I don’t like to make a big deal out of big deals, but Ame and I are engaged.

Bug status: Rejected
Reason: By Design

Notes:
Every modern President of the United States is a puppet. All you Bush haters calm down. And you conspiracy theorists are wrong too. The United States Government is a huge, lumbering dinosaur with far too many forces at play with so very many hands in the cookie-jar it’s disgusting. Looks like it’s functioning perfectly and as intended!

I am not a huge Star Wars fanatic, and as such, I don’t really know or care about all the minutiae of the politics and timelines. I’ve only briefly encountered the “ABY/BBY” way of keeping track of time in the Star Wars universe, but it is mostly the same as ours. I like space battles, my favorite sequences are anything on speeder-bikes, and I love lightsaber battles. Most of the reasons I love Star Wars are why I love science-fiction, physics, and space in general. It pained me though when I realized the Star Wars universe makes no sense. Some of the physics and tech seem unfeasible, but that part is perfectly acceptable to me.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”–Arthur C. Clarke

Done. I’ve just obliterated almost all the arguments saying this or that is scientifically impossible. “But what about…” Nope, sorry. They figured it out with their magic-like technology. The part that makes no sense though is the rate of advancement: It is excessively slow. The six films depict about, what, 50 years time? I know there are important, exciting things that happen after Star Wars: The Return of the Jedi, but for our purposes, it starts with Anakin and it ends with Anakin. I can buy the fact that the technology hasn’t advanced much in this time frame. It even makes sense that the technology behind the Rebel forces seem cobbled together because well, it was! A rag-tag, fringe group of dissidents simply doesn’t have the resources The Empire has access to.

The real problem for me was when Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic was released for the X-Box in 2003. This game takes place 4000 years before the time of the Skywalkers and Obi-Wan. The technology is not significantly different. What gives? That would mean there was little to no innovation for thousands of years! Looking at our own history here on Earth, there was a very similar period of stagnation and even decline called the Dark Ages. The problem with this comparison is we were in a horse and cart phase of technology and it only lasted about 500 years. After The Renaissance, humanity flourished for the most part, and technology is advancing at a tremendous rate. With the Dark Ages ending by the close of the 9^th century, I can’t even imagine what our own technology would be like in the year 5000, let alone starting at Star Wars-level tech and then advancing 4000 years!

Lightsabers can only be constructed by those trained in the use of The Force because the components are too sensitive and volatile to be handled by a machine or someone unskilled in their use. Bullshit. I think over 4000 years, someone would have figured it out, especially a Dark Side user of The Force who wanted to arm his minions well. This is just one example, as there are countless other “stagnations.”

So, Star Wars is cool and has some great things to strive for as far as sci-fi tech goes (FTL, Repulsor Lifts, Lightsabers), but the universe in which it is set is at a stand-still as far as innovation is concerned.