Star Wars on Trial (45 page)

While a few cutting-edge philosophers and scientists are just now realizing that you, your dog, your car, the Atlantic Ocean, Mars, the Andromeda Galaxy and anything else you care to name is in all likelihood nothing more than part of a universal spanning simulation, George Lucas realized this thirty years ago. He used his Star Wars films to clue in those few of us who were savvy enough to realize that what on the surface appeared to be a series of films overflowing with scientific inaccuracies and engineering gaffes were actually carefully crafted scientific clues intended to reveal the true nature of our very universe.

Don't believe me?

Perhaps you think that I watched the Matrix trilogy a few too many times? Well, I'm not talking about The Matrix and its ridiculous premise that humanity has been rendered into a vast sea of Dcell batteries needed to power up computer overlords.

I'm talking about something else altogether-a simulation of everything. Philosopher Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, has spelled out the details of this ultimate simulation in a paper that appeared in 2003 in the Philosophical Quarterly.'
Consider his three simple propositions:

The chances that a species at our current level of development can avoid going extinct before becoming technologically mature is negligibly small.

Almost no technologically mature civilizations are interested in running computer simulations of minds like ours.

You are almost certainly in a computer simulation.

Now of course we have only our own civilization as a reference point to consider those first two propositions. Humans are more than just interested in creating computer simulations of a human mindwe are attempting to do so right now, not only in the quest of a better understanding of what goes on (or, in many cases, goes wrong) in our own skulls, but hoping to create something beyond us. So using humanity as an example, proposition two is certainly false. As to proposition one, Bostrom crunches a few numbers and shows that if we can hold on for just a few more generations, we will have the sort of computing power and hardware necessary to simulate a mind and place it in a virtual reality sufficiently complex so that the simulated mind would consider it "real." If we can make it through the next fifty years we stand a pretty good chance of proving the first proposition false. And if the first two propositions are false (which in all likelihood they appear to be), then there is only one inescapable conclusion-the third proposition must be true.

Yes-you are a simulation living in a simulated universe.

Don't see it?

If you crunch the numbers, you find that it requires an insignificant amount of energy to simulate a person as compared to maintaining one in flesh and blood. Just think about how movies are made today: no longer is it necessary to hire tens of thousands of extras for the big battle scenes (think of the Clone Wars battle scenes) just build them in a computer. The trick is building the first clone warrior-after that, all you need to do is press the copy button. And in the same way, once you can simulate one mind, to do ten, a million or even a trillion is simply a matter of computer storage and numbercrunching capacity. Once the threshold of simulating a single mind is reached, the leap to simulating a universe, with nearly countless planets populated by minds, is relatively easy.

Think about it. If a single advanced alien entity could simulate an entire universe, one containing a trillion-trillion-trillion-trillion simulated minds, what do you think the odds would be that you are actually of flesh and blood, living on some mudball in some corner of that alien's universe?

Damn near zero.

For every entity of flesh of goo, there would be trillions of simulated beings.

But the odds that you are real are even slimmer than that.

If we are a simulation, we find ourselves at a critical point in that simulation: we are at the threshold of creating our own simulated minds, and quickly from that point other simulated universes-our simulation now creating its own simulations.

Geometrical progression is a powerful thing.

If we are a simulation, creating our own simulations, then in all likelihood our creators are also simulations. The original creatures of flesh and goo, our primordial creators that started the whole thing rolling, might be hundreds, millions or even trillions of levels away from us.

The conclusion is inescapable. If Bostrom's first two propositions are false, then you, and everything you know or dream, are a simulation.

And so what?

Well, decades before Bostrom and The Matrix, George Lucas had realized this-the first on Earth to understand the true nature of our simulated reality. Had he announced this to the world in the mid-1970s he would have simply been written off as a drug-damaged 1960s refugee. So he took another path, creating his own little universe. At that time, he knew he had no hope of creating a simulated mind or universe, the technology not available, so he did the next-best thing-he created a simulated world on film, and filled it with hints as to the nature of our universe, using his scientific prowess to create the sort of scientific errors in his films that the sharpest of minds would recognize as clues that would lead to a true understanding of the nature of our universe, while hopefully not alerting the entities who created us that someone had uncovered the true nature of our universe.

Don't believe me?

Well, let's examine just what Lucas created. The many supposed scientific errors, engineering gaffes and failures to follow through on technical premises that are littered throughout the Star Wars films can be divided into three main categories: the generic sci-fi blunders, Lucasisms that represent head-scratching components unique to his films and lastly, what I like to think of as brain-dead concepts, those that only a dead brain would not find questionable (as you can see, rather aptly named). Let's take a look.

SCI-FI BLUNDERS

If one is to tell the tale of a galactic empire, by definition this implies that there must be a mode of traveling far in excess of the speed of light-that is the only possible way such an empire could be held together. If not, things simply don't work. How can the Emperor expect to keep a tight leash over the citizens of Slop-12, which is 1000 light-years distant, if a round-trip communication takes 2,000 years, and his armada, traveling at even half the speed of light, takes the same 2,000 years to arrive at Slop-12 and put down the rebellion?

Won't work.

So you need the means of pushing people and information faster than the speed of light. Wormholes are a theoretical possibility (by jumping into "hyperspace"), connecting distant points through higher spatial dimensions, but theoretical physicists have now shown that such pathways require what is called negative energy density material (which possesses negative gravity characteristics-masses are not attracted, but repelled). While it is not clear how such material might be generated, it appears that the smallest quantities of it would require the total energy output of entire galaxies-something that Han Solo's Millennium Falcon certainly couldn't muster.

So spacecraft, TIE fighters and Death Stars jumping from star system to star system is just not in the cards-this being what many might consider one of the most basic science flaws of the Star Wars universe.

But they'd be wrong.

This is not a Star Wars science error-this is a sci-fi blunder. If you are going to do a space epic then you have faster-than-light capabilities. That is just a given, in the same way that in a western, the good guy's gun never runs out of bullets. This is a sci-fi blunder of the first magnitude, but has nothing to do with George Lucas-this sort of blunder is needed to bring the people into the theater, and keep them glued to their seats.

Sci-fi blunders are those science errors common to sci-fi movies:

Things can travel faster than the speed of light.

When spacecraft explode you can hear it in the vacuum of space, despite the fact that there is no atmosphere in space to carry the compression waves needed for the sound of the explosion.

We can see laser beams, despite the fact that there is nothing to scatter the light in the beam-this being the only way that we could actually see it, not to mention the fact that a laser pulse, moving at the speed of light, would travel the distance between two nearby fighters in millionths of a second, rather than the several seconds shown in the film.

And you certainly don't need a Death Star to shatter a planet. Get a small fighter craft moving at nearly the speed of light and crash it into a planet-the kinetic energy of a craft moving at such a speed is equivalent to the output of several million-megaton hydrogen bombs. No more planet.

None of this means that Lucas is a scientific dolt-merely that he is making a space-based sci-fi film, utilizing the standard infrastructure that the public expects to see in such films. So forget these scifi blunders-they have nothing to do with Lucas. We need to look deeper in order to understand what Lucas is trying to show us and to truly appreciate his scientific genius.

LUCASISIMS

Now this is where things start getting interesting, as we examine the scientific absurdities that are unique to Lucas, those that he deliberately chose to put in Star Wars and was under no obligation to include in order to satisfy the sci-fi moviegoing public.

Almost all Lucasisms center around a single concept-the Jedi.

Except for the fact that members of this ancient sect appear to breathe and eat food, little else that they are involved in seems to make much sense from a scientific perspective. When it comes to Jedi, the two primary things that characterize them are lightsabers and the Force-both of which, under the most cursory inspection, can be seen to be complete and utter scientific hogwash.

Lightsabers are such fun, brightly colored gizmos-weapons suitable for close combat, and a sort of emblem that says, "I'm ajedi, and I can muck around with the Force."

Fine.

The problem is that a lightsaber just isn't going to work. The first big problem is that, just like a flashlight, the stream of laser light goes on and on and on and on, spreading out and diffusing until no longer visible. Besides the fact that you can only see a laser beam if it is scattering from something like chalk dust or fog, you can't just stop it in three or four feet. Light won't stop. The other problem is that when two lightsabers crossed paths, they would simply pass through each other. An intense enough laser beam can melt through the toughest chunk of metal, but it has no heft to it, no mass, nothing that would resemble the clashing and clanging of metal blades, and emit a shower of sparks, when crossed with another laser beam. There could be no such thing as a lightsaber battle. The technically savvy of you know this, and have probably already explained this mistake away by telling your less technically hip friends that the lightsaber is a actually a plasma saber (where plasma is typically a chunk of ionized gas, in which the electrons from a gas atom's or gas molecule's outer orbitals have been stripped away). The big advantage of using plasma, unlike a laser beam, is that it can be bent, folded and even mu tilated by magnetic and electric fields. With a plasma saber it would be theoretically possible to get it to terminate a few feet away, and by manipulating their electric and magnetic fields, two plasma swords could clank against each other. The downside is that since the extremely hot plasma is in contact with air, energy will be constantly carried away from the beam and into the air by way of conduction, convection and radiation. The air around such a beam would literally boil (conventional plasmas are confined in a vacuum, which acts as a thermal isolator so power is not continually being drained away). The hand holding the base of the plasma saber, just a few scant inches away from the plasma, would quickly become a charred stump. And what will power the thing as it continually is dumping its energy into the surrounding air? A couple of D batteries in the handle will not cut the mustard-you'd need a small nuclear reactor.

Lightsabers, or their plasma variants, simply won't work.

Does this mean that Lucas is a science lightweight for having created the lightsaber? Of course not. Lucas is using the lightsabers as a device, a type of clue, pointing out to you that what you should be focusing on are not the obviously impossible lightsabers, but the Jedi. The Jedi are more than hooded guys who whisper mumbo jumbo-they have the power to do something impossible, to actually break the laws of physics.

But how can you break the laws of the universe?

Of course you can't-not in a real universe.

But it would be possible to break the laws of physics in a simulated universe if you could access the program creating that universe. This is what these lightsabers are really all about-cluing us in about not only the nature of the Star Wars universe, but by extension, our universe. So we need to focus on the Jedi-they are the device that Lucas is using to reveal the true nature of our simulated reality. What is the other key ingredient of the Jedi? It is, of course, the Force. In the first few episodes of the Star Wars saga, the Force is presented to us as just some sort of mystical thing, little more than a fantasy element. We eventually learn in The Phantom Menace that there is more to it than that.

Midichlorians.

These are a form of microscopic life that pervades everything, is collectively conscious and can interact with the Force. The more mi dichlorians one has within him, the greater is his ability to manipulate the Force. Jedi training essentially comes down to honing one's skill in interfacing with these bugs. What the midichlorians imply is that the universe as a whole is conscious, every part of it in contact with every other part.

Now, of course, any real universe, obeying the laws of physics, would not work this way. When the Death Star obliterated Alderaan, Obi-Wan swooned as he felt all those little midichlorians getting fried light-years away.

Yes, light-years away-and he felt it instantly.