The new animated film Star Wars: The Clone Wars features an army of cloned soldiers doing battle with droids on far-flung planets. For those of us who grew up watching the Star Wars movies, droids and laser blasters are almost as real as cell phones and Wi-Fi. But what in Star Wars qualifies as remotely plausible, according to our understanding of science, and what is pure fantasy? To help answer this question, ScientificAmerican.com spoke with Jeanne Cavelos, a science fiction writer and author of The Science of Star Wars [read excerpts from the book here]. When her book came out, researchers had spotted less than two dozen planets around other stars—that figure is now over 300—and South Korean researcher Woo Suk Hwang was five years from rocking the world with his fraudulent claims of cloning the first human cells. We asked Cavelos to update us on how George Lucas's vision has fared.http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com
How far have would you say researchers have come with cloning in the last few years, and will we ever have clone armies like in Star Wars?
We have cloned many different animals at this point—cats, dogs, sheep—and there is very little holding us back from cloning humans except ethics and law. It's entirely conceivable that we will see humans cloned for medical or reproductive purposes in the coming decades. The link between genes and behavior has also become much better understood in recent years, and like the Imperial armies in Star Wars, human clones could probably be genetically altered to be obedient and programmable. One area of Star Wars cloning technology that is not very realistic according to today's science is the limited amount of time the clones have to grow and learn. Nevertheless, cloning technology is something in Star Wars that we will be seeing more of soon.
What do you think about all of the exoplanets that have turned up since you first wrote your book?
It's amazing that George Lucas predicted this universe full of planets and aliens. When Star Wars came out in 1977, scientists thought that planet formation was a fluke. Now they are saying that half of the stars out there may have planets.http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com
So do you think we are getting closer to finding alien life forms?
Absolutely. It's amazing to think about all the potential life out there. And it's looking more and more likely that we might find life right here in the solar system. George Lucas came up with Star Wars before we knew about extremophiles, which are life-forms that can live in bizarre, extreme situations. We had thought that life was this fragile flower that could only develop if conditions were just right—it's the "Goldilocks" principle. But instead, we have found life-forms that can survive boiling and subzero temperatures or live deep underground with no sunlight whatsoever. These sorts of conditions probably aren't conducive to the rise of complex, intelligent life, so a lot of life out there in the universe will probably be rather primitive.
What's a possible reason for why the Star Wars universe could have so many humanoids?
It seems that the human species, or whatever its equivalent is in that faraway galaxy, either colonized all these worlds or was genetically "seeded" on many planets. This species became dominant somehow. It's unlikely though that one species could live on so many planets without some kind of respiratory assistance. Each atmosphere is a quirky mixture of ingredients found only on that planet; you wouldn't have the same mixture of oxygen and carbon dioxide as we do. It's nice to see people in Star Wars just land on any old planet and get out of their spaceships without a problem, but it's not realistic.Louis J. Sheehan
