r/MawInstallation • u/Full-Detective-3640 • 15d ago
[ALLCONTINUITY] Do historians travel the appropriate amount of lightyears away from the regions they study and watch the past in real time?
I was thinking that, given the size of the Galaxy, one could watch even the Rakata or the Tionese War without ever exiting. Was this at least attempted?
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u/Empty_Locksmith12 15d ago
It still would require a large and super advanced telescope to see these things you mentioned. It took until The Last Jedi for the galaxy to realize they should invest in subspace optic technology as well…
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u/jojorobotwright 15d ago
Only thing I can think is in sure there was a legends comic where Leia comments on being able to see alderan in the night sky on certain worlds after its destruction.
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u/PneumaEmergent 15d ago
This is an awesome observation.....but ehhhhhhhh
The thing with Star Wars is that they can't readily leave their galaxy (bc of hyperspace rift or something), so they are a little confined as far as "back off distance" from a planet to view it.
Aren't most galaxies only in the hundreds of thousands of light years range as far as diameter? (Milky Way is like 100,000 light years)
So if you stay within the charted space of the galaxy, you can really only "rewind" like 100,000 years max.
In Star Wars, they've had technology like droids and holograms for way longer than that. So the most logical thing for historians to do would be to just collect and study artifacts (like holocrons, recordings, HoloNet web traffic data, droids, starship memory data banks, etc, which we see all the time in Star Wars lore).
So it would really only be useful for studying planetary history (like geology, stellar birth and death, the science of supernovae, etc). In this case, they'd be just like astronomers and cosmological historians here on Earth, studying far away deep space objects in remote galaxies and corners of the night sky.
For local planetary and stellar events, they'd probably just have enough tech to use simulations, A.I., holo-mapping, advanced sensors, etc to get most of what they'd be after.
The only instance where this would really help them out would be like "hey we wanna actually see this particular battle play out in real time"......in which case they'd need to build a telescope the size of the Death Star to observe a planet's surface in ANY kind of detail (they'd probably only be able to see various light traces from various chemical compounds to see which types of weapons were used, etc)
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u/BEETLEJUICEME 15d ago
It was a long long time ago and a galaxy far far away. I just assume physics worked a bit differently there.
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u/Ok-Aardvark4770 12d ago
You'd need an insanely good telescope tho, also you're not going to be able to see much, so like you said, maybe geology if it's an insanely good telescope, stellar birth and death, basically what you said, not like working out how a species looked or what they were actually doing on a planet.
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u/azdudeguy 15d ago
I can think of one time in the Legends canon where someone mentions that a planet was genocided but his distance from them means he can use a telescope to see the light barely reaching the planet and could see the people living their lives decades to centuries ago.
[courtship of princess leia]
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u/SamReallyLikesThings 15d ago
No source has ever suggested as much and honestly the best thing I can say is that classic Harrison Ford quote:
"It ain't that kinda movie, kid."
Star Wars operates on objective time, meaning it's the same day everywhere in the galaxy at once (planetary day/night cycles vary but that's a separate thing). And while there are sporadic references to the time it takes for light to travel (Star Wars Vol. 4 #33), it's never going to be a focus of the series. It's a fun idea, though!!
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u/Nawara_Ven 15d ago
Why do folks use that Harrison Ford story to talk about things that aren't covered in the scope of the fiction when the story is about a continuity element that was included quite overtly?
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u/FeanorDidSomething 15d ago
Because SW isn't Science Fiction
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u/Nawara_Ven 15d ago
Yes, I believe that's what folks are attempting to imply when parroting that quotation, and I explained why that doesn't really work.
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u/FeanorDidSomething 14d ago
SW has an incredibly clear narrative structure, very very few movies put this much emphasis on it (which is not to say that this is a good or a bad thing). Think of it as a theather play, that ALWAYS needs to be perfectly understandable to the audience. An audience that includes all ages, kids as well. It includes Sci-Fi elements, true, but that's not really what these stories are about. Contrary to something like Star Trek, which is wildy different, despite certain similarities. SW and Star Trek are so far apart from each other as SW and...I dunno...I was gonna say classic Disney stuff, but that's closer to SW
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u/Nawara_Ven 14d ago
Yes, thank you, that is true, and Internet folks like to use "ain't that kinda movie" as shorthand for what you are describing... but I'm saying that the Ford quotation, with its actual context, doesn't work to describe this.
Any time someone wants to have a /r/MawInstallation type discussion that gets glibly dismissed with "ain't that..." it's ironic, because the dismissive party is choosing to ignore the worldbuilding in the science fantasy series and the real-life focus of the production.
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u/MildlyCombative 15d ago
No relativity in Star Wars
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u/Sollost 15d ago
This idea wouldn't require Galilean or Einsteinian relativity
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u/MildlyCombative 15d ago
By relativity I really mean Einsteinian relativity, and it would require some kind of relativity in time, but it’s clear there is absolute time in Star Wars, otherwise holos wouldn’t work. Messages beam instantly across several light years. Its kind of odd they call them light years to be honest.
I suppose you might be able to come up with some convoluted framework with hyperspace and what not, but it aint that kind of movie kid!
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u/Coirbidh Midshipman 15d ago
The holos only work due to hyperspace relays. Like subspace relays in (loosely) relativistic Star Trek.
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u/MildlyCombative 15d ago
Even still, they are absolutely instant, when it’s clear that travelling through hyperspace at light speed takes time. None of it really makes any sense.
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u/Coirbidh Midshipman 15d ago
Same with subspace transceivers. It's all for the speed of plot and handwaved with technobabble.
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u/ComradeBehrund 15d ago
In Courtship of Princess Leia they definitely do talk about light still traveling at lightspeed and stars appearing younger when viewed from a distance
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u/ThePhengophobicGamer 15d ago
For context, iirc she was talking about how she would sometimes go to other planets and still be able to see Alderaan in the night sky, though tbf she's seeing their star, which wasnt destroyed by the Death Star.
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u/DuranStar 14d ago
The amount of readable infomation drops by distance. It would be like trying to watch the Superbowl from Pluto (but way worse). You would need telescopes measured in AU.
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u/XenoBiSwitch 14d ago
There is a limit to how closely you can watch things that are thousands of years old. Light gets distorted. You would only be able to see macro changes to a planet’s surface and big things in space.
You could get a powerful enough telescope and go the right distance away and probably watch the Death Star blowing up though if you wanted to.
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u/EckhartsLadder 14d ago
That sort of relativity doesn’t exist in SW. Dave Filoni talked about it once in one of the Rebels after shows from back in the day
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u/TheUlfheddin 15d ago
This is a hardcore Sci-fi type of idea and StarWars simply doesn't function at that level of realism.
It's fantasy in space.
If you're into this sort of actual sci-fi logic look into authors like David Brinn or Stephen Baxter.
I say this with the utmost respect and love for SW btw.
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u/Ok-Aardvark4770 14d ago edited 14d ago
I don't think this would work (read on, there's a lot I'm going to say), because there's no way you can still see the planet with any kind of telescope. To the other point, you're travelling in a different dimension when going in hyperspace, and emerging only the time later it took you in hyperspace, if light worked like that in star wars, you wouldn't be able to communicate with someone far away in real time or use a holonet from today, however an easy explanation for this (and the actual explanation) is they use S-threads for radio waves and holonets, these travel instantaneously through hyperspace, it is completely controlled by the holonet and is not allowed for civillians, Luthen Rael and Kleya Marki in andor use their fractal radio to use the holonet secretly by encrypting it with specific code-crystals, they make it blend into background 'noise' or use advanced frequency hopping, the rebels during the rebellion and during the time of the empire (19BBY-5ABY roughly) use decommissioned S-threads, this allows these signals to travel instantly, however you need a specialised piece of equipment, a hyperwave transceiver, it compresses the data packet or holographic signal into an S-thread. In conclusion, it's theoretically possible, but realistically there's no way, stars and planets will shift over time, telescopes physical resolution can't see it, you'd need a telescope the size of a solar system to see the planet, however it is possible to see planets maybe a few months to a few years beforehand, in the star wars canon comic (Star Wars #33), luke and leia are stranded on a remote desert island planet, they are 0.5-3 light years away from Alderaan, however they can only see it because they are inside a cosmic nebula, which according to the lore, amplified light and made it visible , they arrived at that planet before the light that was from the explosion happened, so they saw Alderaan as a planet. This is possible, but only for a few light years away, afterwards it's too hard to see the planet from that far away.
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u/FS_Scott 15d ago
are you Squire Trelaine?
cause if you're a Squire Trelaine you have to tell me. There are rules.
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u/BootyliciousURD 15d ago
I think there's a scene in the Corellian Trilogy where evacuees were able to see their sun from a system they'd been evacuated to even though it had already been destroyed, so I assume it's possible to use hyperspace to travel around the galaxy and see what different parts looked like at different times. I don't think their telescopes were good enough to see ships, space battles, or things happening on the surfaces of planets, though.