on Earth, and is also to be found out in deep space. Carbon is the backbone of biology because of its very nature. It easily bonds with life’s other main elements, like hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. Carbon is also light and small, making it an ideal element for creating the longer and more complex chemicals of life, such as proteins and DNA. Carbon also makes one of the softest known substances in graphite, and one of the hardest known substances in diamond. All in all, carbon is known to form ten million different chemicals, which is the majority of all chemicals on Earth.

On Earth, we have our own creature that can survive the vacuum of space. They’re called tardigrades, or water bears. Tardigrades are essentially indestructible. They don’t look particularly impressive, with sofa-like bodies and four pairs of stubby, poorly articulated legs. They’re certainly not of exogorth dimensions, or even as massive as a mynock. Tardigrades range in size from 0.012 to 0.020 inches, though the largest species may reach a heady 0.047 inches. Scientists have found tardigrades on top of Mount Everest, in hot springs, under layers of solid ice, and in ocean sediments. They’re able to survive the most extreme environments that would kill almost every other animal. They’ve survived temperatures as hot as 151oC, and as cold as -272oC. They can go without water for ten years. They can stand one thousand times more radiation than other animals. And they’ve even been known to survive the vacuum of space. For ten days in 2007, tardigrades were taken aboard the FOTON-M3 mission into low Earth orbit, where they were exposed to the hard vacuum of outer space. Did that faze them? Not in the slightest. On their return to Earth, and after rehydration, most of the tardigrades recovered within thirty minutes.

A 2011 study found that not only are life-sustaining desert planets possible, but that they may even be more common than Earth-like planets. Models made by the scientists in the study found that desert planets had a much larger Goldilocks Zone than watery planets. The study also suggested that Venus may once have been a habitable desert planet, as recently as a billion years back, and that the Earth may become a desert planet within a billion years due to the Sun’s increasing luminosity. Perhaps, we’d best pay Rey’s survival skills more attention.

N = R* • fp • ne • fl • fi • fc • L Each variable symbolizes the following: N = the number of communicative civilizations in our Galaxy R* = the average rate of star formation in our Galaxy fp = the fraction of those stars that have planets ne = the average number of planets that can potentially support life fl = the fraction of planets that actually develop life fi = the fraction of planets with life on which intelligence arises (civilizations) fc = the fraction of civilizations that develop detectable signs of communication L = the length of time such civilizations send communicative signals into the Galaxy

The study found that humans would be alone in the universe only if the odds of alien intelligence developing elsewhere are less than about one in ten billion trillion, or one in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. In short, it’s extremely likely that there is, or has been, intelligent life elsewhere in space.

Scientists believe the original atmosphere of the primal Earth escaped into space. Compared to today’s breathable air, this primary atmosphere was toxic—rich in ammonia, neon, water vapor, and methane. The air was without breathable oxygen. Nonetheless, unicellular organisms arose and then breathed out oxygen into the air, which brought about a revolutionary change in the Earth’s atmosphere. Over many millennia, this atmosphere then evolved into the air that we breathe today.

Some scientists have suggested the idea of a galactic habitable zone (GHZ). This habitable zone is the region of a galaxy in which life is most likely to develop. In particular, the notion of a GHZ includes factors such as the rate of potentially life-threatening major cosmic events, like supernovae, and an idea known as metallicity—the fraction of chemical elements that is not hydrogen and helium. These factors help in the experts’ calculation of which regions of the Galaxy are best suited to forming Earth-like planets, or to evolve suitable environments for life to advance. And yet, more recently, there are scientists who believe that the GHZ may extend to the entire Galaxy, rather than habitability being restricted to a specific region in space and time.

Clarke’s First Law: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.” Clarke’s Second Law: “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.” Clarke’s Third Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

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Evolution in biology begat other evolutions. The spirit of Darwinism was gifted to physicists. They, too, approached the question of the age of our planet, and the age of the Sun. First, they used thermodynamics, the branch of physics concerned with the dynamics of heat energy. Then, late in the nineteenth century, the nuclear age dawned. Radiometric dating—the technique for dating materials using naturally occurring radioactive isotopes—provided age-dating to fields as diverse as geology, astrophysics, and cosmology. We know now that the planetary systems of the Star Wars galaxy would have gone through similar evolutions.

DNA, or “deoxyribonucleic acid,” exists simply to make more DNA. There’s nearly two meters of DNA squeezed into almost every human cell. Each length of DNA has about 3.2 billion letters of coding. That’s enough to enable 103,480,000,000 potential combinations. That’s a huge number of possibilities. If something like DNA existed in the Star Wars galaxy—and we will soon argue that it would have—the possibilities in a replicator like DNA means the potential people who could have been in the place of Luke Skywalker, but who never saw the light of Tatoo, outnumber the sand grains of Jakku. Such unborn ghosts include greater philosophers than Yoda, pilots greater than Han Solo. That’s because the parade of possible people allowed by replicators like DNA so hugely outnumbers the parade of actual people. Imagine Princess Leia, standing in front of a mirror. If her biology works anything like ours, she could reflect on the fact that she is gazing at ten thousand trillion cells. Almost every one of them contains two yards of jam-packed DNA, or some other replicator. If it were all spun into a single thread, it would make a solitary strand long enough to reach the Moon and back, many times over. Humans have as much as twenty million kilometers of DNA, scrunched up inside. Humans are vehicles for DNA. We are hosts for DNA parasites, which are our genes. In many ways, the actual function of life, that which is being played to the max in habitats on our home planet, is DNA survival. How...

It is a river of coded information, rather than blood and bones. Much of the DNA is redundant, about 97% of it, in fact. But the genes, the business end of DNA, are the short sections that control and orchestrate vital functions. Genes have been compared to the keys of a piano, each playing only a single note. And the combination of genes, like the combination of piano keys, creates chords and a vast variety of tunes. Coalescing, the genes’ contributions create the orchestration that is the human genome. The human genome is considered to be a kind of instruction manual for the body. Genes are simply instructions to make proteins. The letters in which the instructions are written are known as bases, and they are the key to the genetic alphabet. The bases consist of four nucleotides: adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine. What would the cipher have been in the Star Wars galaxy? What ingredients would do the job of replicator?

Darwin himself first set out the case for evolution in his book The Origin of Species. The theory comprised three component concepts. The first notion was “variation.” Variation is based on the observation that each and every individual of any particular species is different. Wookiees may all look the same, but each has a unique set of quirks and characteristics.

The second notion is “multiplicity.” Living creatures, including alien species, tend to make more offspring and have bigger broods than the environment can necessarily maintain. “Nature,” according to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “[is] red in tooth and claw”—both in our Galaxy, and, we may assume, in galaxies far, far away. One might live in a world in which only a small fraction of the Ewoks and Exogorths that are brought into existence actually survive, or manage to evade predators long enough to mate.

The third notion was natural selection. The individual differences between members of a species, coupled with the environmental forces, shape the likelihood that a particular individual will last long enough to pass its characteristics on to posterity. By the survival of the “fittest,” Darwin didn’t mean some kind of innate superiority to others. Rather, it is an unsolicited advantage, the result of the pure serendipity of freak change; they just happen to better “fit” their environment. Should the scene change ...

The idea that life on Earth could have been seeded from somewhere off the planet is called the panspermia hypothesis. The idea has arisen a few times since the fifth century BC. The most recent advocates of the theory were Sir Fred Hoyle and Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe. According to Wickramasinghe, panspermia is the hypothesis that life exists throughout the universe, distributed by meteoroids, asteroids, comets, and planetoids. The main thrust of this theory isn’t concerned with advanced life-forms, though. It mainly deals with microscopic organisms such as viruses, bacteria, and Achaea as well as molecules that can act as the building blocks of life. Additionally, Wickramasinghe says that it “is not meant to address how life began, just the propagation method that may cause its sustenance.”

According to Qui-Gon Jinn, “Midi-chlorians are a microscopic life-form that reside within all living cells and communicate with the Force…. We are symbionts with them…. Without the midi-chlorians, life could not exist, and we would have no knowledge of the Force.” Although these midi-chlorians are present within all life-forms according to Qui-Gon Jinn, they sadly aren’t present in us. However, when George Lucas devised midi-chlorians, he was inspired by tiny organelles that really do exist in nearly all the cells of our bodies. They’re called mitochondria. Mitochondria act as the power plants for the cells in our bodies. The more mitochondria a person has, the better their endurance performance will be. They are the basis for oxygen-breathing life-forms, generating energy from food. Without them, the majority of life as we know it would not exist. We inherit our mitochondria from our mothers. If midi-chlorians are inherited like mitochondria, then Anakin would have inherited his midi-chlorians from his mother. However, she never exhibited signs of Force sensitivity. The converse argument—that midi-chlorians are passed down by the fathers—falls apart, too, when we consider Kylo Ren’s abilities. It’s possible that midi-chlorians represent a dominant genetic trait, and whoever is stronger with the Force passes on midi-chlorians to their offspring. In Anakin’s case, rumor has it that he was conceived from the Force itself. This supports the realization that Anakin’s midi-chlo...

Aquatic mammals like whales evolved thick layers of fat to help regulate their body temperature, while bulkier mammals like elephants take longer to heat up and cool down, making them more resilient to environmental temperature changes. However, in colder climates, thick hair was still of value, as seen in woolly mammoths.

Anthropology professor Nina Jablonski has revealed how humans may have lost their fur to help reduce this heat load on the brain. She describes how, among other factors, “shedding our body hair was surely a critical step in becoming brainy.” Sweating helps to cool us down, but if the hair is thick, the excretions from our eccrine sweat glands would quickly matt the hair, hampering heat loss. Therefore, a rise in hairlessness would be of an increasing benefit. Sweating also carries heat away more effectively in drier environments, so a humid environment would also hamper heat loss through sweating.

Lethal diseases from blood-sucking insects can lead to premature deaths. A genetic mutation causing less dense fur could increase an animal’s chances of survival, causing the hairless mutation to survive and become more prevalent. Over many millennia this could lead to a population of more naked hominids.

They say their hypothesis can also explain why women are less hairy than men, suggesting that the women were more likely to have spent more time in the home bases and therefore had a higher risk of ectoparasitic infestation. As such, hairless women could have a better survival rate, giving birth to more offspring with the same advantage.

summarize: Regardless of whether Wookiees have hair or fur, a hot environment would be the main driver towards hairlessness. The abundance of forests and lack of deserts implies that, unlike the African savannah, Kashyyyk is not a hot and dry place. This would make sweating less efficient. If this is combined with a relatively cool climate most of the time, then insulating fur may have been more advantageous to the Wookiees than losing it to improve sweating. They may also have smaller brains, which could lessen the need for improved heat loss via bare-skinned sweating. However, they would still have to deal with ectoparasites. If this is a strong instigator of hairlessness, they are still hairy because they have effective ways to dispose of the ectoparasites.

Astromech droids are a class of repair droid that are used as automated mechanics on starships. The droids are compact, and have a small “operational footprint,” most being approximately one meter tall. They are tooled-up through special limbs that are hidden in recessed compartments on the droid body. Many starfighter spacecraft rely on astromech droids to act as co-pilots. As the droids sit in astromech sockets, exposed to space, they control flight and power distribution systems, as well as calculate hyperspace jumps and perform routine maintenance. Chatting astromechs are nothing like prattling protocol droids. Astromechs communicate only in writing via computer systems or through binary—that familiar sequence code of clicks, bleeps, and burps. The BB unit is a new class of astromech created some time after the Battle of Endor, with the main new innovation being its spherical body.

Consider the dark side of the Force. Those who ply the dark side draw power from primal emotions, such as fear, anger, and hatred. Darth Sidious says that the source of his dark power is “the universe beyond the edges of our maps.” Unseen. Undetected. The power of the dark side is penetrating and pernicious. Even a Jedi raised from birth in the traditions of the Jedi Order could quickly become corrupted by the lure of the dark side and its seductions. In both brutal and subtle varieties, Star Wars is a timely reminder that totalitarianism is a past, and present, prospect.

The word “robot” was first used in Karel Capek’s 1920s science fiction play, Rossum’s Universal Robots. The word robot came from the Czech word robota, meaning “forced labor,” referring to the featured characters that were thought of as human-like machines.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.

According to Star Wars canon, a tractor beam works by manipulating gravitational forces to grab objects. The Death Star and other Star Wars spacecrafts have an onboard gravity generator, which stops the troops and cargo from flying about inside. It’s possible the tractor beam is just an adapted version of this same technology. Where does modern science stand on this matter? According to Einstein’s theory of relativity, gravity is caused by a warping of space-time due to the presence of matter or energy. The more matter there is, the more space-time is warped, thus increasing the experienced force of gravity. With gravity, the more mass there is, the stronger the gravitational field. Compared to magnetism, the attraction caused by gravity is extremely weak for the amount of matter needed to produce it. However, a tractor beam working in this way could warp the space-time in front of an object causing the object to fall towards the warped region. The problem is that as far as we currently know, gravity cannot be focused; it operates in every direction from its source. So both ships would get drawn into this warped region of space depending on the relative mass of each ship. Therefore gravity is possibly not a good solution unless a way can be found to control it and shield it from particular directions.

We return to swordsman Isao Machii, who was mentioned briefly in the chapter "Could We Ever Become Jedi?" He is a Japanese Iaido master who holds many records for his skills. He manages to cut the BB pellet, which is traveling at roughly 350 kilometers per hour (97 meters per second). He can also cut a tennis ball traveling at 820 kilometers per hour, which is 4.8 times faster than the fastest baseball pitch ever recorded (169 kilometers per hour). Just like the Jedi, he had to train for many years to develop his expertise. However, he proves that a tiny object traveling at almost one hundred meters per second can be successfully intercepted by a human with a blade. However, for Machii to have thought about what he was doing would have taken about three-tenths of a second, by which time the pellet would have flown past. Dr. Ramani Durvasula of California State University describes Machii’s skills as follows: “This is about processing it in an entirely different sensory level because he’s not visually processing this. This is a different level of anticipatory processing. Something so procedural … something so fluid for him.” By establishing the highest response time of human beings, we’ve determined that dodging a blaster bolt would take more than simply reacting; it’s a form of preempting a strike, an anticipatory response or reflex that Machii seems to possess, just like the Jedi. The question arises: If Machii had a lightsaber, could it be used to actually deflect a bolt?

Holographic images are stored within a film that records the interference pattern of incoming light, usually from a laser source. The image itself isn’t in the film, but rather a representation in the form of the interference pattern. This interference pattern is the result of slight differences in the positions of the light waves when they enter the film. When light is shone back onto the holographic film, it reflects back with the same configuration of light waves that originally created it, i.e., we see the original image, and can view it from as many angles as the original light hit it from.

Many companies claim to create 3D images but really they are just 2D images reflected off a mirror or transparent solid surface. These “holograms” make use of an effect known as Pepper’s ghost. Pepper’s ghost is a reflection-based holographic effect developed in the mid 1800s by scientists John Pepper and Henry Dircks. It was more recently used to make rapper Tupac Shakur appear on stage at Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival in 2012—sixteen years after Tupac’s death. Other “holographic” techniques involve the use of a curved mirror to give the illusion that an image is suspended in mid-air in front of us. Sometimes referred to as a “reflecting hologram,” this virtual image is due to the way the light rays from an original image reflect off of a concave mirror. This creates a three-dimensional real image, if the object being viewed is actually 3D. OPTI-GONE International has been using this technique since 1977 to create their popular Mirage toys. In 1991, a concave mirror was also used in an arcade game called Time Traveler, advertised by Sega as a hologram. A similar method has also been used in Realview’s interactive live holography, which they describe as “probably the most advanced 3D interactive visualization system.” They say that “it accurately reconstructs points of light in mid-air.”