Just 48 short years ago, movie director George Lucas used the phrase “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” as the opening to the first “Star Wars” movie, later labeled “Episode IV: A New Hope.” But at least four important aspects of the “Star Wars” saga are much closer – both in time and space – than Lucas was letting on.
One, the ability to add blue food coloring to milk, was possible even at the time the first film came out. But in 2024, “Star Wars”-themed blue milk became periodically available in grocery stores.
And we, an environmental health engineer and a civil engineer, know there are at least three more elements of these ancient, distant Lucas stories that might seem like science fiction but are, in fact, science reality.
Moisture farming
In that first movie, “Episode IV,” Luke Skywalker’s Uncle Owen was a farmer on the planet of Tatooine. He farmed water from air in the middle of a desert.
It might sound impossible, but it’s exactly what experts discussed at the second International Atmospheric Water Harvesting Summit hosted by Arizona State University in March 2025.
Each day, a human needs to consume about the equivalent of 0.8 gallons of water (3 liters). With more than 8 billion people living on the planet, that means engineers need to produce nearly 2.6 trillion gallons (10 trillion liters) of clean drinking water every year. Taken globally, rainfall would be enough, but it’s distributed very unevenly – including landing in the oceans, where it immediately becomes too salty to drink safely.
Deserts, which cover about one-fifth of the Earth’s land area, are home to about 1 billion people.
Researchers at places such as Berkeley have developed solar-powered systems that can produce clean drinking water from thin air. In general, they use a material that traps water molecules from the air within its structure and then use sunlight to condense that water out of the material and into drinkable liquid. But there is still a ways to go before they are ready for commercial distribution and available to help large numbers of people.
Space debris
When the second Death Star was destroyed in “Return of the Jedi,” it made a huge mess, as you would expect when blowing to smithereens an object at least 87 miles across (140 kilometers). But the movie’s mythology helpfully explains a hyperspace wormhole briefly opened, scattering much of the falling debris across the galaxy.
As best as anyone can tell, a hyperspace wormhole has never appeared near Earth. And even if such a thing existed or happened, humans might not have the technology to chuck all our trash in there anyway. So we’re left with a whole lot of stuff all around us, including in space.
According to the website Orbiting Now, in late April 2025 there were just over 12,000 active satellites orbiting the planet. All in all, the United States and other space-faring nations are trying to keep track of nearly 50,000 objects orbiting Earth. And there are millions of fragments of space debris too small to be observed or tracked.
Just as on Earth’s roads, space vehicles crash into each other if traffic gets too congested. But unlike the debris that falls to the road after an Earth crash, all the bits and pieces that break off in a space crash fly away at speeds of several thousand miles per hour (10,000 to 30,000 kph) and can then hit other satellites or spacecraft that cross their paths.
This accumulation of space debris is creating an increasing problem. With more satellites and spacecraft heading to orbit, and more stuff up there moving around that might hit them, space travel is becoming more like flying the Millennium Falcon through an asteroid field every day.
Engineers at NASA, the European Space Agency and other space programs are exploring a variety of technologies – including a net, a harpoon and a laser – to remove the more dangerous pieces of space junk and clean up the space environment.
The Force itself
To most Earth audiences, the Force was a mysterious energy field created by life that binds the galaxy together. That is until 1999, when “Episode I: The Phantom Menace” revealed that the Force came from midi-chlorians, a microscopic, sentient life form that lives within every living cell.
To biologists, midi-chlorians sound suspiciously similar to mitochondria, the powerhouse of our cells. The current working hypothesis is that mitochondria emerged from bacteria that lived within cells of other living things. And mitochondria can communicate with other life forms, including bacteria.
There are many different kinds of mitochondria, and medical professionals are learning how to transplant mitochondria from one cell to another just like they transplant organs from one person’s body to another. Maybe one day a transplant procedure could help people find the light side of the Force and turn away from the dark side.
May the Fourth – and the Force – be with you.
Daniel B Oerther is Professor of Environmental Health Engineering, Missouri University of Science and Technology. William Schonberg is Professor of Civil Engineering, Missouri University of Science and Technology.
The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.
© The Conversation
21 Comments
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SomeWeeb
Bit of a stretch, but sure.
SomeWeeb
I would have gone with droids, drones and lasers myself.
MilesTeg
Among the many things that Lucas misappropriated from Frank Herbert's Dune was detailed accounts of moisture farming such as wind-traps and dew collectors which are based on similar actual practices. Herbert was deeply interested in environments especially desert habitation.
SW's is responsible for the concept of space debris? LOL!
And true that the concept of midi-chlorians was created by Lucas but as usual, everything is glossed over and no details are provided about it or any other concepts, scientifically, politically, socially, etc. That's why SW isn't sci-fi and just a space fantasy adventure.
fallaffel
Let's call it borrowed, Bashar.
MilesTeg
But I already tried to euphemize it......I didn't use 'stolen' like many do. But as you used Bashar....okay.
virusrex
That is not misappropriating anything, Lucas did not say this was an original concept, as it is common on fiction he just took something that he liked and included in his story, it would be like calling Herbert's influences (like Norman Walter or Lesley Blanch) also misappropriating.
The article never makes this claim, it is simply describing things that are included in SW and that are also real right now, that is very different from saying the movies were the first to come up with the concepts.
owzer
misappropriated? appropriated?
ian
Amazing
MilesTeg
Why would what Lucas said have any bearing? LOL! The amount of ideas he took from the Dune Chronicles is extensive and well documented. He didn't even try to alter them that much.
https://nerdist.com/article/everything-star-wars-borrowed-from-dune/
https://screenrant.com/star-wars-dune-story-concepts-ideas-lucas-copy/
https://www.yardbarker.com/entertainment/articles/everything_star_wars_borrowed_from_dune/s1_17316_40041753
He's lucky that Herbert wasn't a particularly an aggressive person but it did cross his mind.
Herbert himself referenced many ideas to write Dune but he had the integrity to customize and alter them accordingly.
Even making a loose connection between SW and space debris is laughable. SW isn't even sci-fi. so how can it even have a connection with these scientific concepts. A badly written article by amateurs that was poorly conceived and researched.
1glenn
If one tried to make a list of the things that the Star Trek shows predicted, it would be much longer than four. That does not mean that everything in Star Trek was entirely new. Even the guiding principles for the United Federation of Planets' explorers were first set down, as far as my own reading has found, back as far as 1940 in Sci-Fi books.
Some of the predicted inventions to be found in Star Trek, just off the top of my head:
cell phones
digital cameras
universal translators (just bought one for my globe trotting daughter, less than a hundred dollars from Japan - "only" handles 80 languages, but who's counting)
the principle of the inclusion of various races, species, and sexual orientations, rather than the principle of exclusion
the ability to make a machine that fabricates other machines from a source of material......this is already talked about as being very important in the establishment of bases outside Earth, although we can't make foods this way yet
wide screen TVs
the idea of stealth technology
the idea of using medical scanners predated the actual invention of MRI technology
So, one can make the argument that Star Trek includes more science fiction than Star Wars.
1glenn
a cashless society
1glenn
the idea that a normal human lifespan should be 200 years
virusrex
Because that is what would make it misappropriating, pretending it was something he came up with, since he did not do it then your comment is false.
And the same can be said about Dune, and from everything that Dune took something from, and you can go back to prehistory this way.
Herbert did the same and sometimes he even copied phrases completely, it is common, it does not mean either misappropriated their sources.
The same as Lucas.
No, it is not, it is a concept that (as the article mentions) have some importance in the extended universe, there is nothing laughable about it.
Of course it is. It is science fiction, adventure, space opera, etc.
1glenn
The conversation seems to have digressed into a comparison of Star Wars with Dune, and which is more nerdy, or hard science fiction. As a life-long sci-fi / fantasy fanatic, I will venture forth with my own opinion.
In my humble opinion, Dune and Star Wars are similar in their degree of science fiction material. IMO, neither leaves the other in the dust, so to speak. Star Trek, on the other hand, is way more geeky, technological, and prescient, than either of the other two.
Let the hate begin! Just kidding, no hate please.
This whole conversation is one I have had many times with one of my son-in-laws. The best that can be said is that we agree to disagree. He is a die-hard Star Wars fan. While I saw the first SW movie many times, I am and forever will be a Star Trek fan. I followed a technological career, while he made his fortune in business, if that has any bearing on the subject.
As for Dune, I absolutely loved the novel, but I found the movie a big disappointment. The novel was able to create a whole amazing universe inside my head, but the movie is way too short to do that. It seemed to me that over 90% of the novel was left out of the movie.
Left out of the discussion is the Foundation series of novels. Asimov's universe predates the others in this discussion, and was influential to all of them. While I loved his novels, and spent a lot of time engrossed in them, as an adult I would say that his basic premise is seriously flawed. The idea that someone could predict the future in detail based upon analyzing a knowledge of today will probably not work because there are too many variables to consider. If one drops a pebble into a pond, the waves radiate out in a circle, getting smaller and smaller with time and distance, which means that other factors than the impact of the pebble will influence the state of the surface of the water more than the pebble. Which is to say that the future will be impacted by events we cannot predict. Again, a lot of fantasy, and less hard science.
In case anyone is still reading......on the far end of the spectrum of fantasy is Lord of the Rings. Apologies to Stephen Colbert, but although I tried several times, I could not read past the first chapter. It was just too boring. The movies, on the other hand, were true works of art, deserving of the many awards which they received.
1glenn
I was surprised to read in a sci-fi story by A. E. van Vogt from about 1940 something very similar to the principles attributed to the United Federation of Planets in Star Trek on how to deal with newly met species on other worlds, by Gene Roddenberry in the 1960s. I had thought that Roddenberry might have created the rules for first contact on his own, but I guess not.
MilesTeg
Provide one passage, one phrase that Frank Herbert copied completely.
chatanista
Blue milk? Yeah, no thanks. The water farming on the other hand is awesome.
MilesTeg
Provide one passage, one phrase that Frank Herbert copied completely.
Well.....where's the passage you claimed Herbert copied completely????
I seriously doubt that you've even read the book. If you did, you'd know that a writer so meticulous and detailed as Frank Herbert would never copy or plagiarize the way Lucas did.
The rest of what you wrote is the same as your mistaken claim about Herbert. It's all posing.
If you knew anything about sci-fi, you'd realize that SW isn't. Why talk and pretend you're an expert on something you clearly aren't.
virusrex
See, it is much more productive to just recognize you just didn't know about the topic, it is well described
https://www.reddit.com/r/dune/comments/pq2c9w/dune_vs_sabres_of_paradise/
There according to your completely arbitrary and incorrect definition of "misappropriation" Herbert is as guilty as he can be.
In reality this is just a lack of understanding of how fiction works and is written.
The same as pretending you are an authority to decide what is or not science fiction, not an argument that debunks the current understanding that clearly contradicts your mistaken concept. I am not pretending to be an expert, simply read what actual experts have to say about the topic and that demonstrate you are wrong.
MilesTeg
Virusex
I stand corrected about the Sabres of Paradise and Dune. You’re right. Thanks for the insight.
GBR48
Almost all of Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' has 'become reality'.
SF authors have been borrowing from each other since the genre began. It is normal practice.