One of my favorite nerd axes to grind is the false perception that the Star Wars films are science fiction. Just because something has starships doesn’t mean it has science and while Star Wars has plenty of the former, it has precious little of the latter. Go to the Discovery Channel’s Science of Star Wars site and see what a pathetic show they made of connecting the two; there is a nice entry on Roombas where the only Star Wars connection is the title “House Cleaning Droids”.

My point is that Star Wars has more to do with fantasy than science. In the films nobody cares to explain how spaceships work, what fuel source they use, or how faster than light travel is possible; but they do feature a naive farm boy, a princess, an old wizard and a black knight. They could be riding around in a horse-drawn carriage and the story could have remain unchanged, only the aesthetic would have been different. In a way that was Lucas’ masterstroke because by dressing up fantasy in sci-fi trappings he made something that was familiar but also singular. Still, the science in Star Wars is laughably bad* and here are a few of the most egregious examples.

1. Parsecs
This one gets brought up a lot so I’m going to get it out of the way first. In the original Star Wars Han Solo brags that the Millennium Falcon made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs. The only problem is that parsecs are a measure of astronomical length (approximately 3.26 light-years), not time. It would be like saying you won a marathon in less than twenty-six miles.

2. Moisture Vaporators
In A New Hope we meet Luke’s uncle Owen who runs a moisture farm in the harsh Tatooine desert. One of his primary tools to gather liquid from the surrounding atmosphere is something called a moisture vaporator. I am a bit confused as to how they do this since you cannot ‘vaporate’ something from a gaseous state to a liquid state. You can evaporate an element or compound, but that only applies when turning it from a liquid to a gas. You could also vaporize something, but again that applies to turning something from a liquid or solid to a gas. Neither of these would be very useful to a desert dweller like Owen. What he needed was something that produced condensation, which changes matter from a gaseous state into liquid state; the exact opposite of evaporation. Owen even realizes this by saying at one point that Luke needed to work on the condensers. Makes you wonder why he had all those vaporators hanging around his moisture farm.

3. Fat, Near-Sighted, Pain-feeling Robots
This is a bit esoteric, but at various points in A New Hope C-3PO calls R2-D2 a ‘overweight glob of grease’ and a ‘nearsighted scrap pile’. What kind of derelict scientist builds droids that can gain weight or are nearsighted? Seems like a droid could have these issues taken care of pretty easily all things considered, and it wasn’t like R2-D2 was some broken down piece of junk. He was the property of a wealthy Princess who trusted him enough to deliver vital information for Rebel’s plan to destroy the Death Star; I think he would have been well maintained. But no, apparently he is myopic and overweight thanks to the truly shitty robot designer who was probably the same guy who designed droids to feel pain. In Return of the Jedi we are shown a room in Jabba’s palace where robots are tortured for disobedience. Couldn’t they just be reprogrammed? Why would you build robots to do all your work, but then give them personalities and pain-sensing software. It’s makes no sense, and more than that its like begging for them to start some kind of robot revolution.

4. Splashdown on Dagobah
I don’t know where the Rebel Alliance gets their X-Wings, but man are they ever getting their money’s worth. In The Empire Strikes Back Luke loses his navigational instruments immediately after entering the Dagoboh atmosphere and has to make a water landing in a fetid swamp, but his ship looks no worse for wear. Nevermind that even that if a regular old aircraft hits the water at full speed it would break apart and/or explode since hitting water at high speeds is like hitting concrete. Can you imagine what would happen if the space shuttle crashed nose first into a lake at terminal velocity? There would be nothing left. Plus, when Luke runs out on his training to help his friends his ship is functioning perfectly. Now I am not an X-Wing designer, but would an interstellar spaceship be built to withstand a few days underwater and remain perfectly flyable?

5. Asteroids do not have atmosphere
On the run from Darth Vader after the destruction of the Rebel base on Hoth Han Solo has the brilliant idea to hide in an asteroid belt because as he says, “they’d be crazy to follow us”. You know what else would be crazy? Getting out of your ship without a spacesuit on after landing on one of the asteroids. Asteroids do not have enough mass to produce much of a gravitational pull; and having a very little gravity they cannot form or hold any matter around themselves. If Han, Chewie, and Leia got out of the Falcon and walked around the inside of that space slug’s colon–I wonder what that thing breathes–bubbles would form in their body fluids due to the reduced pressure, their organs could go into failure due to oxygen and carbon dioxide depravation, and they could possibly suffer fatal decompression. Its called space exposure and it is deadly serious. That’s why astronauts wear those big complicated suits and not just a breath mask that you’d wear if you were using Bondo to fix up your uncle’s Corvette.

6. Losing the Will-to-live is not an acute medical condition
Sadly it is possible to lose the will to live, but it is not a condition that has a sudden, dramatic, and plot-complicating onset. Rather it is slowly brought on by factors like depression, undernourishment or disease. Researchers have studied the phenomenon among populations as diverse as famine-starved third world countries and elderly seniors in home care situations. One thing they have not noticed is that losing you will to live occurring in a matter of hours, which is precisely what happens to Padme at the end of Revenge of the Sith. After her betrayal and spousal abuse at the hands of the recently Sith-ed Anakin Padme is taken to a medical station where she gives birth to Luke and Leia. Apparently the joy of newborn twins didn’t click her will-to-live meter up a few notches and she expires after telling Obi-Wan that her murderous psycho of a husband, “still has good in him”. This was just a cynical way for Lucas to have Padme die at the end of the prequels, yet not have it be directly Anakin’s fault. Sure he choked his pregnant wife, but he did kill her. She just lost the will to live.

7. Midi-chlorians
No list of b.s. Star Wars science would be complete without mentioning midi-chlorians, possibly the most hated element of the prequels other than Jar Jar. While it is true that there is something similar in real life–a scientist has found bugs in the mitochondria of the ovaries female ticks, so I guess Lucas is a genius for predicting what is inside female ticks?–there is no evidence that these insects talk to their hosts, allow them to have sweet-ass powers, or can themselves immaculately conceive annoying sand-hating douche-nozzles. It’s not even really the bad science of midi-chlorians that makes them so infuriating, its that they were clearly only inserted into the mythology to give some quantifiable reason why Anakin is a potentially more powerful Jedi than anyone else in the story. They were created as a way to make Anakin seem special, but instead they just made the Force seem ordinary. In the original trilogy the Force was mystical and the way the characters connected with it was spiritual and intuitive. In the prequels it is a blood test. It’s bad science, bad spirituality, and bad storytelling. If there is a more concrete example that science has nothing to do with the audience’s enjoyment of Star Wars I can’t think of it.

*I am sure that there is some nerdy retcon bullshit that explains away all of this but I don’t really care. Look it up on Wookiepedia if you do.