Special | The technology of Star Trek and Star Wars - Part 1

Get to know a little more about the technology present in the two biggest franchises of fiction, Star Wars and Star Trek.

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Guest columnist: Renato Azevedo

Hello readers. First of all I would like to thank the website team Thunder Wave, who invited me to write this article.

The technology of our favorite series and movies, in addition to being a tool that helps tell the story, also inspires us to pursue these feats in real life. THE Motorola would never have released the cell phone StarTAC if it weren't for the communicators widely used by Kirk, Spock, McCoy and company in Star Trek!

Especial | A tecnologia de Star Trek e Star Wars - Parte 1 1

So, I invite you to check out some other ideas presented in our favorite productions that already have their counterpart in our reality, and which ones can be used in the near or distant future.

bending speed, engage!

STAR WARS

Shall we start with the maximum? How about building a Death Star? Yes, the one and only, and not that thing contrary to the most elementary laws of physics which is the starkiller… even because the Master Yoda Said "size doesn't matter"!

The first Death Star has a diameter of 160 km. The website Centives.net made some estimates around the costs of building just his structure, without going into details about the Super-Laser or the hyperdrive. Compared to the construction of the large nuclear aircraft carriers of the US Navy, and if we were to build it with steel, there would be a need for 1.08*10 to the 15th power of tons of this material. At the current production rate, which is 1.3 billion tons, it would take 833,315 years to produce enough steel.

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The cost would be about $852,000,000,000,000,000, or 13,000 times the current Gross World Product. And a rebel with a paltry X-Wing fighter could blow it up if he was lucky enough to hit the right spot…

And the lightsabers? Well, it was recently announced that a joint team of Harvard and MIT performed an experiment, introducing atoms of the element rubidium in a vacuum chamber, and then cooling it to near absolute zero, or -273º C. Then they passed laser beams through this medium, and the result is that the photons, particles that make up the laser and also the ordinary light that we see, decelerated and coalesced, behaving like a new state of matter.

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What is your favorite?

Photons are massless, and normally never interact with each other. The feat became even more significant when one of the Harvard physicists involved, named Mikhail LUKIN (holy coincidence, Batman!) said: “The physics of what happens in these molecules formed by photons is very similar to what we see in light sabers in films of Star Wars”. But don't worry, it will take a while for us to have an operational saber, as the most immediate applications are in quantum computing, which already produces prototypes of incredibly fast new computers. When this photonic matter technology is further developed, it will allow more complex computing circuits, such as those in today's computers, to be produced for quantum machines.

The droids seen in the saga already have several equivalents in our current world. Various segments of the industry have used robots for decades, and machines for self-cleaning homes can be easily purchased, detecting dirt automatically and performing its task without human intervention. Japan has amazingly developed robotics, and one of its uses is companion androids for the elderly. One of the most famous robots in that country is the Asimo from Honda, who came to visit one of the editions of the Sao Paulo Auto Show.

The interconnection between computer systems seen in the movies is already a reality, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is taking significant steps, to the point that several international organizations have expressed concern that conscious machines could emerge and pose a threat. Drones, unmanned aircraft, have been carrying out military tasks for years, and there is fear that their autonomy will allow them to choose targets indiscriminately, threatening civilian populations even more. It is likely that very soon there will be international conferences to address the topic of AI

In much more positive terms, prostheses like Luke's hand are becoming more and more sophisticated every day, being more comfortable for the wearers and allowing them to have a sensitivity that comes much closer to human hands. To the Walt Disney Company is working on themed prosthetic prototypes, and one of the models is precisely inspired by Star Wars.

Even cooler and very exciting, John Peterson brought together a group of 3D printing enthusiasts like him under the name e-NABLE, and this group of volunteers has helped many children by producing prostheses at a fraction of the cost of ordinary appliances. One of the people who helped was the boy Liam Potter, and the video is exciting!

Augusta boy gets new 'trooper' arm

Possibly the best example of technology equivalent to Star Wars being used today is the ion propulsion of spacecraft.

Yes, very similar to the fighters TIE of the Empire! Such devices, of course, do not match the fictional spacecraft in terms of acceleration and speed, but they have greatly aided space research, at a fraction of the cost of conventional chemical thrusters.

Ionic engines have been in development since the mid-1950s, and their first application on a scientific mission was with the spacecraft. Deep Space 1 gives NASA, launched on October 24, 1998 and which visited the asteroid 9969 braille it's the comet 19P/Borrelly. It was the first use of this type of engine in deep space, which produced just 92 millinewtons of thrust. However, as it operated for long periods of time, the engine gave Deep Space 1 a speed increase of 4.3 km/s, or almost 15,450 km/h.

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Deep Space 1, Image: NASA

Even better was the spectacular Dawn mission, whose speed increase was 11.5 km/s, or more than 41,842 km/h. Launched in September 2007, the dawn headed to the main Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter, where it became the first spacecraft to orbit two distinct celestial bodies other than the Earth and the Moon. From July 16, 2011 until the end of 2012, it orbited the large asteroid Vesta, and then left for Ceres, the dwarf planet it arrived on March 6, 2015. There it made important discoveries, such as the presence of organic material in the small world. , as well as evidence of possible spaces with water or even an ocean under its surface. The mission was terminated due to a lack of conventional fuel for its maneuver thrusters on November 1, 2018, and it remains inert in orbit around Ceres.

In the second part, Star Trek!

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Renato Azevedo is an engineer and writer. Find out more about him at the links below:

Especial | A tecnologia de Star Trek e Star Wars - Parte 1 6Writer with R – official blog

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site contributor Literary Owl and Instagram

Co-host of Owl Pop

Discover the author's books:

From Roswell to Varginha (Editorial Stripe), and Daughters of the Stars (smack)

The Empire, the Meteor and the War of the Worlds

The List: Crack in Reality

The List: Nemesis

Grandma Nena and the Hunters: The Blue Beetle

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