Speaker 1: Technology with tech Stuff from staff works dot com. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to text Stuff. I am your host, Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer here at How Stuff Works. And
Speaker 1: I love technology, and I love science fiction, and I
Speaker 1: love fantasy uh and I love the technology of science
Speaker 1: fiction and fantasy worlds, and you guys do too. I
Speaker 1: was just talking with one of the folks on our
Speaker 1: team and she was telling me about how the tech
Speaker 1: of episodes are some of the favorites of people out there,
Speaker 1: and so I wanted to do another one. And the
Speaker 1: day this show publishes should be the day that Star Wars,
Speaker 1: the Last Jedi, hits theaters in the United States. And that,
Speaker 1: coupled with a book that I received in the mail
Speaker 1: that is titled The Physics of Star Wars, written by
Speaker 1: Dr Patrick Johnson, inspired me to do another one of
Speaker 1: these tech of episodes, this time, of course, the Tech
Speaker 1: of Star Wars. And I say another Tech of Star
Speaker 1: Wars because way back in Two Holy Cats seven years ago,
Speaker 1: Chris Pallette and I tackled the concept of lightsabers and
Speaker 1: how they work both within the Star Wars universe and
Speaker 1: also how the actual effects were done in movies we
Speaker 1: even talked a little bit about whether it might be
Speaker 1: possible to ever build a similar device in our world.
Speaker 1: I did a rerun with an update for that episode
Speaker 1: in two thousand and fourteen. I also did a show
Speaker 1: back in twenty thirteen titled tech Stuff Leaps into Hyperspace
Speaker 1: to talk about the faster than light travel tech of
Speaker 1: Star Wars. I'll touch on both of those things again
Speaker 1: in this episode, because I think it's safe to say
Speaker 1: that without the concepts of hyper drive and especially lightsabers,
Speaker 1: you can't really call it Star Wars. So we're gonna
Speaker 1: touch on those, but we won't go into as much
Speaker 1: detail as those previous episodes. So if what I say
Speaker 1: to you is interesting and you really want to learn more,
Speaker 1: I recommend you look at the backlog of Tech Stuff
Speaker 1: episodes and find those and you can check them out.
Speaker 1: Let's get some basics out of the way before we
Speaker 1: jump into any of the technology. Now, I'm fairly certain
Speaker 1: almost all of you out there have at least heard
Speaker 1: of Star Wars, if not seen all the major movies.
Speaker 1: Some of you are probably hardcore fans who have seen
Speaker 1: all the movies, read the comic books, you've watched the
Speaker 1: television series, the animated series. You've got your own DVD
Speaker 1: of the Star Wars Holiday Special, which George Lucas famously
Speaker 1: wanted to destroy. You might have all the toys, you
Speaker 1: might know the names of every single character, no matter
Speaker 1: how minor or how briefly they appeared on screen. But
Speaker 1: this episode is going to be for everybody. So if
Speaker 1: you are a hardcore fan, just let me get through
Speaker 1: this next little bit. So, the first film came out
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy seven, and after it came out. When
Speaker 1: it first came out, it was just called Star Wars.
Speaker 1: After it came out, it was later given the subtitle
Speaker 1: Episode for a New Hope. After nineteen three, it seemed
Speaker 1: like we were only going to get three movies. It
Speaker 1: was just gonna be a trilogy. That would be Episode four,
Speaker 1: A New Hope, Episode five, The Empire Strikes Back, an
Speaker 1: episode six, Return of the Jedi, originally going to be
Speaker 1: called Revenge of the Jedi. So for years we thought
Speaker 1: that was all we're gonna get, at least officially. We
Speaker 1: did get all these other supplemental pieces of media, including
Speaker 1: comic books. There were some specials. There were a couple
Speaker 1: of Ewok movies, the less said about the better, and uh,
Speaker 1: then you had the sort of splintering of the Star
Speaker 1: Wars universe. You had what most people considered canon, which
Speaker 1: is the stuff that appears in the films, that's all
Speaker 1: the official this is definitely part of the Star Wars
Speaker 1: universe stuff. And then you had everything else that was
Speaker 1: in the expanded universe that might or might not be
Speaker 1: part of the official Star Wars universe. Some things might
Speaker 1: get incorporated into stories, some things might be completely disregarded,
Speaker 1: and there are also contradictions within that as well. But
Speaker 1: generally speaking, fans like myself consider the things in the
Speaker 1: films to be cannon and everything else is apocryphal. So
Speaker 1: it might be true, but there's nothing until it's in
Speaker 1: a movie, it's not. It's not law. Fast forward to today,
Speaker 1: and now we've got a dang Star Wars movie coming
Speaker 1: out every single year. Whether that's a good thing or not,
Speaker 1: I'm going to leave it for some pop culture podcast.
Speaker 1: That's not for me to say. I'm just going to
Speaker 1: look at some of the science and tech within the
Speaker 1: Star Wars universe. And that's where I turned to Dr
Speaker 1: Patrick Johnson. Now, as I mentioned a moment ago, I
Speaker 1: received a book written by him titled The Physics of
Speaker 1: Star Wars and as the extremely cute tagline of may
Speaker 1: the F equals m A be with you. F equals
Speaker 1: in a being the formula to show force, So may
Speaker 1: the force be with you. I'm sure you all picked
Speaker 1: up on that. The book covers lots of different aspects
Speaker 1: of physics and and technology. It covers stuff like time
Speaker 1: dilation and planetary physics, so there's a ton of information
Speaker 1: in the book. It's really easy to read, and it's
Speaker 1: laid out in a way where it gives you the
Speaker 1: context of the technology or concept in science within the
Speaker 1: Star Wars universe. It then explains how that must work
Speaker 1: within the Star Wars universe, and then there's a section
Speaker 1: about how close are we able to match that in
Speaker 1: our world, whether it is a process or a technology
Speaker 1: or whatever. And uh, I really enjoy it, so if
Speaker 1: you get a chance to check it out, you should.
Speaker 1: So I used that as my primary source of research
Speaker 1: for this episode. I'm going to focus on the tech. Obviously,
Speaker 1: I could talk a lot about the physics and stuff
Speaker 1: if I really wanted to, and some of the physics
Speaker 1: information will come into this, but this is tech stuff.
Speaker 1: Not stuff to blow your mind. So we're gonna focus
Speaker 1: mostly on the technology part, knowing that technology is really
Speaker 1: just applied science, right, you just take take that scientific
Speaker 1: knowledge and you make it into something. So where to begin, Well,
Speaker 1: I've done a full episode on it, and I even
Speaker 1: did a rerun with some updates, But I think you
Speaker 1: have to begin with lightsabers because I would argue it
Speaker 1: is the most iconic out of all the technologies that
Speaker 1: are related to Star Wars. Uh. It was something that
Speaker 1: really struck a chord in viewers, and it makes sense.
Speaker 1: You've got a hero who's wielding essentially a magic sword.
Speaker 1: That's what George Lucas called lightsabers. He didn't really refer
Speaker 1: to them as lightsabers that much. In casual conversation. You
Speaker 1: talk about magic swords and bad guy's got a magic swords.
Speaker 1: You get to have these great cool sword fights, which,
Speaker 1: again in the early versions of Star Wars that the
Speaker 1: original trilogy, there are a lot less acrobatic than later
Speaker 1: sword lightsaber duels, but still pretty darn cool if you
Speaker 1: happen to be a kid growing up and watching it
Speaker 1: for the first time. Now, in the world of Star Wars,
Speaker 1: lightsabers are a Jedi's weapon. Jedi are the force wielding
Speaker 1: warriors that are able to control these mystical powers. Other
Speaker 1: people can try to use lightsabers, but there's at least
Speaker 1: an implication there that Jedi are the only ones who
Speaker 1: are really able to be proficient with them, that perhaps
Speaker 1: an affinity with the Force is necessary for you to
Speaker 1: be able to use a lightsaber effectively, and not, I
Speaker 1: don't know, lop your own limbs off. Lightsabers are never
Speaker 1: really described in great detail in the films. We know
Speaker 1: that Jedi build them because we know that Luke's father
Speaker 1: built a lightsaber, than then Luke has and then Luke
Speaker 1: himself has to go and build a lightsaber later on
Speaker 1: in that original trilogy, but it doesn't really go into
Speaker 1: the details of what makes up a lightsaber in the movies. Now,
Speaker 1: the expanded Universe definitely addresses this, and some of that
Speaker 1: element gets kind of leaked into the movies and little
Speaker 1: casual bits and pieces, But again it depends on what
Speaker 1: your tolerance is for apocryphal versus cannon. There's more information
Speaker 1: like a power source essentially a battery pack, a crystal
Speaker 1: that focuses energy and emitter that allows the blade to
Speaker 1: come out of the hilt. But really, what you just
Speaker 1: need to know is that a lightsaber is a weapon,
Speaker 1: a blade made out of some form of luminescent energy.
Speaker 1: So the blades tend to be about three ft long.
Speaker 1: That varies depending upon the Jedi. I'm sure Yodas is
Speaker 1: more like two and a half feet long. The blades
Speaker 1: can be found in various colors. Jedi colors tend to
Speaker 1: be blue or green, although Mace wind Up famously wields
Speaker 1: a purple lightsaber. And Sith sabers as in the Bad
Speaker 1: Guy Eyes Dark Jedi, well, let's not get two technical
Speaker 1: Sith and dark Jedi are not synonymous. But Sith sabers
Speaker 1: tend to be read and lightsabers can block blaster or
Speaker 1: fire we'll talk more about blasters and just a little bit.
Speaker 1: And they also will collide with other lightsabers. You can
Speaker 1: have a duel with someone else and if your lightsaber
Speaker 1: contacts their lightsaber, there's physical contact, as if you were
Speaker 1: holding like a physical blade and it came into contact
Speaker 1: with someone else's physical blade. So that presents itself some
Speaker 1: challenges when you try to figure out how to explain
Speaker 1: how this stuff actually works. Lightsabers can cut through metal,
Speaker 1: they can cauterize wounds. They are clearly hot, the blade
Speaker 1: itself is hot, or else it wouldn't make any sense.
Speaker 1: Various sources in the Star Wars universe refer to them
Speaker 1: as things like laser swords or plasma swords, which are
Speaker 1: two very different things and both of them present very
Speaker 1: complicated issues. If you want to talk about an actual
Speaker 1: handheld weapon that can form a blade that you can
Speaker 1: then use to cut through a metal door or lop
Speaker 1: off snaughty little teenager's arms, I guess Anakin at that
Speaker 1: point was actually probably older than a teenager. But anyway,
Speaker 1: so if it's a laser sword, that's tricky because we're
Speaker 1: not really good at getting light to stop at a
Speaker 1: specific point three feet out from the hilt of an emitter.
Speaker 1: Imagine having a flashlight and turning it on and just thinking, well,
Speaker 1: I want the flashlight to only extend three ft and
Speaker 1: then I want to stop. How do you do that?
Speaker 1: How do you get the light to not continue on?
Speaker 1: One way you could get around this is if you
Speaker 1: had some sort of system that would hold a mirror
Speaker 1: about three feet out from the hilt from the emitter
Speaker 1: on your handle, and it would reflect the light back
Speaker 1: down into the emitter and allow that light to bounce
Speaker 1: back and forth between a mid and mirror. Uh, but
Speaker 1: the movies don't seem to have that mirror. It's kind
Speaker 1: of a moot point. You can actually see the when
Speaker 1: a lightsaber is is sort of pointed directly at the camera,
Speaker 1: there's a point of light there, So clearly there's not
Speaker 1: some sort of dark spot, So it doesn't really work
Speaker 1: in that case. Plus, a laser that's strong enough to
Speaker 1: cut metal and cause massive damage would require a great
Speaker 1: deal of power. The lasers you find and laser pointers
Speaker 1: are not strong enough typically to cause very much damage,
Speaker 1: although you can buy some that are strong enough to
Speaker 1: maybe set fire to some matches or or maybe even
Speaker 1: do some more severe damage to stuff if it's left
Speaker 1: on a flammable surface long enough, if you if you've
Speaker 1: concentrated the light on that spot long enough. But if
Speaker 1: you want something that's gonna be so strong that can
Speaker 1: do that sort of instantaneous damage, you're talking about a
Speaker 1: massive requirement for power, and you would need a really
Speaker 1: big cooling system something to keep all all that equipment
Speaker 1: cool so that you could continue to use it. That's
Speaker 1: probably not something that you really want with a handheld
Speaker 1: blade system. So laser is also another big problem. They
Speaker 1: can't physically stop other forms of energy like blaster fire
Speaker 1: or lightsabers from passing through the blade. Again, if I
Speaker 1: have a flashlight and you have a flashlight, and we
Speaker 1: swing our flashlights and arcs so that the actual beams
Speaker 1: would come into contact with one another, we don't feel
Speaker 1: any resistance. The beams just pass right through. There's no
Speaker 1: collision there. So if a lightsabers mail of a laser,
Speaker 1: then you don't have this physical contact element that lightsabers
Speaker 1: clearly have in the movies, so we can't really describe
Speaker 1: it as a laser. And keeping in mind, yes, these
Speaker 1: are fictional movies, obviously, right, it's fantasy. If you really
Speaker 1: want to get down to it, it's more of a
Speaker 1: fantasy film than a science fiction film. And there's nothing
Speaker 1: wrong with that. We're just talking about if we wanted
Speaker 1: to make one in the real world, could we do it?
Speaker 1: So let's say that, all right, Well, lasers are clearly
Speaker 1: a no go. What about plasma plasma is a real thing?
Speaker 1: We can make plasma plasma being ionized gas, not the
Speaker 1: component in our blood, but an ionized gas. It's it's
Speaker 1: the most plentiful form of matter in the universe. Stars
Speaker 1: are made of plasma, and ionized gas just means that
Speaker 1: the gas is made up of charged particles. The atoms
Speaker 1: have had electrons stripped from them, which means you've got
Speaker 1: free flowing electrons within that gas. You've got charged particles
Speaker 1: flowing within that gas. Typically, the way we do this
Speaker 1: is that we can put it under a lot of
Speaker 1: pressure and heat it up a whole bunch, and that
Speaker 1: strips the electrons from these atoms and causes them to
Speaker 1: move like crazy. When you add heat to material, you
Speaker 1: cause more atomic motion. And so this is very fast
Speaker 1: moving particles within a a gas, a big ionized hot,
Speaker 1: hot gas, and we're talking about hundreds of thousands of
Speaker 1: degrees in fahrenheit, like two degrees fahrenheit something like that.
Speaker 1: In order to get the gas temperature where you're stripping
Speaker 1: it and you've made this ionized format. That temperature is
Speaker 1: definitely high enough to cut metal or to cauterize wounds.
Speaker 1: There's no question about it. If you did get plasma,
Speaker 1: then you could you could cause some serious damage, but
Speaker 1: you also wouldn't be able to hold the lightsaber, because
Speaker 1: it would be as if you're holding a handle from
Speaker 1: which a substance that is the temperature of the surface
Speaker 1: of the sun is coming out. You would have to
Speaker 1: have some sort of incredible protection so that you don't
Speaker 1: immediately get burned by it. Not to mention, there'd be
Speaker 1: other forms of radiation besides just heat that you would
Speaker 1: have to deal with. Potentially, so you might be able
Speaker 1: to contain the blade using electro magnets. Because a ionized
Speaker 1: gas having a charge, it does respond to magnetic fields.
Speaker 1: In fact, that's actually a big problem because if it
Speaker 1: comes into any range of any magnetic field of consequence,
Speaker 1: it's going that magnetic field is going to uh to
Speaker 1: bend the blade. If you're on a planet that has
Speaker 1: a magnetic field, for example, Earth has one, then that's
Speaker 1: anitial that's a problem. Immediately, the magnetic field of the
Speaker 1: plant alone would distort the blade to the point where
Speaker 1: you wouldn't be able to have an actual sword pop
Speaker 1: out of the heilt. You might be able to have
Speaker 1: it stop where you want it to using electro magnets,
Speaker 1: so unlike lasers, where it's just going to shoot out
Speaker 1: and keep going. Using electromagnetism, you might be able to
Speaker 1: create like a cylinder, essentially a loop of plasma flow,
Speaker 1: so that you have kind of this glowing torch of plasma,
Speaker 1: and you could simulate having a blade that way. However,
Speaker 1: just like lasers, you wouldn't be able to use this
Speaker 1: aid to stop things from hitting you, like other lightsabers
Speaker 1: or blaster fire. Uh. Dr Johnson and his book describes
Speaker 1: it like this. If you think of plasma, plasma is
Speaker 1: really kind of a soupy sort of substance. It's a
Speaker 1: soupy substance of particles. So if you had two lightsabers
Speaker 1: and a duel, it would be like two blades of
Speaker 1: soup hitting each other. They don't clash, they would just
Speaker 1: gloop in. Also, because they would both have these electromagnetic
Speaker 1: fields around them, instead of it bouncing off of each other,
Speaker 1: they more likely meld into one. You would have the
Speaker 1: electromagnetic field twist in such a way where it becomes
Speaker 1: one field instead of two, and you would end up
Speaker 1: having your two blades merge into a single plasma mess,
Speaker 1: which is more like something that happens in spaceballs than
Speaker 1: in star Wars. But yeah, it would not work the
Speaker 1: way it does in the movies, and so really the
Speaker 1: final verdict is that lightsabers are works of fiction through
Speaker 1: and through with only the most tangential relationships with real
Speaker 1: gadgets and science. But we do have stuff that can
Speaker 1: do some really impressive cutting or cauterizing. It's just that
Speaker 1: it's not in that laser sword format. It's less visually
Speaker 1: impressive than that. So we do have stuff that can
Speaker 1: do some amazing things, but it's not like a light
Speaker 1: sword that'll uh, really impress people when you turn it on,
Speaker 1: and it certainly doesn't make that cool boom boom noise.
Speaker 1: Blasters kind of a similar story, uh. In Star Wars,
Speaker 1: blasters are guns. They can be cannon or they can
Speaker 1: be handheld blasters, rifles, that sort of thing. They fire
Speaker 1: out brightly lit projectiles. When I was a kid, I
Speaker 1: just thought of them as laser guns. I just thought, no,
Speaker 1: it's a laser gun. Even though they call them blasters
Speaker 1: in the movies, I think in the scripts they refer
Speaker 1: to them as laser guns. At least in some of
Speaker 1: the early screenplays. They look a little like laser beams.
Speaker 1: They're truncated. You can you get these kind of like
Speaker 1: tiny dashes, So think of them maybe like as much
Speaker 1: as a meter long and some shots, but usually it's
Speaker 1: less than that. And they're just coming out of these
Speaker 1: guns and you can see them. You can see this
Speaker 1: distinct dash like line. Uh. They don't move like laser beams,
Speaker 1: so they can't really be laser guns because if they
Speaker 1: move like laser beams, they'd move at the speed of light,
Speaker 1: which means we wouldn't be able to follow their progress.
Speaker 1: We see if they were on or off, but we
Speaker 1: wouldn't be able to see them move across the place
Speaker 1: because light travels too fast for us to perceive it
Speaker 1: that way. If you turn on a flashlight, you cannot
Speaker 1: actually follow the beam as it leaves the flashlight and
Speaker 1: heads out into the environment. For example, you know if
Speaker 1: if you turn it on, it looks like the end
Speaker 1: of the flashlight. Let's say that you're pointing out a
Speaker 1: wall that's fifty ft away. You turn the flashlight on,
Speaker 1: it looks like the light has instantaneously come on as
Speaker 1: far as the onto the wall, so you didn't actually
Speaker 1: see the light travel from the flashlight all the way
Speaker 1: to the wall. It goes way too fast for that. Clearly,
Speaker 1: blasters do not fire projectiles at that speed because we
Speaker 1: can actually follow them with their eyes. In fact, not
Speaker 1: only can we follow them, but characters can and do
Speaker 1: dodge them or block them with lightsabers. So Jedi will
Speaker 1: use their lightsabers to block blaster fire, and in at
Speaker 1: least one altered scene we see a character dodge blaster
Speaker 1: fire from just a few feet away. That would be
Speaker 1: the awful retroactive edit to a New Hope, which I
Speaker 1: don't like, and I don't know why you even brought
Speaker 1: it up. It was tacky of you to do it.
Speaker 1: You should know that that particular edit it really upsets me.
Speaker 1: Han shot first, So, like lightsabers, blasters are not really
Speaker 1: comparable to any real world technologies today. I mean, if
Speaker 1: you think of it as something again like a plasma
Speaker 1: weapon instead of a laser weapon, you run into some
Speaker 1: of those same problems I was talking about with lightsabers,
Speaker 1: mainly the idea that if you come into contact with
Speaker 1: any magnetic field at all, it's going to warp the fire.
Speaker 1: You can't you can't reliably hit anything, which I guess
Speaker 1: could explain why stormtroopers are so bad at shooting stuff,
Speaker 1: because the weapons they use are being affected by magnetic
Speaker 1: fields of other materials, and therefore they are random, the
Speaker 1: way Obi Wan refers to blasters, random and crude, unlike
Speaker 1: a lightsaber, which would be just as random in the
Speaker 1: face of magnetic fields if it too was made of plasma.
Speaker 1: Lasers are used in weapons systems today, but they're more
Speaker 1: frequently used for guidance and aiming. There are some militarized
Speaker 1: lasers that can cause damage, but typically these are ones
Speaker 1: that are mounted onto large mobile stations, like a trailer
Speaker 1: that you would tow behind another vehicle, or sometimes mounted
Speaker 1: to a militarized vehicle. Because they require so much energy
Speaker 1: to operate and they're so heavy that you can't carry
Speaker 1: them around by hand. Uh And even these are much
Speaker 1: more limited obviously than anything we see in Star Wars. Plasma,
Speaker 1: again as different, is difficult. If you were to shoot plasma,
Speaker 1: I don't know how you would keep it in a
Speaker 1: coherent beam the way the blaster fire is in Star Wars.
Speaker 1: I don't think that that would really be possible. You
Speaker 1: could get a blob of plasma and it could be
Speaker 1: pretty dangerous. Propelling it at high speed would be a
Speaker 1: little bit of a challenge. You could use electromagnetism, and
Speaker 1: that would help a lot. But again, unless you had
Speaker 1: some way of containing a very tight, narrow magnetic field
Speaker 1: through which the plasma would travel, I don't know how
Speaker 1: you would make it maintain its shape. And plasma once
Speaker 1: it leaves the source of its energy loses energy very
Speaker 1: very quickly. It starts to cool down immediately, so it
Speaker 1: would not be a very destructive force for very long
Speaker 1: once it left that source of energy. So again an
Speaker 1: element of fantasy, but still pretty fascinating. Now this takes
Speaker 1: us to another iconic piece of technology within the Star
Speaker 1: Wars universe. It's no moon, it's a space station. Talking
Speaker 1: about the Death Star, Dr Johnson did some calculations to
Speaker 1: determine how much energy the Death Star would have to
Speaker 1: emit in order to destroy a planet, and he did
Speaker 1: this by comparing the amount of damage it would need
Speaker 1: to do to destroy something like Alderon, which spoiler alert
Speaker 1: if you haven't watched episode four, it gets blowed up.
Speaker 1: He said, well, let's take a look at the largest
Speaker 1: collision we have on record of anything, and that would
Speaker 1: have been a fragment of the comet shoemaker late Levi nine.
Speaker 1: When't it collided with Jupiter, and according to Dr Johnson,
Speaker 1: to match the power of that impact, the Death Star
Speaker 1: would need to fire a beam of three times ten
Speaker 1: to the forty five power photons with an energy level
Speaker 1: of one point one two times ten to the twenty
Speaker 1: seven power jewels, which is about the same amount of
Speaker 1: energy that our son omits in three seconds. Or, as
Speaker 1: he points out, if you were to take the average
Speaker 1: consumption rate that humans set in the year two thousand thirteen,
Speaker 1: it would take three million years of human consumption to
Speaker 1: equal that amount of energy. So it's a massive, massive
Speaker 1: amount of energy. That's way more energy than we can
Speaker 1: manage to generate at this point, and it brings to
Speaker 1: question what the heck was the Empire using as an
Speaker 1: energy source for the Death Star. At least for starkular base.
Speaker 1: We know that it was siphoning power off of a
Speaker 1: nearby star as well as the core of a planet,
Speaker 1: and together that could provide an enormous amount of power
Speaker 1: if you could actually figure out how to do that
Speaker 1: sort of harnessing. But for the Death Star, I guess
Speaker 1: they just have a whole lot of coal. Honestly, I
Speaker 1: have no idea what the energy source was supposed to be,
Speaker 1: but it's phenomenal. And he also points out that that's
Speaker 1: just the energy requirements of the laser itself. If you
Speaker 1: wanted to build the Death Star, that would require more
Speaker 1: energy than we've ever expanded in our history as well.
Speaker 1: Because you look at the the size of the Death Star,
Speaker 1: you then start to figure out how much material you
Speaker 1: would need to build the thing, how much oxygen you
Speaker 1: would need to fill it so that people could live
Speaker 1: inside of it um and those numbers start adding up
Speaker 1: pretty quickly. Just getting stuff into space takes an enormous
Speaker 1: amount of energy. Now you could get around that a
Speaker 1: little bit by having some form of construction point out
Speaker 1: in space itself. So, in other words, instead of constructing
Speaker 1: stuff on a planet, sending it up into orbit, and
Speaker 1: then assembling it out in space, if you had all
Speaker 1: of your operations out in space already, maybe you're mining
Speaker 1: asteroids for raw materials, maybe you have a manufacturing facility
Speaker 1: with three D printing capabilities that's in orbit around the planet.
Speaker 1: That would cut down on some of that energy requirement.
Speaker 1: But in the real world right now, we don't have that,
Speaker 1: not on a scale that would be anywhere remotely close
Speaker 1: to being able to build something like the Death Star. Still,
Speaker 1: I thought it was really fascinating to kind of look
Speaker 1: at some actual numbers, you know, extrapolated from what we
Speaker 1: know based on the information that's in the movies and
Speaker 1: some from the expanded universe. Well, that just covers some
Speaker 1: of the basic iconic weapons of Star Wars. But we've
Speaker 1: got a lot more to talk about, and before I
Speaker 1: jump into those topics, let's take a quick break to
Speaker 1: thank our sponsor. All Right, we're back. Let's talk a
Speaker 1: little bit about some of the ways that people use
Speaker 1: to get around in the Star Wars universe, largely space
Speaker 1: travel technologies, because that's obviously something that we have experience
Speaker 1: with in real life too. We have gone up into
Speaker 1: space and we've seen that the Earth is round, just
Speaker 1: throwing that out there no reason, and there's lots of
Speaker 1: different ways of doing it, and we've even seen several
Speaker 1: different ways in the Star Wars universe. Again, it doesn't
Speaker 1: tend to go into much detail because it's not important
Speaker 1: for the story. The story is not about how did
Speaker 1: we build an engine so that we can go out
Speaker 1: into space. It's more about, you know, here are the
Speaker 1: different points of interest, and let's get our characters from
Speaker 1: point A to point B. However, there are some things
Speaker 1: we can definitely talk about. For one thing, there are
Speaker 1: ion thrusters and ion engines in star wars. That's typically
Speaker 1: what they refer to as the engines that get them
Speaker 1: around between uh planets. It's when you're not in hyperspace,
Speaker 1: when you're just traveling at what star Trek would probably
Speaker 1: refer to as impulse power, going on impulse drive. Well,
Speaker 1: on ion engine is a real thing. We have ion engines,
Speaker 1: and just as I said, with plasma being an ionized gas,
Speaker 1: and ion engine gives you a clue as to what
Speaker 1: the actual working element is here. And ion engine throws
Speaker 1: out charged particles. That's how it generates thrust. Now engines
Speaker 1: in general, this is kind of how they work, right.
Speaker 1: You have to to generate forward momentum. You've got to
Speaker 1: throw something out the back, right, is that that good
Speaker 1: old law of thermodynamics. You need to have something going
Speaker 1: out the back so that you can move forward. In
Speaker 1: the case of ion engines, we're talking about charged particles atoms.
Speaker 1: So you apply an extremely high voltage to some sort
Speaker 1: of atomic substance, some sort of collection of atoms that
Speaker 1: you have at your disposal, and that creates this ionized
Speaker 1: ah uh substance that you can then direct out through
Speaker 1: a nozzle essentially a thruster, and by ejecting that, you
Speaker 1: create thrust. Now keep in mind that these are atoms
Speaker 1: that you're throwing out there. So if we remember that
Speaker 1: forces mass times acceleration, you can throw them out really
Speaker 1: really hard, right, But they are very very tiny. They
Speaker 1: don't have a lot of mass, So because they don't
Speaker 1: have a lot of mass, they don't impart a lot
Speaker 1: of momentum to something like a spacecraft. They do generate thrust,
Speaker 1: but it's not like you go zero to sixty instantaneously.
Speaker 1: It's more like you go to zero to sixty within
Speaker 1: hours or days, depending upon the size of the thruster.
Speaker 1: You have, the amount of mass you're trying to push,
Speaker 1: and how much material you're throwing out of the thing.
Speaker 1: So you would need lots and lots and lots of
Speaker 1: atoms to make it work the way it works in
Speaker 1: the Star Wars universe. But it would work. You could
Speaker 1: have ion engines. It's just that you wouldn't accelerate nearly
Speaker 1: so quickly. You would continue to accelerate well beyond what
Speaker 1: you could use with chemical rockets. Chemical rockets, you burned
Speaker 1: through that fuel pretty quickly and then you're just you're
Speaker 1: going as fast as you were able to accelerate to.
Speaker 1: But you're never going to go faster than that unless
Speaker 1: you go within the gravitational pull of some other body.
Speaker 1: With ion thrusters, you can just as long as you
Speaker 1: still have atoms to ionize and throw out the back
Speaker 1: of the engine, you can continue to accelerate. And you
Speaker 1: could do this over the course of years or decades,
Speaker 1: getting up to extremely high speeds over a long time.
Speaker 1: So you would not have a fast rate of acceleration,
Speaker 1: but it would be very steady and it would continue
Speaker 1: until you were reaching the relative speed of what you
Speaker 1: were firing out the back. Once you reach that equilibrium,
Speaker 1: so you could go really wicked fast eventually, But it's
Speaker 1: that eventually that is the problem. It means that you
Speaker 1: better not be in a hurry to get where you're going. Also,
Speaker 1: ion thrusters are are really good for traveling vast distances
Speaker 1: where you don't have this crushing deadline that you have
Speaker 1: to be there absolutely overnight by tomorrow. Uh. It is
Speaker 1: better for if you're sending a probe, let's say out
Speaker 1: to a distant planet in your Solar system, and you
Speaker 1: want to be really conservative with the amount of fuel
Speaker 1: you have to use, the amount of energy you have
Speaker 1: to use, and ion thruster is an ideal way to
Speaker 1: do that. But in the world of Star Wars it
Speaker 1: doesn't make a whole lot of sense because there's also hyperdrive,
Speaker 1: and if you have hyperdrive and you're talking about long distances,
Speaker 1: hyperdrive is way better at getting you far away very
Speaker 1: fast than an ion thruster would be. So while ion
Speaker 1: thrusters are real, we actually have built them and we
Speaker 1: have used them, they do not work the way they
Speaker 1: work in Star Wars. Now, there is a related technology
Speaker 1: in Star Wars that also uses ions, that would be
Speaker 1: ion cannon. And the first time you see ion cannons
Speaker 1: in use, in fact it maybe the only time, is
Speaker 1: an empire strikes back during the siege of hath Haf,
Speaker 1: being the ice planet that the rebellion has set up
Speaker 1: base on, and so you've got the imperial forces gathering
Speaker 1: around and on the surface of hot they start turning
Speaker 1: these enormous guns, these guns that are on giant turrets
Speaker 1: towards the sky and they start firing off ion beams,
Speaker 1: and in the Star Wars universe, an ion beam doesn't
Speaker 1: cause physical damage the way of laster or a lightsaber would. Instead,
Speaker 1: it overloads electrical systems, so it shuts down electrical systems,
Speaker 1: will shut down computers, it will shut down shields, it
Speaker 1: will shut down navigation equipment, all that sort of stuff.
Speaker 1: So it works in a similar way to what an
Speaker 1: electromagnetic pulse or e MP would do here on Earth.
Speaker 1: It doesn't really stretch the imagination too far. If you're
Speaker 1: talking about an ionized material, you could presumably run a
Speaker 1: very strong electrical current. You could apply a very strong
Speaker 1: voltage to it and therefore overload any electronics that happened
Speaker 1: to be within that that field. But we don't really
Speaker 1: have anything that could do this um as far as
Speaker 1: an actual cannon goes. If you wanted to talk about
Speaker 1: electromagnetic pulse, we have covered that in tech stuff before,
Speaker 1: but to give you a brief overview of what that
Speaker 1: would be like. Typically, this is something that you would
Speaker 1: find in the wake of a nuclear explosion. So nuclear explosions, Uh,
Speaker 1: they're bad, it's not great. Uh, they'd cause an enormous
Speaker 1: amount of damage. But on top of the immense devastation
Speaker 1: they can reek in the point of explosion. They also
Speaker 1: generate these massive electromagnetic pulses that can cause a lot
Speaker 1: more damage further out. Uh In nineteen sixty two, there
Speaker 1: was the testing of a nuclear bomb that ended up
Speaker 1: affecting the elector the electrical systems of Hawaii, which was
Speaker 1: miles and miles and miles away from the testing center.
Speaker 1: But they had their traffic lights going out, they had
Speaker 1: car alarms going off, they had all sorts of stuff happening, well,
Speaker 1: burglar alarms, not car alarms. And if the same sort
Speaker 1: of warhead had been detonated over the United States, it
Speaker 1: would have been enough to cause power grids in numerous
Speaker 1: states to overload, and that could lead to not just
Speaker 1: power failures, but fires and other things. Electromagnetic pulses go
Speaker 1: essentially in three phases. You have the first phase E one.
Speaker 1: That's where you get a big release of gamma radiation.
Speaker 1: This would be from your nuclear warhead. Gamma radiation is terrible.
Speaker 1: You don't want to get hit by it. You will
Speaker 1: not turn into the hulk. Don't go seeking gamma radiation.
Speaker 1: This would also induce within electronics and enormous voltage well
Speaker 1: beyond their capacity to handle it. So this would fry
Speaker 1: a lot of electronics right off the bat. The next
Speaker 1: phase is E two. This is essentially the same effect
Speaker 1: as being hit by a bolt of lightning. And even
Speaker 1: if you have your electronics on surge protectors, which would
Speaker 1: normally insulate them from a lightning blast, the effects of
Speaker 1: E one are probably so severe that there's no more
Speaker 1: protection left, and so this would anything that was not
Speaker 1: fried by E one is definitely gonna get fried by
Speaker 1: E two. Then you got E three, which is more
Speaker 1: of a distortion of the magnetic field. It's just kind
Speaker 1: of like a temporary, temporary experience where the magnetic field
Speaker 1: around there is all twisted up, and so things would
Speaker 1: be like if the Earth were being hit by a
Speaker 1: magnetic storm like a solar flare. So that's also can
Speaker 1: cause some problems with electronics. But after the first two
Speaker 1: waves you probably already as bad off as you're gonna get.
Speaker 1: Maybe further out the magnetic distortion would be causing more
Speaker 1: of an issue. It is not good. We don't want
Speaker 1: it to happen. It would cause massive amounts of damage.
Speaker 1: Moving on from ion cannons and ion thrusters, let's talk
Speaker 1: about solar sales. I forgot that solar sales were even
Speaker 1: a thing in Star Wars because they pop up in
Speaker 1: the prequels. Count Dooku has a solar sale on his
Speaker 1: space acecraft, and I try not to think about the prequels.
Speaker 1: Are account Dooku at all costs. However, for the purposes
Speaker 1: of this podcast, I was forced to do it. Shame
Speaker 1: on you. But solar sales themselves are pretty awesome. A
Speaker 1: solar sale uses the the momentum of photons two move
Speaker 1: a spacecraft. So whereas a sale on a sailing boat
Speaker 1: captures wind, a solar sale is a large reflective surface
Speaker 1: upon which photons can bounce and thus transfer momentum to
Speaker 1: a solar sale. Now that sounds pretty awesome, but it
Speaker 1: also raises some questions. For example, photons photons are particles
Speaker 1: of light, but they don't have mass. Momentum, however, is
Speaker 1: defined as P equals M times V. Now p it
Speaker 1: stands for momentum, M stands for mass, and V stands
Speaker 1: for velocity, which is you know, a vector. Velocity is
Speaker 1: a a speed and a and a direction. So photons
Speaker 1: will have speed and a direction, but they don't have mass.
Speaker 1: So how can they possess momentum if you've got a
Speaker 1: particle that has no mass, How how could that possibly
Speaker 1: push against anything? Well, photons do have momentum, but it's
Speaker 1: relativistic momentum, photon momentum. We define that as a uh
Speaker 1: An equation of plants constant divided by the photons wavelength.
Speaker 1: All right, that gets a little complicated. So first of all,
Speaker 1: my photons energy is equal to plants constant times the
Speaker 1: frequency of the photon, which is measured and hurts banks constant,
Speaker 1: by the way, is six point six three times ten
Speaker 1: to the thirty four power big number. So you've got
Speaker 1: the the momentum which is plucks constant divided by this
Speaker 1: photon wavelength. That tells you, by the way, that different
Speaker 1: colors of light have different relativistic momentum, right, because wavelength,
Speaker 1: that's that's what determines the color, and the difference being
Speaker 1: that if you've got uh, you know, wavelength of one size,
Speaker 1: you're going to actually have more momentum than another. It
Speaker 1: really tells you how much energy each wavelength of light has.
Speaker 1: So red light has lower energy than blue light, and
Speaker 1: so easy way of thinking about it, now, each photon
Speaker 1: can only transfer part of its momentum to the actual
Speaker 1: solar sail. So you're talking about a minuscule amount of
Speaker 1: momentum being transferred by a massless particle to this large
Speaker 1: reflective surface that's usually incredibly thin. I mean thinner than
Speaker 1: a sheet of paper. If you really want an effective
Speaker 1: solar sale, and it has to cover a massive amount
Speaker 1: of area. If you're pulling a human being, it's you're
Speaker 1: talking about something like the equivalent of five miles of material.
Speaker 1: That's a lot of material. It's a huge solar sale. Also,
Speaker 1: the way it's done in Star Wars, it looks like
Speaker 1: this big curved sail. You wouldn't want a curved sail,
Speaker 1: you want a flat surface. The reason for that is
Speaker 1: if you have a curved surface, some of those photons
Speaker 1: are going to be hitting that an angle, which means
Speaker 1: it's not really pushing the spacecraft forward. It's pushing a
Speaker 1: little to the left or a little to the right,
Speaker 1: and it's those left and rights are canceling each other out.
Speaker 1: It's just wasted energy. You would prefer to capture as
Speaker 1: much of that, giving you forward momentum as possible. It does, however,
Speaker 1: mean that whatever direction you're facing, you better want to
Speaker 1: go that way because you don't really have a whole
Speaker 1: lot of opportunities to change your direction. The reason why
Speaker 1: this is an effective means of getting around in space
Speaker 1: is because if you have a steady supply of photons,
Speaker 1: while every individual photon is barely able to transfer any
Speaker 1: momentum to your spacecraft, there are trillions of the little
Speaker 1: suckers and they're constantly hitting that surface. So just through
Speaker 1: the quantity alone, you will continue to accelerate. You'll do
Speaker 1: it very slowly, so using a solar sale, again, like
Speaker 1: an ion thruster, is not going to get you up
Speaker 1: to super fast speeds right away, but over the course
Speaker 1: of many, many years, you'll get pretty darn fast. Now
Speaker 1: you may remember that there was uh this work being
Speaker 1: done on tiny little satellites that are launched into space.
Speaker 1: They're gonna be use solar sales to propel them toward
Speaker 1: Alpha Centauri, and over the course of several years they
Speaker 1: will get up to a speed of about the speed
Speaker 1: of light. And while it would take us a really
Speaker 1: long time for to get by alphason tory, if we
Speaker 1: were using chemical rockets, we would take us hundreds of
Speaker 1: years with a solar sale. We can get there within
Speaker 1: about twenty years. And the payload they're pulling as these tiny, tiny,
Speaker 1: tiny little satellites. It's essentially nothing more than a camera
Speaker 1: and an antenna to send data back to Earth and
Speaker 1: that's it. So it's very small and that's why it's
Speaker 1: a viable technology for that particular application. But for Count
Speaker 1: Dooku to go zoop zipping around the galaxy, not so much.
Speaker 1: It wouldn't work the way it does in the movies.
Speaker 1: Um sad to say that brings us to hyperdrive, and boy,
Speaker 1: how they is this a tough one to talk about.
Speaker 1: So hyper drives tries to get around the big problem
Speaker 1: of getting around a galaxy that is many light years
Speaker 1: across in a reasonable amount of time. Because, according to
Speaker 1: Einstein's observations, and this has been borne out by all
Speaker 1: all experimentation up to this point, the speed of light
Speaker 1: is as fast as you can go in our universe.
Speaker 1: And we assume that Star Wars is taking place in
Speaker 1: our universe. It's just another galaxy within our universe. So
Speaker 1: you can't go faster than the speed of light, and
Speaker 1: yet things might be several light years apart, which means
Speaker 1: it would take you even if you could go as
Speaker 1: fast as light and anything with mass can't. But let's
Speaker 1: say that somehow you found a way around that, you
Speaker 1: would still take several years to get to your destination.
Speaker 1: That's not great. If you want a rollicking adventure in
Speaker 1: space where a farm boy takes down a militaristic empire,
Speaker 1: you need something to get around that. That's something is
Speaker 1: hyper drive. Now, in the world of Star Trek, the
Speaker 1: way they get around this is using the warp drive,
Speaker 1: and warp drive warps space time itself. You can think
Speaker 1: of space time as being this kind of three dimension
Speaker 1: nal really four dimensional soup around us, and it conforms
Speaker 1: in some ways to all the objects that are present
Speaker 1: within that spacetime. We warp spacetime. You are warping spacetime
Speaker 1: right now, not on nearly as grand as scale as
Speaker 1: something like Jupiter or the Sun, but you are warping spacetime.
Speaker 1: If we could control that and warp it in such
Speaker 1: a way that we're effectively making a distant point closer
Speaker 1: to us, we can still travel at a reasonable speed
Speaker 1: and get to that destination faster, not because we're moving faster,
Speaker 1: but because we've pulled that point closer to where we are.
Speaker 1: That's the concept behind warp drive. Hyperdrive is kind of similar,
Speaker 1: but even more vaguely described. Hyperdrive is supposed to open
Speaker 1: up a pathway through extra dimensions that we normally don't
Speaker 1: have any contact with, and using that extra dimension, creating
Speaker 1: a short between points A and B, and it relies
Speaker 1: very heavily on computers to make the calculations necessary to
Speaker 1: go into and come out of hyperdrive in a safe way,
Speaker 1: so that you arrive at your destination at a reasonable
Speaker 1: distance and you don't appear, say in the middle of
Speaker 1: a star or a supernova, as Hans Solo would say.
Speaker 1: So it's not like dustin crops back home. You have
Speaker 1: to have that calculation, You have to have this way
Speaker 1: of entering into these extra dimensions, and we don't have
Speaker 1: anything remotely capable of doing that. We have lots of
Speaker 1: theories that require extra dimensions that we cannot ourselves observe.
Speaker 1: You may have heard of string theory. String theory essentially
Speaker 1: says that everything in our universe, at a level even
Speaker 1: smaller than sub atomic is made up of strings, and
Speaker 1: those strings are either links of string or loops, kind
Speaker 1: of like a rub band and they're all vibrating at
Speaker 1: different frequencies, and the way they vibrate determines what they are,
Speaker 1: like is an electron or a proton or whatever it
Speaker 1: may be. String theory. Some of them suggest that we
Speaker 1: would need as many as twenty six dimensions in order
Speaker 1: for the theory to work, and there's nothing that we
Speaker 1: can do experimentally that can tell us whether or not
Speaker 1: we're on track. They're not falsifiable. In other words, and science,
Speaker 1: there's an important concept called falsifiability. So for something to
Speaker 1: really be considered scientifically valid, it has to be falsifiable,
Speaker 1: meaning there has to be a way where if you
Speaker 1: were to test it, the outcome could be otherwise, and
Speaker 1: that would tell you, all, right, well, now we know
Speaker 1: that this is that way because every time we experiment
Speaker 1: it turns out this way. But if it didn't turn
Speaker 1: out that way, it would be false. String theory is
Speaker 1: not falsifiable because it's not testable. We cannot test it
Speaker 1: in any way. That doesn't mean wrong, it just means
Speaker 1: we can't know that it's right because it's beyond our
Speaker 1: capability of even exploring. W It's kind of cool in
Speaker 1: a way, also frustrating, because you might argue that's more
Speaker 1: of a philosophy than a science. However, the math is
Speaker 1: pretty awesome. It also is well beyond my ability to
Speaker 1: understand some of those mathematical models require these extra dimensions.
Speaker 1: So hyperdrive would in some way be able to tap
Speaker 1: into that that is so far beyond our capabilities that
Speaker 1: it really is the same as saying you could summon
Speaker 1: a magic dragon and it will teleport you to where
Speaker 1: you need to go. It's about the same thing because
Speaker 1: there's not really any way that we can physically uh
Speaker 1: accomplish what we see in Star Wars in the real world.
Speaker 1: But at least they were trying. They weren't trying to
Speaker 1: go faster than light as as such, as they were
Speaker 1: trying to create shortcuts in space time, at least according
Speaker 1: to most descriptions of hyperdrive. Again, in the movies, it
Speaker 1: doesn't really go into that detail. It just you know
Speaker 1: that hyperdrive is very fast, and you know it's very
Speaker 1: dangerous based upon the limited amount of information spoken in
Speaker 1: the Star Wars films. And the last thing I want
Speaker 1: to talk about in this section is the concept of
Speaker 1: super maneuverability, and Dr Johnson actually brought this up in
Speaker 1: his book and I thought was pretty fascinating this idea
Speaker 1: that there are times where you see vehicles in Star
Speaker 1: Wars behave in ways that are beyond the capabilities of
Speaker 1: what the craft normally would be able to do based
Speaker 1: upon its design. So, in other words, if you build
Speaker 1: a plane and you've got a certain wing design, certain
Speaker 1: chassis design, certain engine in that plane, they're gonna be
Speaker 1: some things that plane can do, and then there'll be
Speaker 1: things outside of that that the plane cannot do. But
Speaker 1: in the Star Wars universe, there's occasionally moments where vehicles
Speaker 1: are able to do something that is outside of what
Speaker 1: they typically should be able to do. Dr Johnson actually
Speaker 1: talks about the possibility of creating systems that would allow
Speaker 1: us to do this, and in fact, we have done
Speaker 1: this with military vehicles, where by adding in extra technological
Speaker 1: elements you can create a extra maneuverability capability of your vehicle.
Speaker 1: So an example he gives us adding paddles two thrusters
Speaker 1: for jet engines, So in other words, you can use
Speaker 1: paddles to help redirect the thrust that's coming out of
Speaker 1: a jet engine because the direction of the thrust determines
Speaker 1: what direction the vehicle goes. In if you're throwing thrust
Speaker 1: immediately behind you, you're going forward. If you start throwing
Speaker 1: thrust to the left, you'll start moving to the right.
Speaker 1: By using paddles to redirect thrust, you can add to
Speaker 1: the maneuverability of a vehicle within a certain range of parameters. Obviously,
Speaker 1: if you go beyond that, you can start to cause
Speaker 1: structural damage to your vehicle, and that's not good. So
Speaker 1: one of the examples Dr Johnson gives us of a
Speaker 1: vehicle a plane, a jet that has the capability of
Speaker 1: hovering with its nose pointed nearly straight up because of
Speaker 1: this ability to direct the thruster, which doesn't sound terribly comfortable,
Speaker 1: but he points out that the capability was designed so
Speaker 1: that if you're in this type of aircraft and you
Speaker 1: have an enemy aircraft behind you and it's trying to
Speaker 1: chase you down and shoot you, you can use this
Speaker 1: maneuver too, come to what is essentially a complete stop
Speaker 1: in the air, have your enemy aircraft fly past you,
Speaker 1: and then now you're behind it and the tables have turned.
Speaker 1: So there are some elements of the technologies in Star
Speaker 1: Wars that we do have in our real world, and
Speaker 1: in fact there's some that work much better in the
Speaker 1: real world than in star Wars because they rely upon
Speaker 1: planetary physics, not interstellar physics. So you might see things
Speaker 1: like planes banking in star Wars, or not planes, but
Speaker 1: StarCraft banking in star Wars, like X wing fighters and
Speaker 1: tie fighters. Uh. Obviously that's not really possible in space,
Speaker 1: where you don't have an atmosphere to bank off of,
Speaker 1: but it does essentially, it does work here on the
Speaker 1: the planet Earth. Also, tie fighters want a weird design.
Speaker 1: Their wings are vertical, not horizontal, so that means they
Speaker 1: wouldn't actually generate lift as they move through the air.
Speaker 1: They'd work fine in space, I guess, but once you
Speaker 1: got them down to an atmosphere, I'm not sure how
Speaker 1: well they would perform unless you were to fly it sideways,
Speaker 1: and even then that'd be a little weird. I've got
Speaker 1: a lot more to say about a few more technologies
Speaker 1: that are in the Star Wars universe, but before I
Speaker 1: jump into that section, let's take another quick break to
Speaker 1: thank our sponsor. Okay, so I talked about how vehicles
Speaker 1: attempt to get around in space and star Wars. There's
Speaker 1: also terrestrial vehicles stuff what not. Meant to go into space.
Speaker 1: In other words, I think I was channeling Chris Pallette
Speaker 1: there for a second. So you've got things like Luke's
Speaker 1: land Speeder in a New Hope. It travels by levitating
Speaker 1: above the ground, and obviously that has some really cool benefits, right.
Speaker 1: You don't have to worry about a rocky, traveling, rocky
Speaker 1: path that you're traveling down. You're you're actually floating above it,
Speaker 1: so it's a nice smooth ride. You don't have the
Speaker 1: friction of the ground to fight against, so you can
Speaker 1: accelerate very smoothly get up to a nice top speed.
Speaker 1: The question remains how you do that, because gravity is
Speaker 1: a harsh mistress, as the tick once observed, and boy
Speaker 1: was he right. So how would anti gravity work? How
Speaker 1: do the repulsor lifts in Star Wars work. That's a
Speaker 1: good question because there's not really ever addressed, and obviously
Speaker 1: other vehicles are able to do this too. When the
Speaker 1: Millennium Falcon takes off, you know it's thrusters are all
Speaker 1: located in the back of the spacecraft, but it must
Speaker 1: have some form of repulsors in order to actually lift
Speaker 1: off the ground before its ion thrusters kick in. And
Speaker 1: there are a lot of interesting questions about this. I mean,
Speaker 1: gravity is one of the fundamental forces of the universe,
Speaker 1: is one that we understand the least about. We can
Speaker 1: incorporate the other three fundamental forces into a unified theory,
Speaker 1: but gravity eludes us. We have not yet figured out
Speaker 1: how to incorporate that in a unified theory. And while
Speaker 1: we use a lot of language to talk about what
Speaker 1: gravity does, it's mostly placeholders. Like we talked about gravitons,
Speaker 1: that again is more or less a placeholder for the
Speaker 1: thing that is able to actually in act gravitational pull
Speaker 1: upon things. We know that we know what gravity does, right.
Speaker 1: We know that it's a force that attracts all objects
Speaker 1: toward one another, and that that forces dependent upon the
Speaker 1: mass of the objects in question and their relative distance
Speaker 1: to each other. So the further away you are from something,
Speaker 1: the less of a gravitational pull you will experience from
Speaker 1: that thing. But technically speaking, every single object in the
Speaker 1: universe is pulling gravitationally upon every single other object in
Speaker 1: the universe. It's just that, and in most cases that
Speaker 1: pull is so faint as to be completely undetectable. But
Speaker 1: when you get into distances and masses that are substantial enough,
Speaker 1: you can get this actual gravitational pull. So, for example,
Speaker 1: a planet and you Earth is massive enough and you're
Speaker 1: close enough to it where you are going to be
Speaker 1: affected by its gravitational pull, and that's why you're not
Speaker 1: flying off into space. I presume you're not flying off
Speaker 1: into space. If you're an astronaut strapped into a rocket
Speaker 1: and you're about to go to the space station, you
Speaker 1: are about to fly into space, and I salute you.
Speaker 1: But for the vast majority of my listeners, I suspect
Speaker 1: that they are not about to fly off into space. Well.
Speaker 1: Dr Johnson actually has a suggestion for how our repulsor
Speaker 1: left could work, assuming that you're not using some sort
Speaker 1: of mag lev approach, which I'll talk about in just
Speaker 1: a second, and that is again bending spacetime, which seems
Speaker 1: to be a bit of overkill to me, but let's
Speaker 1: run with it. He says that if you were able
Speaker 1: to remove the bending of space time around an object,
Speaker 1: you could levitate it. Uh. And like I said before,
Speaker 1: spacetime bends around everything, So if you could remove that
Speaker 1: around an object, you could have it where it just
Speaker 1: floats in a very specific way above whatever surface you
Speaker 1: were concerned with, but you would have to make constant
Speaker 1: adjustments for this, Every little tiny change would possibly result
Speaker 1: in capsizing your vehicle. You would have to have an
Speaker 1: incredible system that is able to sense these changes dynamically
Speaker 1: and respond instantly so that you would have the proper
Speaker 1: balance the entire time. Otherwise you would just end up
Speaker 1: having a object that would flip around and then crash.
Speaker 1: And that's not great. Now I did mention maglev vehicles.
Speaker 1: They work on a principle that is similar to what
Speaker 1: we see with the repuls or left vehicles in Star Wars,
Speaker 1: but they require very specific parameters. You can't just run
Speaker 1: a maglev vehicle over any surface. It has to be
Speaker 1: over something that's generating a magnetic field. So this is
Speaker 1: how a lot of maglev trains work. Typically, you will
Speaker 1: have a collection of magnets. Some of them might be
Speaker 1: permanent magnets, some of them might be electro magnets. So
Speaker 1: let's say in the train you have some permanent magnets
Speaker 1: set up on the base of your train, and then
Speaker 1: in the tracks you have electro magnets, and the electro
Speaker 1: magnets are generating a magnetic field that's in the same
Speaker 1: polar alignment as the magnets that you have permanently affixed
Speaker 1: to your train. So you've got the similar poles facing
Speaker 1: one another, north pole to north pole or south pole
Speaker 1: to south pole. Now, if you've played with magnets, you
Speaker 1: know that those same poles will repel one another. North
Speaker 1: repels north, South repels south. Opposites attract one another. So
Speaker 1: if you have the magnets repelling one another, you can
Speaker 1: actually create a four strong enough to push the train
Speaker 1: up to levitate the train above the tracks. And there
Speaker 1: are magnev trains that do this that use electromagnetic force
Speaker 1: and magnetic fields to create this form of levitation. They
Speaker 1: will also use electromagnetic force to propel the train. Typically
Speaker 1: you'll use a system that is switching poles rapidly, and
Speaker 1: you really can do this just by using alternating current
Speaker 1: through an electro magnet. You reverse the flow of electricity
Speaker 1: that flips the magnetic field. So if you do, it's
Speaker 1: so that the opposite charge is just in front of
Speaker 1: the train, it pulls the train forward, and the the
Speaker 1: same charge is just behind the train that pushes the
Speaker 1: train forward, and this push poll if you keep flipping
Speaker 1: those poles over and over and over again. You can
Speaker 1: make the train accelerate pretty darn quickly. This is, of
Speaker 1: course the basis for the the the transportation systems that
Speaker 1: have been proposed for hyperloop, using electro magnets to create
Speaker 1: that motive force. Although the hyper loop doesn't necessarily use
Speaker 1: mag lev as the way of getting above the ground,
Speaker 1: the initial hyper loop presentation that Elon must talked about
Speaker 1: was one that would use air skis, so the actual
Speaker 1: vehicles would use pressurized air pumped downward to create lift
Speaker 1: and then use electro magnets to create the motive force
Speaker 1: to move down the track. Other hyper loop designs actually
Speaker 1: do use mag lev technology, they avoid the air skis
Speaker 1: approach that Elon Musk had suggested. So mag lev does exist,
Speaker 1: but again you can't just use it anywhere. This has
Speaker 1: to be first of all, the tracks are set up
Speaker 1: in such a way where the train is not going
Speaker 1: to get unbalanced and fly off. You know, you have
Speaker 1: to have that that barrier system there to hold the
Speaker 1: train in place where it's gonna levitate up, but it's
Speaker 1: not gonna fly off the track one way or the other.
Speaker 1: It does, how a remove that that amount of friction
Speaker 1: that you would get with wheels making contact with a rail,
Speaker 1: so you do reduce the friction that you would encounter otherwise.
Speaker 1: So there are systems out there that are like that.
Speaker 1: But again, you can't just drive it over anywhere. You
Speaker 1: can't drive it over the desert like the land speeder
Speaker 1: does because you don't have that magnetic field to push
Speaker 1: off against, so that wouldn't really work. One other thing
Speaker 1: you could do, and again this requires a magnetic field,
Speaker 1: but would be super awesome if you could do it,
Speaker 1: is you could use superconductors and use superconductor levitation. You
Speaker 1: may have seen videos of this. It's one of the
Speaker 1: most counterintuitive things to see. Like the first time I
Speaker 1: saw it, I thought, what sorcery is this? It must
Speaker 1: be trickery. Someone must have gone in and done some
Speaker 1: sort of digital video shenanigans. But no, it's actually a
Speaker 1: relatively well understood phenomena. Superconductors can levitate uh in the
Speaker 1: presence of a magnetic field. They could actually main tain
Speaker 1: an orientation relative to that magnetic field, and they won't
Speaker 1: change it unless you change unless you actually change their orientation.
Speaker 1: So the way this typically works is that you get
Speaker 1: a superconductor, you have to chill it. Superconductors typically are
Speaker 1: only super conductive when they are very very cold. Superconductive
Speaker 1: means there's no electrical resistance of the materials. Thus you
Speaker 1: have super conductor. A conductor allows electricity to move through it,
Speaker 1: but typically you have resistance, and that means you lose
Speaker 1: some energy in the form of heat you get. The
Speaker 1: material will heat up as this resistance is there, and
Speaker 1: you can reduce resistance in various ways. But superconductors, once
Speaker 1: you chill them to a certain amount, and we're talking
Speaker 1: super cold, you're usually using liquid helium to get them
Speaker 1: cold enough, they will conduct electricity with no resistance, and
Speaker 1: they have this, uh, this other facetness flux pinning levitation.
Speaker 1: So you get a superconductive duct that's cooled down to
Speaker 1: this level you got over a magnetic field. It'll just
Speaker 1: hold its position there over that magnetic field, and you
Speaker 1: can even tilt it in different ways and it looks
Speaker 1: like it's just stuck in mid air. It's fascinating. If
Speaker 1: you have a round magnet, so you've got a magnetic
Speaker 1: field that's in around like a track, you can even
Speaker 1: give it a little push and it'll just spin around
Speaker 1: and around that track and and and again what seems
Speaker 1: like magic. It's fascinating to watch, and there are tons
Speaker 1: of videos about this phenomena on YouTube, so if you've
Speaker 1: never watched one, I recommend you do it. What's going
Speaker 1: on here is that when you super cool a superconductor,
Speaker 1: once it reaches a certain temperature, I think minus two
Speaker 1: eleven degrees fahrenheit is the warmest we can get right now,
Speaker 1: but that's actually much warmer than what it used to be.
Speaker 1: You can, uh, you actually see it reject all magnetic fields,
Speaker 1: so it's like it's expelling magnetic fields and that allows
Speaker 1: you to put it into whatever orientation you want within
Speaker 1: another magnetic field and it will just hold it there
Speaker 1: because it's not allowing anything inside. It's just kind of
Speaker 1: just kind of stuck. Um. Obviously, you can't really do
Speaker 1: that with a vehicle. You would have to have the
Speaker 1: vehicle components chilled to a an incredible amount. That means
Speaker 1: you have to haul around a huge amount of liquid
Speaker 1: helium or liquid nitrogen, probably liquid nitrogen first to cool
Speaker 1: it down enough to then switch to liquid helium. To
Speaker 1: use liquid helium right away, you're just gonna shatter whatever
Speaker 1: your technology you're using, and you would still need a
Speaker 1: magnetic field to float above, so you couldn't just do
Speaker 1: it anywhere. But still pretty interesting. Uh So again, propulsors
Speaker 1: probably not terribly practical in the real world. Dr Johnson
Speaker 1: also addresses another thing that I wish never existed in
Speaker 1: the Star Wars equals. I'm talking about pod racing pod racers.
Speaker 1: Uh First of all, I really showed that George Lucas
Speaker 1: loves car racing a lot, which we all knew. If
Speaker 1: you know anything about lucas is past and his childhood experiences,
Speaker 1: you know that he was really big into hot rods.
Speaker 1: He was he loved fast cars, and pod racing is
Speaker 1: nothing but a real long car racing sequence in The
Speaker 1: Phantom Menace. But how would that work? I mean, the
Speaker 1: way the pod racers are set up. They look like
Speaker 1: they are cockpits that are tethered to free floating engines,
Speaker 1: apparently jet engines, that then pull the cockpit along, and
Speaker 1: most of them have two, some of them have four.
Speaker 1: One of them is more like a jet engine rocket
Speaker 1: that one of the characters is writing on top of,
Speaker 1: but the rest are being pulled either two or four.
Speaker 1: Jet engine. Jet engine is not the safest things to
Speaker 1: be around. In fact, if you ever worked around jet engines,
Speaker 1: you know there are two danger zones, and I don't
Speaker 1: mean like the song. One of them is directly in
Speaker 1: front of the jet engine the intake, because you could
Speaker 1: get sucked into it and that would be bad. And
Speaker 1: the other is directly behind the jet engine, where you
Speaker 1: could get hit by hurricane force winds when a jet engine.
Speaker 1: When a Boeing jet engine is idling, it's idling at
Speaker 1: a speed that is equivalent to a category three hurricane
Speaker 1: when it's actually thrusting, when it's putting forth thrust. That's
Speaker 1: talking about a category five hurricane that's strong enough to
Speaker 1: knock over a house. We're talking about more than a
Speaker 1: hundred fifty five miles per hour winds at a hundred
Speaker 1: degrees fahrenheit. So it's a hot hurricane blast hitting you
Speaker 1: right in the face, and you've got two of those
Speaker 1: strapped fifty feet in front of you pulling you along.
Speaker 1: Not the best way to get around. What I did
Speaker 1: love about Dr Johnson's approach in tackling this was he said, well,
Speaker 1: would it be possible to build something like this that
Speaker 1: would kind of work that way? Says, well, if you
Speaker 1: if you can elevate it off the ground so that
Speaker 1: you could get it up to speed to generate thrust
Speaker 1: so it could take off. And if you added wings
Speaker 1: to it so that it would have left so I
Speaker 1: could counteract the effect of gravity pulling it down, then yes,
Speaker 1: but then you've just built a jet, because that's what
Speaker 1: a jet is, and you no longer have a pod
Speaker 1: raiser um not not practical. Also, he talks about the
Speaker 1: electrical arc that is visible that exists between the engines.
Speaker 1: For that to happen, it has to be in a
Speaker 1: massive amount, like the voltage has to be so high
Speaker 1: that when jar Jar comes into contact with it, he
Speaker 1: would have been essentially um executed by electricity, and we
Speaker 1: all would have been spared the rise of the Empire,
Speaker 1: because as we all know, jar Jar is the one
Speaker 1: who voted to give the Emperor the control over the
Speaker 1: Senate and the executive power that he needed in order
Speaker 1: to really bring his plan to completion. So the universe
Speaker 1: would have been spared, but somehow Jars are survived. It's
Speaker 1: really the tragedy of the Phantom Menace when you think
Speaker 1: about it. So one other thing I wanted to touch
Speaker 1: on before I conclude is the concept of holograms. In
Speaker 1: Star Wars they factor in pretty heavily. A character communication
Speaker 1: is often represented by holograms. Princess Leiah has a hologram
Speaker 1: stored in R two D two. There's a hologram chess
Speaker 1: game that's aboard the Millennium Falcon. Holograms are interesting in
Speaker 1: the Star Wars universe. They appear to be fully three
Speaker 1: dimensional creations of light. They can be created by a
Speaker 1: single projector because R two is able to project out
Speaker 1: this image of Princess Leiah fully formed and then her
Speaker 1: brother starts creeping on her, which is you. But anyway,
Speaker 1: we can't really do that because again we can't really
Speaker 1: tell light where to go and make it stop. Typically,
Speaker 1: if we want to create a hologram like effect, you
Speaker 1: need to have something that you're projecting the light against,
Speaker 1: particles like a dust cloud or smoke or something else
Speaker 1: along those lines. Now, you could use different wavelengths of
Speaker 1: light and different sizes of particles too, kind of get
Speaker 1: an effect similar to what you see in Star Wars,
Speaker 1: but you wouldn't have very good resolution, nor would you
Speaker 1: have very good color representation, so it would look more
Speaker 1: like a morphous light blobs as opposed to three dimensional
Speaker 1: figures that seem to have some sort of of of
Speaker 1: presence in your area. So holograms as they are depicted
Speaker 1: in Star Wars are not possible. Now, there are a
Speaker 1: lot of ways of cheating around that, Like I've talked
Speaker 1: to in the past about the Peppers Ghost, a usion
Speaker 1: which gives the effect of a hologram, but is not,
Speaker 1: at least in the sense of what we see in
Speaker 1: Star Wars the same thing. Pepper's Ghost, by the way,
Speaker 1: uses a reflective surface like a pane of glass, and
Speaker 1: you typically have the viewer the person who you want
Speaker 1: to do the effect on, in darkness, and you have
Speaker 1: out of the viewers line of sight an area that
Speaker 1: can be brightly lit. And so then the viewers looking
Speaker 1: at a pane of glass, they see a reflection in
Speaker 1: that pane of glass, but to them it looks like
Speaker 1: a translucent figure. A lot of Haunted mansions uses, including
Speaker 1: the Haunted Mansion ride at Disney. In Disneyland Disney World,
Speaker 1: whenever you go through the ballroom sequences and you see
Speaker 1: all the ghosts that are dancing around or at the
Speaker 1: birthday party, or they're shooting weapons at one another, those
Speaker 1: ghosts are actually animatronic figures that are either below or
Speaker 1: above the track, which you can't see because you're in
Speaker 1: a enclosed track that's in darkness, and you're seeing their
Speaker 1: reflections on a pane of glass. So to you it
Speaker 1: looks like these translucent ghost figures, but in fact they
Speaker 1: are solid, three dimensional figures that are just out of
Speaker 1: sight and you're just looking at their reflections. So there
Speaker 1: are ways we can cheat to make it look like
Speaker 1: we have a three dimensional hologram, and there are some
Speaker 1: ways that we can make very believable simulations of that,
Speaker 1: but we cannot. We don't have the technology to make
Speaker 1: one the way that we see them in Star Wars,
Speaker 1: not to that level. Not to say that we won't
Speaker 1: ever do that. We may find a way of being
Speaker 1: able to do it in the future, and we can't.
Speaker 1: Like I said, if you use smoke or mist or
Speaker 1: water and you use multiple projectors, you can get pretty
Speaker 1: interesting simulations, but it's not quite the same thing. Still,
Speaker 1: it was fun to go into the world of Star
Speaker 1: Wars and look at some of the technology there. There's
Speaker 1: clearly a lot more that we could have talked about.
Speaker 1: I didn't touch droids at all. We didn't talk about walkers.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of other things are like electro
Speaker 1: staffs and things of that nature that I didn't even
Speaker 1: really mention in this episode. A lot of that is
Speaker 1: covered in the book that I was using as my
Speaker 1: prime resource, The Physics of Star Wars. Again, that's by
Speaker 1: Dr Patrick Johnson, and I do recommend checking that book out.
Speaker 1: If you're interested in science and you like the Star
Speaker 1: Wars films. It's very easy to understand. It's entertaining, so
Speaker 1: I recommend that if you want to give this a
Speaker 1: longer look and explore other elements of science, not just
Speaker 1: the technology aspects. As for the tech of series, I
Speaker 1: love doing these. If there is a world of fantasy
Speaker 1: world out there, science fiction world out there that has
Speaker 1: interesting technology, and you would like me to cover it
Speaker 1: both in the way it's supposed to work within that
Speaker 1: mythology and the way it would work in our real world,
Speaker 1: let me know, or any other topic for that matter,
Speaker 1: if there's something in tech that you want to know
Speaker 1: more about, send me a message. Maybe there's someone you
Speaker 1: want me to interview on the show or have on
Speaker 1: as a guest host, let me know that as well.
Speaker 1: You can reach out to me on email. The address
Speaker 1: for the show is tech Stuff at how stuff works
Speaker 1: dot com, or you can drop me a line on
Speaker 1: Facebook or Twitter. The handle of both of those is
Speaker 1: tech Stuff hs W. We also have an Instagram account
Speaker 1: at tech Stuff hs W. Check that out. We've got
Speaker 1: a lot more stuff coming up on that so including
Speaker 1: I think we're gonna end up having some interesting little
Speaker 1: video snippets and stuff, things that you don't get anywhere else.
Speaker 1: So check out the Instagram account, and as always, you
Speaker 1: can join me live when I record these things on
Speaker 1: Wednesdays and Friday's over at twitch dot tv slash tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: Just go over that site. You'll see where the schedule
Speaker 1: is and you'll see when I record, and you can
Speaker 1: watch live as I have brain meltdowns and become incapable
Speaker 1: of saying even the simplest words like my viewers did
Speaker 1: just moments ago that you didn't get to hear because
Speaker 1: Ramsey the Wonder producer cut it out. Thanks Ramsey, and
Speaker 1: thank you guys. I'll talk to you again really soon.
Speaker 1: May the Force be with you for more on this
Speaker 1: and thousands of other topics. Because it staff works dot
Speaker 1: com