In the early days of the twenty-first century, there was a growing belief that educators were not doing enough to make students more STEM-literate, and that Americans in general needed to be more technologically nuanced in order to navigate the growing importance of STEM in their everyday lives.
Faced with the question of how to make STEM – science, technology, engineering, and mathematics – more accessible, the Museum of Science in Boston turned to the world of Star Wars as guidance. Although the Star Wars Universe created by George Lucas is more technologically advanced than present-day planet Earth, connections can still be made with current research efforts in everything from robotics and artificial intelligence to modern medicine, space exploration to visualizing the cities of the future.
More importantly, Star Wars takes place in 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 offers an even greater examination of the exhibit, with experts in various fields contributing essays to more 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 twenty-first century Earth are obvious – such as space exploration and robotics – others 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 Empire of Palpatine – a city that encompasses an entire planet with skyscrapers that extend 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, many of which overlap with urban areas on Earth – 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 on 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 serve as discussion points when considering potential solutions to Earth’s population growth nonetheless.
While Ed Rodley explores the future of cities, physics professor Lawrence Krauss tackles the subject of galactic space travel with equal fervor. According to Krauss, without a device similar to the hyperdrive of Star Wars, the ability to visit “galaxies far, far away” remains out of reach for inhabitants of planet Earth.
One would have to travel near light speed to reach a distant galaxy within one’s lifetime, a velocity we are currently incapable of achieving. As Krauss further points out, the amount of fuel needed to propel an object that fast is tremendous – the fuel mass needed to accelerate a spacecraft to just half the speed of light “would be greater than the mass of our entire galaxy.”
Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, however, suggests that space and time dynamically respond 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 according to Lawrence Krauss, as they do not involve the propulsion of an actual 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 continues. “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 future problems that might arise, as well as potential solutions. 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