Documentary on Star Wars vs. scientific reality with Norwegian subtitles

Thursday, May 13, 2010

NRK has subtitled a documentary here in English on Star Wars and how much of the movie is based in fact vs. what is not possible (e.g. sound in space), so feel free to take a look at it if you're interested in either Norwegian, space, or both. The documentary is a bit annoying in how it looks at some of the concepts in the movie from the view of today's technology though, such as comparing the TIE fighters (TIE = twin ion engine) to Deep Space 1 just for both having the word ion in the title. But the upcoming VASIMR is also technically an ion engine as well, and if there's a next generation of VASIMR that would be an ion engine too, and so on and so on. Same thing for the windows which it first assumes would be glass, and then mentions that we here on Earth have just started developing the ability to make windows out of plasma and that that could work...

So sometimes it's a bit reminiscent of that op-ed that concluded that the economics of mining in Avatar didn't make sense because one kilogram of unobtanium was only worth $20 million, and that (BIG EXTRAPOLATION) at current inflation rates that wouldn't be worth that much by 2154. Well, unless they knock off six zeroes from the currency like Turkey did a few years back. It's like a German economist on the night of the Beer Hall Putsch (where Hitler and his friends bought three beers for three billion marks) imagining a similar future where all goods are worth trillions and quadrillions of marks just because the German mark is worth X amount of money on that day.

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