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

by Mark Brake

The method of choice for cryonics is not the spaceship, but the fridge. Clinical medicine is now able to switch people off for a period of time, leaving them with no heartbeat or brain activity. Used for certain surgical procedures, those who have been frozen say it was as if time stopped … and re-started an hour later. Accident and heart-attack victims are brought back from the dead on a daily basis through the use of defibrillators and CPR. Patients’ bodies are often cooled by neurosurgeons, so they can operate on aneurysms (enlarged blood vessels in the brain) without harm or rupture. Babies are born from the uterus of a mother whose embryos are frozen in fertility clinics, defrosted, and safely implanted.

To grasp the concepts behind the cryonics, witness the news stories about people who’ve fallen into a frozen lake, and been submerged up to an hour in the icy water before being rescued. Those who survived did so because the freezing water put their body into a sort of suspended animation. The experience slowed down their metabolism and brain function to the point where they needed almost no oxygen.

The Star Wars account of carbonite suggests that the substance was used before the invention of the hyperdrive, with early spacers (a slang term for someone who spent a large part of their life in space) using carbonite to endure long journeys. But the technique had brutal side effects, known as hibernation sickness. Little wonder that bounty hunter Boba Fett was worried Han Solo would be iced for good when encased in carbonite. The freezing process might “ice” his prize in the mafia sense of the word, as well as the literal one.

Turns out Boba Fett had good reason for concern. On Earth, of course, it’s illegal to perform cryonic suspension on someone who is still alive. So please don’t try it at home. Terrestrial research shows that freezing damages the structure and integrity of tissues, so that stuff leaks out when the temperature is raised again. This much you can try at home: freeze and defrost a strawberry and you will soon have a good idea of the mushy mess that Han might become. So, even though a person may appear preserved on the surface, on a cellular level the damage is disastrous. Nature boasts a few creatures that can weather the freezing process—some frogs, fish, turtles, and insects. Their bodies produce huge amounts of the carbon-based sugar glucose, a natural antifreeze preventing ice-crystal formation. Sadly, sufficient levels of glucose in humans would come with a side-effect of death. But the terrestrial version of “freezing” folk reveals some possible secrets about what might have happened to Han. Once transported to a cryonics facility, patients aren’t simply slammed into a vat of liquid nitrogen. The water inside their cells would freeze. When water freezes, it expands. Their cells would simply shatter. The cryonics experts must somehow remove water from the cells and swap it with cryoprotectant, a sort of human antifreeze. This cryoprotectant, a glycerol-based chemical mixture, is an attempt to make for humans a version of the natural antifreeze that frogs and fish eke out w...

But cryobiologists hope that a new technique, called nanotechnology, will soon make revival a reality. Nanotechnology uses microscopic machines to manipulate single atoms—the building blocks of all things, even organisms—to build or repair human cells and tissues. Futurists hope that soon nanotechnology will repair not only the cell damage caused by freezing, but also the damage done by aging and disease. Some cryobiologists predict that the first cryonic revival might occur somewhere around the year 2040.

If you should meet your demise while reading this book (granted, that’s cosmically and statistically unlikely), you could always try cryonics out for yourself, of course. Try, by choice, something that Han Solo had no choice in trying. Cryonics is big business, but it isn’t cheap. It can cost up to $150,000 to have a whole-body preservation. For more frugal futurists, you can preserve just your brain for a cool fifty thousand dollars—an option known as neurosuspension. Keep your fingers crossed that, should you opt for this brain treatment, vitrification technology will come up with a way to clone or regenerate the rest of you. The cryonics industry is currently working on chemicals to perform the carbon-freezing function with less death. Han Solo was presumably pumped full of these. The good news is, once the freezing process is done, a study undertaken by cryobiologists (recently published in the Rejuvenation Research journal) showed that memories are preserved, at least in worms (see: "Would an Exogorth Really Evolve on an Asteroid?").

This is no mere cant. This expert opinion is that of Californian think-tank The Institute for the Future. The IFTF is the Earth’s most respected think-tank. It’s been plotting the course of the future for government and corporate concerns since it was cleaved off the RAND Corporation in 1968. The IFTF says droids will increasingly dominate the twenty-first century—from the way we wage wars to the way we spend our leisure time.

Exhibit A: Star Wars leisure droids Over time, droids became ubiquitous in the everyday life and operations of the galaxy. They were trusted with a legion of tasks, ranging from the running of basic diagnostic systems to performing complex surgical procedures. Droids were even trusted to fly starships. Depending on their function, droids were categorized into classes. Medical droids, for instance, were categorized as class one, security droids as class four, and construction droids as class five. Exhibit B: Star Wars battle droids More ominously, during the pan-galactic war (also known as the Clone Wars) the Confederacy of Independent Systems (CIS) employed a Separatist Droid Army, led by the infamous Kaleesh cyborg, General Grievous. The Army was comprised almost exclusively of droids and numbered in the quintillions. The troops were created and tooled up by Baktoid Combat Automata, a manufacturer of battle droids owned by the Techno Union, an unholy alliance of corporate giants who feigned neutrality in the wars, but in deeds actually armed and supported the CIS. When the Clone Wars ended, the Techno Union was absorbed into the Galactic Empire. Under the new regime, many people in the galaxy were afraid or otherwise distrustful of droids, due to their memories of bad droid behavior during the war. But what does planet Earth currently have to offer in the way of droids?

The rise of the motor-droid promises not just of hordes of jobless drivers, but also of the transformation of the associated traffic infrastructure, from training to fuel stations. There’s also the potential for motor-droid piracy. Star Wars is rife with pirates and bounty hunters. A future Earth of droid-driven traffic is full of the promise of pirates boarding freight-droids, or hacker-jackers, with the skills needed to hack into droid software, and hijack the freight onto an alternate journey of their choosing. Inevitably the rise of the robots will put people out of work. Bank of America Merrill Lynch foresees 47% of US jobs will be droided out by 2020. The Boston Consulting Group predicts droid software or droids will replace 25% of jobs by 2025.This robotic revolution doesn’t just affect America; the Australian Committee for Economic Development forecasts that five million Aussie jobs are set to disappear before the same year.

This third kind of droid, one not dreamt up in the stories of Star Wars, is the first truly smart terrestrial droid, one that will be based on brain emulations, or ems. Professor Robin Hanson, economist and scholar at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, thinks the droid revolution, when it comes, will be in the form of the Em-Droid. You take the best and brightest two hundred scientists on the planet (ironically this may include Hawking, Gates, and Musk), then you scan their brains and upload their consciousness into a robot. This is the Em-Droid—a robot indistinguishable from the humans upon whom they are based, except a thousand times faster and fitter for the future. Train an Em-Droid to do a job and clone it a million times: an army of droids is at your disposal. When Em-Droids can be made cheaply, they will displace humans in almost every job. In the new Em-Droid economy, the global economic output may double every few weeks, and competition will drive nearly all wages down to subsistence levels. Trillions of Em-Droids will live in tall, liquid-cooled skyscrapers in searingly hot cities. Given the nature of the Em-Droid, they will be very able and focused workaholics, who respect and trust each other more than humans do. Some Em-Droids will have bodies; others will simply live in virtual reality, as Em-Droid white-collar workers won’t need bodies. The Em-Droids will collect in related “clans” and use “decision markets” to make crucial corporate and political decisi...

This made me think a lot

This third kind of droid, one not dreamt up in the stories of Star Wars, is the first truly smart terrestrial droid, one that will be based on brain emulations, or ems. Professor Robin Hanson, economist and scholar at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, thinks the droid revolution, when it comes, will be in the form of the Em-Droid. You take the best and brightest two hundred scientists on the planet (ironically this may include Hawking, Gates, and Musk), then you scan their brains and upload their consciousness into a robot. This is the Em-Droid—a robot indistinguishable from the humans upon whom they are based, except a thousand times faster and fitter for the future. Train an Em-Droid to do a job and clone it a million times: an army of droids is at your disposal. When Em-Droids can be made cheaply, they will displace humans in almost every job. In the new Em-Droid economy, the global economic output may double every few weeks, and competition will drive nearly all wages down to subsistence levels. Trillions of Em-Droids will live in tall, liquid-cooled skyscrapers in searingly hot cities. Given the nature of the Em-Droid, they will be very able and focused workaholics, who respect and trust each other more than humans do. Some Em-Droids will have bodies; others will simply live in virtual reality, as Em-Droid white-collar workers won’t need bodies. The Em-Droids will collect in related “clans” and use “decision markets” to make crucial corporate and political decisi...

Love tid as idea for book

They used to say that a child conceived in love has a better chance of happiness. They don’t say that anymore. Not to me. I was conceived here, in the driving rain of Kamino. Churned out, among a fifth of a million other clone soldiers. Those that don’t do as they’re told, or think straight, are thought below par. “Bad batcher,” that’s me. Sick of seeing my own face, day in, day out, to the first syllable of extinction. I feel I belong to a new underclass of human. No longer determined by social class, or the color of skin. Nah, this new discrimination is all down to science. Though we shed five hundred million cells a day, I’m the same person I was yesterday. Same as all the others. Almost. Hatched by the thousand, accelerated growth in half the usual time. Combat, training, combat, training. It’s tedious. A life led just for the battlefield. The soldiers of old would have life experiences to bring into battle. Subtlety. Nuance. Empathy. Things that would make them more able to understand how enemy soldiers might think, and act. But I guess there’s so many different species in the galaxy, clone troopers would have a hard job working through all those many alien cultures anyway. Might as well shoot first, think later. Most mission tasks pit us up against droids in the Separatist army. But none of these jobs are for me. I’m no front line cannon fodder. Don’t care if it’s the orders of the Republic or the Separatists. There’s no gene for fate. When the going is good, the goo...

Book

DARPA has invested millions in preclinical research studies to develop a means of soldiers surviving significant blood loss. This “breakthrough” would solve the problem of needing life-saving medical treatment immediately after combat injury. That’s clearly a strategic problem during the snags and hazards faced in the heat of battle. Yet, more millions have been invested in squirrel power. Yes, there’s a squirrel gene that makes an enzyme in the pancreas, which enables hibernation through the winter months. Genetic modification (GM) research is being conducted into the possibility of taking the gene from the squirrel and implanting it into soldiers, allowing the world’s first ever GM GIs! (Cue Youtube clip of “bad batcher” GIs who’ve taken on too many squirrel traits and are spied busily burying their nuts where no-one else can find them.)

There are plans to blunt the soldiers’ brains. A forty-million-dollar grant has been handed out to develop memory-controlling implants. This may allow any remaining keenly edged emotional acumen to be tampered with. The aim is to delete the soldiers’ empathy genes so that not only do they show no mercy, but are also devoid of fear. A disturbing, dark side-sounding “Human Assisted Neural Devices (HAND) program” will control soldiers’ brains by a remote “joystick,” which operates from some far away control center.

Throughout history, there have been many claims of extrasensory perception (ESP). However, the first real experiments and popularization of ESP occurred in the 1930s with J. B. Rhine’s research at Duke University. He was first to employ the card-guessing technique, which utilized Zener cards. Each card is printed with the image of a different shape, such as a circle, a square, a few waves, a cross, or a star. With the symbol side hidden, the person being tested for extrasensory perception is asked to guess which symbol is on the card, while the proctor records the results. In The Phantom Menace we see the young Anakin Skywalker being put through a similar test by Mace Windu. He guesses all the objects correctly, demonstrating to the Jedi Council that the Force is truly strong with him. In the real experiments of the 1930s, and in subsequent tests, there have been no conclusively successful candidates for ESP.

The Force incorporates ideas from many cultures such as the Chinese principle of Qi and the Roman Catholic God. The famous Jedi well-wish “May the Force be with you” is an obvious refiguring of the saying “The Lord be with you.” So it’s possible the Force is meant to be something more spiritual than scientific.

There is an ability in some animals that allows them to use an invisible force as a guide. It’s called magnetoreception and it relies on the Earth’s magnetic field. Animals like salamanders, frogs, and migratory birds use this mechanism to gain an added sense of direction. For years scientists wondered how exactly this was done, considering that the geomagnetic field is so weak. Now, they have identified the mechanism in birds and, impressively, it involves their eyes. What’s even more interesting is that Scientist Joe Kirschvink at California Institute of Technology has been looking for a magnetic sixth sense in humans, too. His tests showed that a set of neurons in the brain were firing in response to a varied magnetic field. The test subjects were not aware of the magnetic field, but their brains were definitely responding. The signal was picked up on an electroencephalograph (EEG). If a person could somehow tap into this response exhibited by their brain, they could be able to use the effect as a kind of sixth sense. In regard to magnetoreception, Kirschvink said, “It’s part of our evolutionary history. Magnetoreception may be the primal sense.”

It’s now known that the phenomena of electricity, magnetism, and light are all different aspects of the same field, called the electromagnetic field, which carries the electromagnetic force. This is just one of four fundamental forces of nature also known as fundamental interactions. The other three are gravitational, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear. Each one has an associated particle that is said to convey its force. These are known as force carriers. In Star Wars, the Force is described as an energy field, although it’s not a field that modern physics is currently aware of. Even though the Force does involve some of the fundamental interactions, scientists don’t currently know whether there is one overarching force or framework that could make them all related. However, scientists have been searching for something like that; it’s often referred to as a theory of everything.

Roughly 68% of the universe is dark energy and around 27% is dark matter, both of which scientists are literally in the dark about. The other 5% is more familiar and includes all the atoms that comprise the things we see around us. Atoms are extremely spacious. The central part, called the nucleus, is only about one hundred thousandth of the size of an atom. As such, more than 99.99% of your body and everything around you is actually empty space. The exception would be the fundamental forces, whose fields are able to mediate that “empty” space.

Electromagnetism is the force that holds our atoms together, while also flowing through us as electromagnetic radiation. It’s also the force that prevents your backside from falling through the seat, even though the atoms are 99.99% space. Its force is conveyed via photons—the unit of light. We can see objects because photons travel to our eyes from said object. Photons can exist at lower energies, such as radio waves, all the way up to high-energy gamma rays. At distances and masses that are within our everyday experience, EM is much stronger than gravitation. The EM field is also infinite, as evidenced by the fact that we can see the light from galaxies that are billions of light-years away. The other two fundamental forces are nuclear, meaning they essentially only exist within the nuclei of atoms. They both have very short-range fields, about a trillion times smaller than a millimeter. The strong force is what keeps the nucleus together despite the protons having the same charge and wanting to repel. It’s much stronger than EM force and its force carrier is gluons, which mediate force between the quarks. Quarks are elementary particles, meaning they are not formed from smaller particles. There are six “flavors” of quark, two of which are used to form the nucleons (protons and neutrons) in the nuclei of atoms. Three quarks combine to form each nucleon. The proton contains two “Up” and one “Down” quark, while the neutron contains one “Up” and two “Down” quarks. The weak ...

In 2013, the Higgs Boson was confirmed. It’s thought to provide some evidence for a Higgs field that gives mass to particles, while permeating the entire universe. Maybe this is a step towards identifying the true nature of the Force.

“Laser” stands for “Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.” It essentially works by using energy to stimulate a substance into emitting photons. The aforementioned substance is known as the gain medium and can be made from a gas, liquid, or solid. The first ever laser used a solid ruby crystal as its gain medium. This produced a red light beam. Other gain mediums can produce other colors, depending on the particular wavelength of the emitted photons. For example, larger wavelengths have lower energies and produce red light, while the smaller wavelengths have higher energies, producing blue light. Other colors also exist, including green and yellow. So the kyber crystal in the lightsaber could make sense as a possible gain medium. Then slight impurities in the crystals could give a lightsaber its characteristic color. This would also mean that different colored lightsabers have different energies. However, as light waves are invisible, these beams could only be seen if they reflected off some surface or were scattered by particles in the surroundings. So a laser saber would actually be invisible, which isn’t what happens in the movies. This is not the only obstacle in the way of this method.

Everyday laser cutters, used for cutting sheet metal as thick as fifteen millimeters, can typically work at powers of five hundred to six thousand watts. The thicker the sheet of metal, the more power is needed to cut through it. It’s been estimated that a lightsaber would need fifteen to twenty million watts of power to cut through metals like we see in Star Wars. For comparison, Lockheed Martin needed a thirty-thousand-watt laser to disable a vehicle one mile away. And that device needed to be mounted on a truck. However, the most powerful laser ever built has a beam with a peak power of two thousand trillion watts (two petawatts); that said, the laser only operated for one trillionth of a second. A major issue with laser beams is that, once they’re emitted, they keep on going until they’re absorbed or reflected. This means a laser saber would need some other mechanism to keep it contained within a fixed length. The laser beam would also suffer the same problem as the flamethrower saber in that it couldn’t be used to block the strike of another weapon. One light beam would travel straight through the other. However, in an online discussion between astrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson and particle physicist Brian Cox, it was suggested that at ultra high-energies there’s a probability that gamma ray photons will actually bounce off each other. Tyson subsequently proposed that if you could make two gamma ray lightsabers, then you could possibly duel.

Visualize Luke on Dagobah wondering how to get his X-wing out of the swamp. While he and Yoda are meditating on the matter, Archimedes emerges out of the woods. He applies some cleverly positioned ropes and pulleys, then winches out the X-wing with the help of a swamp dragonsnake. So, to move objects more massive than him, it’s possible that Yoda manipulates the Force to act like a lever or pulley system. In this way, his training allows him to manipulate objects by applying the Force, whereas we have to be more hands-on by developing and utilizing mechanisms.

There are more subtle ways to influence people’s minds, though. We’re surrounded by advertising campaigns built to manipulate us into buying into some idea or product. Often they hijack our natural responses to things by appealing to our emotions or including sexual imagery. The Jedi basically use the ability to force their desires upon a person’s mind, and they’re meant to be the good guys! Imagine the chaos if that skill made its way out into society.