I’m not a Star Wars fan. When I was a kid, I watched the first three movies in theaters when they were released, and forgot almost everything about them for quite a long time. I eventually found out they had made a prequel and a sequel trilogy, years after the fact, and decided to watch them. For my taste, in the prequel trilogy, apart from Natalie Portman’s beauty on screen, the rest was just awful. The sequel was less bad. Sometime later, I watched a few other movies or episodes set within the same universe. For me, they seem to prove that whoever owns the franchise rights is trying to milk it until it’s dry.
Nevertheless, all those hours watching little ships that make noise in space, laser weapons that go “tzing!”, lightsabers, and other stuff made me realize a few interesting things about that fictional universe. The first is that unlike what I thought about it when I first watched the original trilogy as a kid, the Jedi stuff — lightsabers and supernatural powers on the one hand, and Gnostic cosmology on the other — is not crucial to keep the fictional universe interesting. I’d even say that when there are no Jedis involved, it gets much better.
The original story is nothing to write home about. It’s a very common fairy tale, the same storyline later (re) used in Harry Potter: a regular boy finds out he is secretly a prince and learns to use his latent abilities. Later, he discovers a darker side to his story, for his father is the main bad guy. When they decided to milk it for all it was worth, the father’s story was filmed, and that was the prequel trilogy. Following the spirit of the times, they later rinsed and repeated it with a female hero, before creating several other derived works, none of them remotely original, but all of them creating together the tapestry of a possible, if not probable, alternate reality. The fantasy is so powerful some people consider “Jedi” to be their religion.
But what’s really interesting for me is how technology works in it. Tech-centered sci-fi is a dime a dozen, and even the best works often have poorly conceived (fictional) technology, extrapolations of whatever was high-tech when it was written together with things that a couple of years after it was written were replaced in real life by some new invention. There are often tech-reliant plots whose logic is faulty, as in Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. Part of it comes from a childlike fascination with Science that was more common before WWII showcased science being used in very evil ways, in an ugly alphabet that runs from Atomic bombs to Zyklon B. Later sci-fi mostly toned down Science-worship, becoming richer and better in the process.
As the Star Wars universe is pretty much dystopic from the political point of view, its tech can be ugly, and often is. A central plot in the original movies is the Death Star, a huge spaceship with a kind of death ray that can destroy a whole planet. In the first movies, the laser guns were almost only used by the baddies, who couldn’t hit the side of a barn with them, so they weren’t scary at all. The laser swords, however, that somehow would only be stopped by another laser sword, were the kind of scary little boys find exciting. As the Death Star mega-gun, in fact.
But there is another side to that fictional universe’s tech that makes it almost utopic, and that’s where it gets interesting. From the very first films, it is not only clear but also central to the comings and goings of the plot that virtually all tech is recyclable. There are whole alien races whose single occupation is scavenging and selling second-hand tech. In the first film, for instance, the hero’s father buys robots from an alien race of small beings dressed like monks with shining red eyes. They had found the robots wandering around, but they also had lots of other second-hand scavenged technological stuff for sale.
Likewise, in one of the derived series, the mercifully Jedi-less Andor, the eponymous hero works as a tech scavenger and reseller, before being swept up in a plot that eventually transforms him into a political rebel. In yet another, The Mandalorian, the little red-eyed alien monks appear again, having dismantled for parts the anti-hero’s spaceship they found parked in the desert.
Star-Wars-universe tech, then, appears to be almost infinitely recyclable. Parts from one spaceship will fit other spaceships. Fuel appears to be contained in cassettes that can be taken from one ship to another or stored. All machines — be they ships, laser swords, or anything else — are made to last for a very long time. It is possible to put a laser sword in a trunk and leave it there for decades, and it will work perfectly when turned on after such a long inactivity. Spaceships are sunk underwater and will reliably travel to outer space when they emerge.
There isn’t much in the way of technological advances during the considerably long timeframe of the films. No new inventions, not even, apparently, new models of spaceships or guns. The computers stay the same, with a look that in real life seemed high-tech in the 1970s and now seems quaint.
In other words, it’s a fictional universe in which tech is not linked to consumption: they invented nifty stuff, made it durable, recyclable, and reliable, and were satisfied with that. For our days, when driving a 10-year-old car is something people will only do if forced by the circumstances, when a 2-year-old phone is about to become unusable because many apps will cease working on it, it’s sheer utopia.
Our days, however, are the exception, not the rule. For most of mankind’s very long history, the goal of any toolmaker was to make stuff that was durable, recyclable, and reliable. Curiously, one of the oldest and most common human technologies wasn’t durable, recyclable, or reliable, although it was cheap to make, and that is why most of our archeological findings consist of its broken remains.
Pottery — essentially nothing more than earth that is molded and burned in a kiln — breaks easily, and when it breaks it cannot be easily mended. In fact, if you have a kiln it’s easier to make new crockery than to recycle broken pieces. As it breaks often, most places had to have a kiln around.
Artistry is as much a human trait as tool use, and thus earthenware “fashion” always changed, albeit very slowly for our standards. That’s how archeologists classify old populations: the “Bell Beaker Culture”, for instance, made bell-shaped beakers for a timeframe that would fit inside the chronology of the Star Wars tales.
What about the rest, though? What about all other technologies, apart from pottery, in the archeological record? The simple explanation is that most of it was organic, as wood or leather, and it rotted away leaving few if any traces. The more realistic and complicated answer is that what could be fixed was fixed, what could be mended was mended, and whatever couldn’t be fixed would often be recycled into something new, like a pair of old jeans can become cutoff shorts. Brass or iron tools can be melted down into new tools. Even a broken stone knife can be made into smaller stone knives.
Reusing, mending, and fixing have always been the standard because resources are finite, and it doesn’t make sense to throw away 59,000 tons a year of clothing on what once was a pristine desert. We are the exception, but not because we discovered something. It’s simply that in the last decades, globalization led to an unhinged kind of economy in which consumption — a race from extraction to landfill — replaced more rational goals.
The Star Wars universe has none of it. Their tools are in line with virtually all of human tool-making and -using tradition. They don’t “consume” (a word that used to mean “destroy by fire”) things; they build tools, use them, take care of them, and make them in such a way as not to be any unnecessary waste. At the same time, of course, they have some tech we don’t, some enviable things that, however, still fit with the rational ethos of in-universe tech use.
When I was a kid and watched the first movie, I was fascinated by the hero’s flying car. It’s not a flying car in the sense of what people are trying to do now with scaled-up four-propeller drones, things that after all are nothing more than cheaper electrical helicopters. It was just a car that floated in the air instead of resting on tires. I read somewhere they filmed it using a regular car whose wheels were covered with mirrors reflecting the sand around and giving the impression that the car floated. The same technology would be used in spaceships, motorcycles, and a few other forms of transportation.
It would be wonderful to have something like that in real life because it would solve what is possibly the greatest technological problem of all: friction. Thousands of years ago, our ancestors made everybody’s life easier by inventing the wheel. The wheel, however, does not solve the problem of friction; it just transfers it elsewhere. Oxcarts could be heard from afar because the friction between the axle and the wheel, even when the axle was greased, was strong enough to make a loud constant noise. Our modern solution is to put, literally, wheels within wheels, for bearings are nothing more than a couple of small wheels connected by still smaller wheels. In fact, as my wheelchair’s ball bearings are old and used, whenever I roll around they whisper a song I joke I will arrange for piano and play. I feel like I am driving a miniature whispering oxcart.
The friction between the wheel and the ground is also a serious problem. Ingenious people found ways to minimize it. Tires, for instance. These were initially made of longer-lasting iron, but are now made of rubber and are a great source of pollution, made much worse by the greater torque and weight — therefore friction — of electric vehicles. Another way to minimize this friction is by smoothing the road; the stupid way to do it is to pave whatever tires can touch, covering vast surfaces with waterproof pavement made of polluting substances that will leak out to the water we drink, and a smarter way is the railroad.
As Star Wars tech is fictional, we can only guess whether they would use the same tech to avoid friction within the moving parts of their spaceships and such. Even if it were impossible for some reason, though, solving the problem of friction between load and ground would singlehandedly eliminate the greater part of man-caused pollution. Utopic indeed.
The next big utopic tech in Star Wars would be the way they propel their vehicles. I’m not even talking about going faster than the speed of light; I’m just talking about how cars and bikes move around. After all, while friction is a problem, it is also how we make cars move. That’s why electric vehicles pollute so much, by the way. The much greater weight, because of the batteries, and the much stronger punch of electric motors, making much heavier vehicles gain speed twice as fast as older and lighter internal-combustion cars, increase tremendously the friction between tire and ground. Any land vehicle, except for wind-propelled toys, goes forward by grabbing the ground and forcing it back. Braking is just the opposite maneuver.
In the Star Wars universe, however, they have something that makes floating cars and bikes go forward without grabbing anything, with no friction at all. Together with the floating technology, again, it would solve most of our energy-use and pollution problems.
Another form of technology in that universe, however, is also interesting but a tad creepy. They have several kinds of rideable animals that are not much more than curious-looking fictional equivalents of a horse. They have scary monsters, fictional versions of the scary monsters of real life, such as wolves, bears, or lions. But they don’t have fictional equivalents of our pets, or if they do they were so unimportant I missed them.
Robots, instead, fulfill that function. And it’s creepy. Just like “cat people” (as in people who like cats but not dogs) think it’s creepy that dogs obey their owners, and “dog people” (the same, inverted) think it’s creepy that cats can ignore their owners, in a way. I love both cats and dogs, by the way, and I am surrounded by three dogs and a cat while writing this. But I’m creeped out by robots that are “above” a pet because they can think — even if they would not be particularly bright if they were human —, and below any pet in that they are just machines that can be, like any other machine in that universe, disassembled and recycled.
The relationship between the heroes and their robot assistants is not that different from the relationship between Han Solo and his hairy assistant, and both remind me of the overtly racist relationships common in early 20th-century comics, as that of Mandrake The Magician and his African sidekick Lothar: the hero is (seen as) a full human, and while his sidekick is not, he/it is very close to humanness, much closer than a cat or a dog. The hero is heroic, and his not-that-human sidekick is either bestial or funny. The hero wears civilized clothes, and the sidekick doesn’t.
That place between animal and man is creepyland. That’s why some people are creeped out by animals that understand and obey human orders, like dogs, and others are creeped out by animals that believe themselves to be our equals or even superior to us, like cats. Early 20th-century racists would talk a lot about “subhumans” whom it would be a favor to enslave, and so on, but they were talking about humans who would often be in fact much superior to them in many important ways. Star Wars robots, however, are enslaved subhuman characters: they are what racists wanted other people to be, one hundred years ago. The robots love their owners, like any pet, they obey them, like dogs, they are beloved but expandable for a higher cause, but at the same time, they can think and decide on their feet (or wheels), often saving their owners. It’s creepy.
I read somewhere there is an ongoing discussion among Star Wars fans about its robot’s sentience. I think it’s beside the point. Borrowing from another recent fictional universe, that of Harry Potter, I’d say Star Wars robots are much closer to the former universe’s “house elves”. However, Star Wars robots’ lack of flesh makes it much harder to imagine the possibility of their emancipation or of an abolitionist movement. They are just creepy.
And, even worse, at least for those of us who like pets, they completely replace the latter, with so many “advantages” that it’s easy to forget we are talking about machines. It’s almost like the substitution of screen pornography for love, or even sex, that has become so widespread among young men of late. Unlike a dog, which would have died (and thus taught a boy about the death of a beloved living being), Andor’s adoptive parents’ robot (curiously, the only robot I’ve seen needing to recharge, like a cellphone, in all the hours of Star Wars I’ve watched) gets scratched but survives its owner, even if it was already there when the adopted kid arrived. The famous R2D2 and C3PO “live” even longer.
Just like mankind has always sought tech that is reliable, durable, and recyclable, we have always had the companionship of tame animals. We have working animals, like the ox or the horse, and the Star Wars universe also has them, in different shapes. We have animals we grow for food, from bees to cows to chickens, and while they are not present in the Star Wars universe, they could be there but not be important enough for the plot to appear onscreen. Our pets, however, those animals we love and that love us back, would have appeared if they were there, but they don’t. In their place are cold machines, almost human in their abilities and thus their superior; but not alive, and thus vastly inferior to the humblest kitten.
In a way, it’s a warning, something that, as it happens in any good sci-fi universe, shows us the mistakes we are presently making. We killed our horses and oxen, and now we drive machines that cost much more than a horse and don’t last much longer. We grew vast megalopolises, and now we eat meat and eggs that often come from the other side of the world, often raised in conditions we would not accept if we could see, as in past times we would have seen. Will we replace our pets with machines, like we’ve been replacing love with screen porn? I hope not, but I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.