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Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination

The Museum of Science in Boston prides itself in its ability to bring the fields of STEM – science, technology, engineering and mathematics – to life for visitors young-and old alike, but in the early days of the twenty-first century realized that their mission was even more urgent.  Various reports at the time concluded that educators were not doing enough to make students more STEM-literate, and that Americans overall needed to be more technologically efficient in order to navigate the growing importance of STEM within their everyday lives.

Faced with the dilemma of how to make STEM more accessible, the Museum of Science turned to the world of Star Wars as guidance. Although the Star Wars Universe created by George Lucas in 1977 is more technologically advanced than anything found in the here-and-now of planet Earth, there are similarities nonetheless that reflect the efforts of scientists around the globe, from robotics and artificial intelligence to modern medicine, space exploration to visualizing the cities of the future.

More importantly, Star Wars is a futuristic world – despite taking place “a long time ago” – that millions of Americans have been exposed to since its premier in 1977. Using that familiarity as a springboard, the Museum of Science created Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination, a traveling exhibit that premiered in Boston in 2005 before journeying to nineteen additional cities over a nine-year span.

“When we started brainstorming ways to excite people about imagining the future and taking a more active role in shaping it, we quickly ran into a problem – we have no shared vision of what that future looks like,” exhibit developer Ed Rodley explains in the Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination companion book. “To talk about our future, we needed a depiction of a technologically advanced society that was familiar to a broad audience. We needed something that also gave us fertile ground to explore the implications of technological decisions. What we needed was Star Wars.”

The Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination companion book allows for even greater examination than the exhibit itself, with experts in various fields contributing essays to fully explore the similarities and digressions between Star Wars and the present. While many of the intersections between the “galaxy far, far away” of Star Wars and those of twentieth century Earth are obvious – such as space exploration and robotics – an additional number are actually quite surprising.

Ed Rodley, for instance, examines the planet Coruscant and the future of our own cities, a subject that might not immediately come to mind for Star Wars aficionados. As depicted in the prequels of George Lucas, Coruscant was the capital of both the Galactic Republic and the Empire of Palpatine – a city that encompasses an entire planet with skyscrapers that extend high into the clouds above. The atmosphere of Coruscant is also filled with a steady stream of vehicles coming-and-going, while oceans and forests have been eliminated and paved over to accommodate the large influx of citizens that reside at the center of the Star Wars Universe.

A planet-size city with no natural resources contains a host of problems and growing concerns, many of which overlap with urban areas on our own planet – the depletion of forests on Coruscant requires an artificial method to replenish oxygen in the atmosphere, for example, while the lack of oceans, rivers and streams means that polar regions need to be melted and used as a water source.

It is estimated that by the year 2030, over half the population of planet Earth will be located in cities, and many of the issues that Coruscant experienced during its development have already occurred here as well. The growth of Las Vegas as a residential and tourist destination has put a strain on the limited water supply in the Nevada desert locale, for instance, while farmland in China has been paved over to make room for expanding urban areas in that country.

Thus despite the fact that the methods used by Coruscant to keep it functioning are extreme and impractical – as is a planet-sized city like Coruscant itself – they do act as discussion points when considering potential solutions to Earth’s own population growth nonetheless.

While Ed Rodley explores the future of cities on Earth through an examination of the Coruscant from Star Wars, physics professor Lawrence Krauss tackles the subject of galactic space travel with equal fervor. According to Krauss, since no device similar to the hyperdrive of Star Wars is available to transport Earth-made vessels to the outer reaches of space, the potential to visit “galaxies far, far away” remains permanently out of reach for inhabitants of planet Earth.

One would have to travel close to light speed to reach a distant galaxy within one’s lifetime – something the human race is incapable of achieving. As Krauss further points out, the amount of fuel needed to propel an object that fast is tremendous, noting that “the mass of fuel required to accelerate of spacecraft to half the speed of light would be greater than the mass of our entire galaxy.”

Lawrence Krauss does acknowledge, however, that Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity suggests that space and time dynamically responds to matter and energy, altering the space-time geometry of objects as well as their motion. Both the hyperdrive of Star Wars and the warp drive of Star Trek are thus theoretically possible as they do not involve the propulsion of a craft through space but the propulsion of space itself instead.

“To do so would require generating a kind of energy, called negative energy, which we thus far have no idea how to create and maintain in a laboratory,” Krauss further explains. “It is quite plausible that when we understand how to combine general relativity and quantum mechanics better, we will be able to prove the scenario is possible.”

That’s the good news for those hoping to someday travel across the galaxy. The bad news is similar to the constraints on current spacecraft propulsion – the amount of energy needed to travel via hyperdrive would exceed the total amount of energy available in our entire galaxy, rendering the possibility as moot.

The future of the human race may not look exactly like the Star Wars Universe from a “long time ago” but by exploring the technological advancements of a “galaxy far, far away,” one can get a better understanding of the obstacles that we will potentially face in the future and the possibilities that exist when it comes to solving them. Just as the science fiction of Star Wars emerged from the imagination of George Lucas, the real science of the future will likewise come from the imagination of scientists, technicians, engineers, and mathematicians – and quite possibly be influenced and inspired by Star Wars as well.

Anthony Letizia

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