Do you think the average citizen of the Star Wars galaxy would even be aware of the Force? — Page 2

It's hard to justify how average citizens could be unaware of the Force.  Surely a documentary would be made at some point about the Jedi, who supposedly had such an important role in the Republic.  Surely there would have been some sort of scientific investigation into the claimed abilities of the Jedi.  Surely there were cameras to record their supposed feats during the Clone Wars and broadcast them to the masses.  The only real way to make sense of Han's statement is that the Empire had been suppressing the media and any and all information about the Jedi for at least his entire lifetime.

Just because the Jedi have superhuman abilities isn't automatic proof that they come from the Force or even that the Force exists. I'm sure that skeptics in the galaxy far, far away could explain away Jedi feats as being the results of some ultra-sophisticated technology or even genetic manipulation.

If it makes you feel any better, in TRM, Naboo->Tatooine only took as long as it took Ric Olie to say "look over there."

xhonzi said:

Also- not in that thread, but I do recall thinking that Tatooine->Alderaan was about 5 minutes, but someone suggested that they could be on the Falcon for days.  It all seems to make more sense to me that way.  Also- I think Zahn writes hyperspace as still taking significant time to travel.  Not compared to realspace, but still not instantaneous.

I've always felt that the trip to Alderaan was the only place in any Star Wars film where they made it feel like space travel took a long time. Han walks out and gives them an arrival time, and the characters waste time playing chess and playing with laser swords. I've always gotten the impression that the trip took them several hours.

However, starting with The Empire Strikes Back, you start to feel getting from one end of the galaxy to the other takes about as much time and effort as getting from one end of a big city to the other. Though once you get to the PT, space travel suddenly feels instantaneous as they zip around from planet to planet. If Star Wars makes space travel feel like an intercontinental flight, and ESB and ROTJ make it feel like traveling around a big city, then the PT makes it feel like an extremely hyper kid on his bicycle bouncing around his neighborhood from one friend's house to the nest. 

CP3S said:

Bib Fortuna and Jabba the Hutt scoff at the idea of Luke being a Jedi. I guess that could be taken as, "Wow, a Jedi. Haha, what a kook" or a, "Him? A Jedi? Yeah right!", I've always taken it as the first. 

Their reaction makes sense because

A) All the Jedi are supposed to be dead.

B) If a Jedi did somehow survive, he would be middle-aged to elderly.

Also, Jabba and Bib are technically correct because Yoda explicitly said Luke would only be a Jedi after defeating Vader.  So, if you'll forgive my use of PT jargon, Luke at that point was a Padawan and not a Jedi.

CP3S said:

xhonzi said:

Also- not in that thread, but I do recall thinking that Tatooine->Alderaan was about 5 minutes, but someone suggested that they could be on the Falcon for days.  It all seems to make more sense to me that way.  Also- I think Zahn writes hyperspace as still taking significant time to travel.  Not compared to realspace, but still not instantaneous.

I've always felt that the trip to Alderaan was the only place in any Star Wars film where they made it feel like space travel took a long time. Han walks out and gives them an arrival time, and the characters waste time playing chess and playing with laser swords. I've always gotten the impression that the trip took them several hours.

However, starting with The Empire Strikes Back, you start to feel getting from one end of the galaxy to the other takes about as much time and effort as getting from one end of a big city to the other. Though once you get to the PT, space travel suddenly feels instantaneous as they zip around from planet to planet. If Star Wars makes space travel feel like an intercontinental flight, and ESB and ROTJ make it feel like traveling around a big city, then the PT makes it feel like an extremely hyper kid on his bicycle bouncing around his neighborhood from one friend's house to the nest. 

 Maybe the Millenium Falcom isn't as powerful a ship as the ones in the new movies. When Luke first saw it, he called it a piece of junk. Maybe Han's ship took a little longer to travel than some of the "higher end" models that were around.

Maybe Bespin is close enough to Hoth to allow the Falcon to get there on sublight alone. And who knows how much time passed between the scenes of their departure and arrival? They may have spent several weeks en route.

CP3S said:

Not to mention the force becomes biological fact in the prequels when we introduce midichlorines to the mix, now making it something observable and testable via scientific technology.

It would seem to make force denial something akin to germ denial.

 Remember the XyZ/ABC pledge.  Oh, wait.

DuracellEnergizer said:

Maybe Bespin is close enough to Hoth to allow the Falcon to get there on sublight alone. And who knows how much time passed between the scenes of their departure and arrival? They may have spent several weeks en route.

 Not likely.  To travel from our sun to Pluto would take an average of 340 light minutes (i.e. if the Falcon were traveling at exactly the speed of light, it would take 340 minutes to do so, more than 5 hours).  Now the passage of time is unclear, but what is clear is that the Falcon isn't ever travelling nearly that fast, and it has several hangups between systems.  And those 340 light minutes are just to the Kuiper belt and the dwarf planet Pluto, not actually out of our solar system.  The next closest star to us is Alpha Centauri (actually two stars), which happen to be about 4.37 lightyears away.  Travelling at even a rapid sublight pace would take years.  Now obviously Hoth is the Sol sytem and Anoat or Bespin aren't Alpha Centauri, but nevertheless, if Star Wars existed in the real universe, likely similar distances would apply.  In the distances they talk about in ESB, it's likely that such close stars would in reality be considered binary stars.  Alpha Centauri A and B are about as far apart as Uranus from the sun, or about 24 times the distance of earth to the sun (or 24 AU--Pluto's average distance being about 40 AU).  This approximately means about 200 light minutes.  Now it is unclear how time passes in ESB.  Are they stranded for months before arriving at Bespin?  I don't think so.  It really seems like no more than a few days.

Gosh, I'm really getting into mumbo jumbo.  At the end of the day, it's unlikely that such distances could be traversed in so little time on sublight speeds.  We just have to accept that we are in a fantasy universe and enjoy a "perfect" movie where solar systems are unreasonably close and people can walk with gas masks inside an asteroid without their blood boiling and their eyeballs bursting.  I still love ESB.

In answer to the original question, it seems like just from OT inferences the Jedi were well known.  Ben told Luke they were the guardians of peace and justice.  Though not the only police force, it seems they would have been a major fighting force of galaxy-wide renown.

darth_ender said:

Are they stranded for months before arriving at Bespin?  I don't think so.  It really seems like no more than a few days.

Yeah, perhaps.  Han did acknowledge that Bespin was "pretty far, but I think we can make it," too.  Still, it would take years if the scale is like our solar system, but as xhonzi said, we can imagine that Star Wars systems, or perhaps even just Hoth, Anoat, and Bespin, are closer than the norm.

Just an added thought, it appears that Luke never jumps to hyperspace either.  He wants to "keep it on manual for a while," and thereafter steers a bit, implying a sublight trip.  I guess all these systems might be pretty close.  But again, you can't rip a movie like this for not being scientifically accurate.  You watch it for enjoyment, not physics lessons.

kamalayka said:

 Maybe the Millenium Falcom isn't as powerful a ship as the ones in the new movies. When Luke first saw it, he called it a piece of junk. Maybe Han's ship took a little longer to travel than some of the "higher end" models that were around.

Ah, yes, that would make sense. Especially since Han brags about how his ship is ridiculously fast and can out run Imperial Cruisers and make Kessel runs in impossible short times. Han is even surprised when Luke and Obi-Wan say they've never heard of the Millennium Falcon before. And doesn't Lando call it the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy? Also in the EU always talks about it being superlatively fast.

It feels like the Falcon has always been built up to be this insanely fast ship. So I don't think the idea of it being older and slower stands too well. I am pretty sure this is a case of "let's do it this way" then later changing direction and doing it a different way.

I think the Jedi would be fairly well known from the holonet, but I'm sure it would be extremely rare for the average guy/girl/other to see a Jedi in his/her/its lifetime. They would be a lot more common on core worlds like Coruscant, but farther out in the galaxy, most people would have just seen brief clips of them on the news or only heard of them.

gobalicious said:

the Empire had been suppressing the media and any and all information about the Jedi for at least his entire lifetime.

Wouldn't parents tell their children about Jedi and The Force? Wouldn't people wonder why they aren't allowed to speak of something?

The Jedi may have been misportrayed by the media, leading the public to believe that they didn't really possess powers as great as they did. So most people wouldn't have thought that much of the Jedi.