military's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ( DARPA) has spent years developing the closest thing we have to a "Star Wars" style laser cannon. Hüdepohl ( Some of the Millennium Falcon's most powerful and most-used weapons, its quad laser cannons are also relatively feasible. While it's not the battle-ready deflector we've seen in Star Wars, it's definitely a step in that direction.Ī glowing laser shines forth from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, creating an artificial star 90 km above the surface of the Earth used to fine-tune the telescope's optics.
#Well never be able to make the jump to lightspeed portable#
Such a shield isn't technically feasible yet, but their general concept to use plasma to deflect radiation is certainly within the realm of possibility.Īdditionally,in 2008, Ruth Bamford of the Science and Technology Facilities Council's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in England and her colleagues studied the possibility of deflecting radiation using a portable magnetic shield. This "invisible shield" around Earth was the inspiration for this team's suggestion that you could use and manipulate plasma to deflect electromagnetic radiation - such as that coming from an energy-based or laser weapon, possibly. The students took notice of the Earth's ionosphere, a part of the upper atmosphere that contains plasma.Ĭurrently, we bounce communication signals off of the ionosphere's plasma to send them to different locations on Earth. But is this just a well-worn science fiction trope? Not exactly.īack in 2014, ExtremeTech profiled a team of students from the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom who considered the possibility of using plasma to build such a deflector.
Whenever conflict arises, deflectors go right up, keeping the ship intact despite enemy attacks. (Image credit: Lucasfilm)Īboard most ships in the "Star Wars" universe, and throughout sci-fi stories, deflector shields are a staple security measure. So, theoretically, without high-g suits, the human passengers aboard the Millennium Falcon would black out when the ship took high-g turns, even without traveling as fast as Han Solo has bragged it can. Twelve g's is about the maximum that jet-fighter pilots can experience before passing out, but this assumes they're wearing g-suits, which squeeze the legs in high-g situations to prevent blood from being pushed down. Īt 1 g, we can still push blood up to our brains, but as the g's increase, this becomes more difficult. This is comparable to being in a gravitational field 12 times higher than what we normally experience on Earth. According to calculations from Wired, passengers aboard the Millennium Falcon could experience up to about 12 g's while traveling at the speeds portrayed in the films (though this might not be the case if they are traveling through hyperspace). Recently, researchers put the EmDrive to the test and found that the thrust it produced comes from some kind of electromagnetic interaction that is likely between the engine's power cables and Earth's magnetic field, according to their study This might not be the end of the EmDrive as a potential, future engine - but it certainly isn't a hyperdrive.Įven if we suspend our disbelief and accept the ship's speed, another issue arises: g-forces. But it bounces microwaves around a chamber as a substitute for propellant. This is not a hyperdrive, or a warp drive as some have suggested. Now, there is some excitement in the scientific community surrounding an engine called the EmDrive. Stephen Hsu, a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Oregon, told our sister site Live Science, "You would need some very exotic type of matter in order to stabilize a wormhole, and it's not clear whether such matter exists in the universe." So, because we can't prove their existence, we certainly can't manipulate them for our own purposes. Now, while the theory of general relativity does predict wormholes, they are still just a theoretical phenomenon.
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