I doubt that president Obama's aides expected to be quoted in economic science articles on their cost prediction of the construction of a Death Star like orbital battle station.
If I read the paper right, I think the cost analysis of the Death Star is more a fun trick to build a real world money analogy in which the final quantity is of no relevance at all, as they later normalize it to a gross galactic product, based on the manhattan project.
The Manhattan project example struck me as an odd idea in the paper, as the project involved creating a whole industrial infrastructure from scratch [1], where it seems like the Death Star is a very large spacecraft in a galaxy filled with spacecraft. The carrier example seems like a better model to project from.
[1] 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb', Richard Rhodes
I don't think that's true: Wikipedia tells me the entire multi-year budget of the Manhattan Project ended up at around $26B in 2015 dollars. Not chump change, but certainly if they'd needed more money, more could have been found. I'd bet at least 10x that was spent on the US Navy every year of the war.
Reminds me of Feynman's stories about testing the limits of what they could actually requisition. A 10" gold hemisphere ended up as a doorstop after its experimental use was complete[1]. I also remember reading somewhere about a (somewhat fanciful) request for some quantity of a rare earth element, to which the response was that it was more than the entire known global supply.
In this infographic, on the 'Austrian' side you have a chart that looks remarkably similar to the IS-LM model (Investment and Savings - Liquidity preference and Money Supply) which is a mathematical representation of Keynes' macroeconomic theory...
It also mentions that interest rates are key - well they aren't exactly ignored in the IS-LM model (it's perpetually on the Y-axis), nor in present day 'Keynesian' economics (pretty much every move the fed makes is described in terms of the target interest rate).
As for the cause of recessions, Austrians blame inflation, or asset-price 'bubbles'. Again, not exactly ground breaking. Why do you think central banks generally raise interest rates during times of high inflation? Today however, we barely even have inflation. And then another link is pedantic about the definition of 'inflation'.
The 'cure' for recessions is apparently to let them happen. This isn't a bad thought, however there IS a human cost. The region I live in Canada right now is going through a recession, what are the symptoms? Increased crime, increased domestic violence, increased suicide, higher poverty. And this is a country with a social net. It wouldn't get any better with 'laissez-faire' policies...
Anyhow, while so called 'Keynesians' are busy actually trying to be economists (both in industry and government), 'Austrian' economists are basically just whining about how they're marginalized, without offering up anything more than empty rhetoric and no answers.
And then the best straw-man of all: "Why did no one predict the housing crisis and subsequent recession?"
For the same reason "no one" predicts the crashes of individual stocks. Because people get caught up in the frenzy, ignore the voice of reason, and the smart money has already exited... If no one predicted the housing crisis, why did Goldman Sachs bet against it?
BTW, Keynes was a fairly successful investor, far more so than Hayek...
Speaking of investing, one of my favourite quotes: "Bulls make money, bears make money, but pigs just get slaughtered!"
I don't know how the q-fin section works, but in the math part of the arxiv "General Mathematics" is the bucket that the admins put crank articles in before they get removed.
I am also growing irritated with the excessive promotion that is not only saturating all media, but also somehow overflowing into everything else. It is almost to the point where I expect that someone will sneak into my home and replace my usual clothing with Star Wars 7 promotional apparel as I sleep.
And I also know that since Disney owns Lucasfilm now, it will never, ever stop. The franchise is part of that entertainment black hole that has become a never-ending advertisement for itself.
They're going to make this release a success on paper, whether anyone actually likes the movie or not, because they're already contracted to make two more of them, plus the toys and video games.
OP appears to be interested in scientific papers, and may have stumbled upon it. This is unlikely to be astroturfing and more a side-effect of the recent interest in Star Wars and its associated marketing push.
i always read it as a 'generalized' personal pronoun implying no particular subject (like 'man' in german or 'on' in french) which is nicer than writing everything in a passive voice.
"You" for singular and plural seemed mind-narrowing to me at first too, until we... got accustomed to. Surely the trend can continue with other pronouns!
"In this case study we found that the Rebel Alliance would
need to prepare a bailout of at least 15%, and likely at least 20%, of GGP in order to mitigate the
systemic risks and the sudden and catastrophic economic collapse. Without such funds at the ready,
it likely the Galactic economy would enter an economic depression of astronomical proportions."
The death star has no intrinsic economic value. It produces nothing, so it's destruction shouldn't really change anything. It could only ever be back by either taxation or the printing of money. This doesn't change whether it exists or not.
The destruction of the death star may reduce the burden since it would no longer incur operational costs. On the other hand, it did establish the operators as a tax authority.
I would expect lending banks to be covered by printed money followed by corresponding inflation. On the other hand, if the lenders are isolated among relatively few planets/systems, they could be overtaken by the government and those systems would bear the brunt of the losses.
The most likely outcome wouldn't be galactic recession, but return to chaos and war as the grievances between systems would now be unchecked.
It has as much economic value as Aircraft Carriers do. It might be an economy in itself, creating a demand for food and other necessities which must be procured from somewhere, generating demand. It must also be supplied by weapons, clothing etc (not sure how durable they are in that world).
But you're right that it can act as an enforcement agency, a tax collector of sorts. Or maybe an extortionist: "Pay up or we destroy your planet!".
Creating additional demand for other goods is not valuable; quite the opposite: it's a cost that needs to be balanced against whatever ongoing value is being provided.
I always figured it'd be easier to find a small moon and retrofit it with power-plants, engines, weapons and facilities than build a complete small-moon sized system made of (mostly hollow?) worked metal in orbit. Cheaper and probably more rugged.
It could be a problem of mass - a Death Star made of composite materials probably masses quite a bit less than an equivalent-sized moon or asteroid, (presumably) making it a lot cheaper to shuttle around.
(I freely admit to being more of a Trek than Wars fan, so I don't actually know how physics has been toyed with in that particular distant galaxy, so I don't know if my hypothesis is true - maybe they use spindizzy-like motors so that larger masses are actually more economical to move?)
Put more accurately, it's even softer sci-fi than Trek. The deuterocanonical "Expanded Universe" material[1] goes to a lot of effort to explain and justify stuff like moon-sized space stations and jet-fighter-sized ships that can destroy stars, but if you don't just sort of turn your critical faculties off and go along for the ride, it gets too much to bear pretty quick.
[1] Now more properly called the "apocryphal pre-Disney Expanded Universe material", or so I gather.
For the record that's not what it's called. The official terms are legends. It's been re-branded as Star Wars Legends. Honestly the EU was a bit of a mess but by far the best parts of Star Wars were in there. Unfortunately books make less money than movies and no one was interested in doing direct translations of already told stories no matter how much they made sense.
The key problem with most of the best EU stuff is that, by the mid/late 90s, the original actors were far too old for it.
Although, I'd love to see a (live action) TV series based very loosely on the early Han Solo stories, obviously with someone else cast in the part of a 20-something Han.
It's space opera, which is a subgenre of science fiction.
Some people invent definitions of "science fiction" that exclude some works of science fiction, but that's silly. There's no definition of "science fiction". It's a concept that we feel out by pointing to things that are "clearly science fiction" and then sort of deriving a fuzzy decision boundary from that. If you ask people whether Star Wars is science fiction, most people will say yes. Robots! Lasers! Space ships! Aliens! It's clearly science fiction.
There are useful definitions, which talk about subsets of science fiction that don't include Star Wars. But those aren't definitions of science fiction, even if they use the same words.
"Science fiction" is also an artificial ghetto that historically was used to segregate "science fiction" from "literary fiction". It's funny to see the same process being repeated.
> It's space opera, which is a subgenre of science fiction.
That's an interesting view, but one which is nullified by:
> There's no definition of "science fiction".
Then the phrase has no meaning or use, and the statements "Star Wars is science fiction" or "space opera is a subgenre of science fiction" are semantically null, neither true nor false, just sequences of words that form grammatically valid sentences that communicate no meaning.
If "space opera is a subgenre of science fiction" is to be true, then "space opera" and "science fiction" both need to have definitions, and the definition of the latter must include at least everything included in the definition of the former. If either or both has no definition, then the statement has no meaning, and cannot be said to be true or false.
You're dancing around philh's main point, which I find very much valid. When we're talking about something popular like "science fiction", you need to account for two different definitions.
* The written definition, as found in the dictionary and/or agreed upon by the tiny subset of hardcore fans who care.
* The loose popular definition, which varies for each person but tends to include the broadest set of common basics: lasers, robots, spaceships, etc.
When referring to the written definition, it makes sense to say, "It's space opera, which is a subgenre of science fiction," as long as you're saying it among folks who appreciate the distinction. But when referring to the popular imagination, it's not a stretch to say, "There's no definition of "science fiction," because it means something a little bit different to each person.
I disagree. If philh intended to make the finer distinction you're now making they should have stated it. As it stands they are stating both that a) "science fiction" is a fuzzy category, there's no right or wrong in how you categorize it in specific instances and b) this particular statement on what is science fiction is right. These two points contradict each other, and dragonwriter was correct in pointing this out. Just because a certain usage of a word is not accepted by the majority doesn't mean it's wrong.
verisimilidude didn't get me, but nor did you or dragonwriter. I'm distinguishing between definition and meaning. You don't need to be able to define a word, to know roughly what it means.
The words "science fiction" mean something. They're a map pointing to some territory. They don't mean the exact same thing to everyone, but close enough to be useful.
Attempted definitions of "science fiction" attempt to point at the meaning. They're maps pointing to a map.
When I say "there's no definition", what I really mean is "I've never seen a definition that points to a good map of the territory".
In particular, a lot of definitions point at maps which don't point to Star Wars, and those are bad maps.
> I'm distinguishing between definition and meaning.
"definition" and "meaning" are the same thing.
> You don't need to be able to define a word, to know roughly what it means.
The degree to which you know what a word means is precisely the specificity to which you can define it. Those are different phrasings of the same content.
> The words "science fiction" mean something. They're a map pointing to some territory. They don't mean the exact same thing to everyone, but close enough to be useful.
I kind of disagree with this. The words "science fiction" mean different enough things to different people (and even to the same people in different contexts) that those definitions are not close enough to be useful, except where social convention, mutual agreement, etc., act to align the definitions to, if not precise alignment, very close alignment within some very narrow subset of the space of all the definitions the term has when considering all possible contexts of use.
Often, a key aspect of making the term useful in a particular exchange is agreeing on a definition.
> When I say "there's no definition", what I really mean is "I've never seen a definition that points to a good map of the territory".
I think the problem is that you fail to recognize that the different uses aren't various fidelities of "maps" pointing to the same "territory", they are -- to borrow the map/territory metaphor -- maps pointing to different territories that are share a name, the way the same name might refer in different contexts to the juridical territory of a city, the territory of the county of the same name in which the city is located, the territory of a metropolitan area centered on the city that is not coextensive with it or the county, or a geographical feature associated with and overlapping the boundaries of the citiy. A map of any of those territories would differ critically from the other, not because it is a bad map of the territory, but because it is a map of a different but overlapping territory.
> In particular, a lot of definitions point at maps which don't point to Star Wars, and those are bad maps.
I think its a bad map in the way that a map of Los Angeles that doesn't include East L.A. [0] is a bad map.
[0] An unincorporated community in Los Angeles County, but not part of the City of Los Angeles.
Given that I've explained the distinction I'm making, this is a super unhelpful thing to say. It makes me disinclined to engage with the rest of your comment.
Fantasy and science fiction are usually lumped together under the "speculative fiction" umbrella. Since Clarke pointed out that magic is equivalent to sufficiently advanced technology, the dividing line between science fiction and fantasy can change according to the technical sophistication of the observer.
In 1865, Jules Verne's _De la Terre à la Lune_ was science fiction. By 1903, Tsiolkovsky made it space fantasy. By 1960, it was back to science fiction again, though it will never be usable for manned launches until we find some way to make >100g accelerations survivable.
As such, I don't find it useful to divide the genres too strictly. A Charles deLint fairy tale novel and a Cunningham/Carruthers Men in Black comic are in the same genre: low modern urban fantasy. Laser guns and magic wands are the same thing. Lightsabers and vorpal blades are the same thing. Robotic automata and servitor daemons are the same thing.
In most cases, the fantasy elements keep the story interesting, and the sci-fi elements lend it an air of future plausibility. You don't have to explain a magic wand, but you might have to mention that a laser rifle uses an Er:YAG laser and a heavy air-breathing lithium battery, only in very arid atmospheric conditions, to literally explode the water in a human target into steam from hundreds of meters away. But a shock cannon uses a different type of laser to ionize the air between the user and the target, and uses a voltage multiplier circuit to shoot an artificial lightning bolt down the conductive pathway, grounding through the target. If it isn't explained, it's another magic wand.
I have read books that started out looking like high fantasy at the beginning, until the characters learn that magic is the result of an AI--from the colonization ship's navigation computer--performing weapons research on the human descendants of its former passengers, and that the creatures formerly described as demons are actually aliens.
Science fiction answers the question "What if science?". It explores how the human condition may react to the new circumstances presented by advanced science. That's why it is almost universally set in the future, even where quazi-magical (Dune).
But Star Wars separates itself from frame one. What is the first thing lucas says in star wars? "A long time ago..." so this isn't anything that might happen in the future. And "in a galaxy far far away" ... it isn't anything to do with us. Lucas couldn't be more blatant. Star Wars is not science fiction.
Science fiction doesn't have to revolve around the human condition. It can be set in any location, at any point in time, with any species. The only criteria is that science has to be involved as part of the plot in some way. I think Star Wars qualifies as science fiction or any of its sub-genres.
Fantasy is the same, except that instead of science you have some form of magic as part of the plot.
Then you can mix to create a hybrid of sorts. Of which, because of the Force one could make an argument that Star Wars is a hybrid. Except that it is part of canon that there is scientific reasoning for it all.
Trek is about how science affects society. Quite often there's some dilemma thrown up by by technology, and the characters have to deal with it. The characters are ordinary people who happen to have some training and some intelligence, working in groups.
Star Wars is an opera. You have heroes, with heroic skills, fighting epic battles of historical significance. It's very much about individuals, and not terribly much about groups. Technology is purely incidental in Star Wars. We have light sabres, so let's have a duel where we can investigate some emotions.
If Lucas hadn't thought of light sabres, but just given them samurai swords, not much would change in your assessment of the world. You'd think the same of the characters, and it would be just as entertaining.
If Trek didn't have FTL travel, it would be a very different show.
> Science fiction answers the question "What if science?".
I prefer this definition, too, but by it, quite a lot of Trek stories (even just the canon, on-screen stuff) are space fantasy of the same type as Star Wars; there's lots of SF-by-that-definition in Trek, too, which Star Wars pretty much completely avoids, but its not a black-or-white, all-or-nothing distinction with ST purely on the SF side of the fence.
For ships it's similar between the two; sub-light speeds are handled by engines that shoves stuff out the back to propel the ship forward and light speeds handled by magical technology that plays with space/time.
From conversations in the movies I'm led to believe the Death Stars followed the same premise. For that amount of mass it has to be impressive technology though.
There is a tremendous amount of empty space within the Death Star II, per the combat sequence flying multiple fighter spaceships thru it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPZigWFyK2o
As noted, that's a lot lighter and easier to move than a rock the same size.
I suppose it comes down to construction versus operation costs. Most likely be cheaper to retrofit a rock, and (I assert) it'd likely be sturdier; but fuel costs for moving it around would be better with a fully built station. The outlay in finding, extracting, shaping and moving metal to construct the station must be enormous, (especially considering it's inertial gravity means it needs to be buttressed against its own weight).
Given that the first Death Star only made a limited number of journeys and the second one never went anywhere. The fuel cost savings never got to be found.
Hey, you gotta breaks some eggs to make a Soufleé. Maybe the moon was in the wrong spot or maybe the Deathstar was a moon that was slowly converted. ;-)
16 Psyche is the most massive M-class asteroid in the Sol system. It has mass ~2e19 kg, which could be reworked into a spherical iron shell 100m thick with outer radius ~1400km. Rather than fill up the whole interior with incomprehensible machinery and bottomless pits, I'd just put everything interesting near the surface shell, rotate the whole thing at 40 minutes per revolution to get some decent artificial gravity in the equatorial region, put the spaceports at the poles, and use the big empty space in the middle for the boron-11 plasma containment and proton beams. Panels on the inside surface of the shell could convert charged particles from the center reactor into electricity.
Skip the big weapon. The propulsion system is your weapon.
It's a good thing Earthican engineers can use stories received from distant galaxies as cautionary tales on how not to build non-planetary habitats.
> Skip the big weapon. The propulsion system is your weapon.
Ah, the Kzinti Lesson.
But I think that a hollow asteroid that big would be difficult to aim, and to move - you're a very slow sitting duck that may not be able to swing its guns around on the enemy in time - and that's assuming there's only one target at a time.
better yet, EE Doc Smith and using planets moving at light speed (including an anti-planet) and using them as weapons. Lensmen series had some seriously over powered weapons but throwing planets was one of the better one. I think one example was taking a planet from an alternate universe which itself was moving at light speed and dropping those puppies into ours
Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence has even the puny humans using kamikaze neutrons stars while the main players the Xeelee (in the Baryonic corner) and the Photino Birds (in the Dark Matter corner) slug it out with cosmic strings and weaponized galaxies.
And yet, most space combat know-it-alls discount the utility of stealth in space. Stealth doesn't have to be absolute and bullet-proof to be useful. And there's nothing against the laws of thermodynamics in restricting all of your emissions beyond that of a 3-deg Kelvin blackbody to a 20 degree cone.
This is a silly and basically irrelevant question, but is there a reason that "sextillion", "billion", "quintillion", etc., are consistently written in all caps? I've never seen this practice before.
"While noted science fiction fan Paul Krugman may point to the number of jobs that the Death Star created, Hazlitt is also ready with a response. Using the example of government building an unnecessary bridge:
[F]or every public job created by the bridge project a private job has been destroyed somewhere else. We can see the men employed on the bridge. We can watch them at work. The employment argument of the government spenders becomes vivid, and probably for most people convincing. But there are other things that we do not see, because, alas, they have never been permitted to come into existence."
Public investment doesn't crowd out private investment if the private sector isn't investing anyways. Such as in a depression, or other instances of high unemployment.
The correct way to fix that by having the Federal Reserve lower interest rates or do quantitative easing - you create new medium of exchange until the volume of trade is going as fast as practical. The fiscal multiplier is zero when monetary policy is active.
Sure it does. In order to generate the money needed to pay the public workers, either taxes must be raised or the monetary supply changed. In either case this affects the private sector economy that shifts investors away from using the capital they have to do some work.
Not in a huge recession (or depression). Even in the current environment capital is extremely cheap and plentiful. In a depression with deflation there is a strong incentive for capital to stop investing because the literal zero-risk rate of return is positive (sit back and watch your dollar go further and further!)
The economy has many variables and assuming that a condition holds for all situations is ideological, not factual.
What this argument misses is a political and economical difference, in trade agreements, amount of wars and overall political situation between a world where US has F-35 Join Striker Fighter and a world where it doesn't. This comparison becomes more and more obvious when you include more and more military technology in the question.
Creation of Death Star had a direct political goal: unity of the Galaxy under united government. The methods that were used to achieve this goal, were, of course, horrible and inhumane — but these characteristics have little economic effects. The united government, as opposed to a fragmented states in a quasi-federation named Republic, which we had an opportunity to see in first three episodes, however, has a direct effect on economics.
Do I really need to explain how different is trade, commerce and business in the world of united Galactic Empire with brutal, but effective police enforcement and bureaucracy as compared to thousands of states of the Republic, that could actually wage war against each other? Or, for that matter, how different was in that regard the world of 18th and 19th century, with constant wars between economic behemoths, compared to the world of today, where all "western", "1st-world", and essentially economically powered world is ideologically, economically and even military united as never before?
96 comments
[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] threadIf I read the paper right, I think the cost analysis of the Death Star is more a fun trick to build a real world money analogy in which the final quantity is of no relevance at all, as they later normalize it to a gross galactic product, based on the manhattan project.
[1] 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb', Richard Rhodes
Reminds me of Feynman's stories about testing the limits of what they could actually requisition. A 10" gold hemisphere ended up as a doorstop after its experimental use was complete[1]. I also remember reading somewhere about a (somewhat fanciful) request for some quantity of a rare earth element, to which the response was that it was more than the entire known global supply.
[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=7papZR4oVssC&pg=PA135#v=on...
Good attempt to get a the hacker news readers interested in macroeconomy, but I'll not fall for it!
http://www.voicesofliberty.com/article/a-beginners-guide-to-...
http://www.peakprosperity.com/forum/keynesian-vs-austrian-ec...
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-09-22/illustrated-guide-k...
> Some links: http://www.voicesofliberty.com/article/a-beginners-guide-to-.... http://www.peakprosperity.com/forum/keynesian-vs-austrian-ec.... http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-09-22/illustrated-guide-k....
A few of the Austrian strawmen:
> http://theaustrianinsider.com/infographic-keynesian-vs-austr...
In this infographic, on the 'Austrian' side you have a chart that looks remarkably similar to the IS-LM model (Investment and Savings - Liquidity preference and Money Supply) which is a mathematical representation of Keynes' macroeconomic theory...
It also mentions that interest rates are key - well they aren't exactly ignored in the IS-LM model (it's perpetually on the Y-axis), nor in present day 'Keynesian' economics (pretty much every move the fed makes is described in terms of the target interest rate).
As for the cause of recessions, Austrians blame inflation, or asset-price 'bubbles'. Again, not exactly ground breaking. Why do you think central banks generally raise interest rates during times of high inflation? Today however, we barely even have inflation. And then another link is pedantic about the definition of 'inflation'.
The 'cure' for recessions is apparently to let them happen. This isn't a bad thought, however there IS a human cost. The region I live in Canada right now is going through a recession, what are the symptoms? Increased crime, increased domestic violence, increased suicide, higher poverty. And this is a country with a social net. It wouldn't get any better with 'laissez-faire' policies...
Anyhow, while so called 'Keynesians' are busy actually trying to be economists (both in industry and government), 'Austrian' economists are basically just whining about how they're marginalized, without offering up anything more than empty rhetoric and no answers.
And then the best straw-man of all: "Why did no one predict the housing crisis and subsequent recession?"
For the same reason "no one" predicts the crashes of individual stocks. Because people get caught up in the frenzy, ignore the voice of reason, and the smart money has already exited... If no one predicted the housing crisis, why did Goldman Sachs bet against it?
BTW, Keynes was a fairly successful investor, far more so than Hayek...
Speaking of investing, one of my favourite quotes: "Bulls make money, bears make money, but pigs just get slaughtered!"
And I also know that since Disney owns Lucasfilm now, it will never, ever stop. The franchise is part of that entertainment black hole that has become a never-ending advertisement for itself.
They're going to make this release a success on paper, whether anyone actually likes the movie or not, because they're already contracted to make two more of them, plus the toys and video games.
Then things may calm down.
"In this case study we found that the Rebel Alliance would need to prepare a bailout of at least 15%, and likely at least 20%, of GGP in order to mitigate the systemic risks and the sudden and catastrophic economic collapse. Without such funds at the ready, it likely the Galactic economy would enter an economic depression of astronomical proportions."
The destruction of the death star may reduce the burden since it would no longer incur operational costs. On the other hand, it did establish the operators as a tax authority.
I would expect lending banks to be covered by printed money followed by corresponding inflation. On the other hand, if the lenders are isolated among relatively few planets/systems, they could be overtaken by the government and those systems would bear the brunt of the losses.
The most likely outcome wouldn't be galactic recession, but return to chaos and war as the grievances between systems would now be unchecked.
But you're right that it can act as an enforcement agency, a tax collector of sorts. Or maybe an extortionist: "Pay up or we destroy your planet!".
(I freely admit to being more of a Trek than Wars fan, so I don't actually know how physics has been toyed with in that particular distant galaxy, so I don't know if my hypothesis is true - maybe they use spindizzy-like motors so that larger masses are actually more economical to move?)
(I'm a happy reader of r/asksciencefiction, if you can't tell.)
[1] Now more properly called the "apocryphal pre-Disney Expanded Universe material", or so I gather.
Although, I'd love to see a (live action) TV series based very loosely on the early Han Solo stories, obviously with someone else cast in the part of a 20-something Han.
It's space opera, which is a subgenre of science fiction.
Some people invent definitions of "science fiction" that exclude some works of science fiction, but that's silly. There's no definition of "science fiction". It's a concept that we feel out by pointing to things that are "clearly science fiction" and then sort of deriving a fuzzy decision boundary from that. If you ask people whether Star Wars is science fiction, most people will say yes. Robots! Lasers! Space ships! Aliens! It's clearly science fiction.
There are useful definitions, which talk about subsets of science fiction that don't include Star Wars. But those aren't definitions of science fiction, even if they use the same words.
That's an interesting view, but one which is nullified by:
> There's no definition of "science fiction".
Then the phrase has no meaning or use, and the statements "Star Wars is science fiction" or "space opera is a subgenre of science fiction" are semantically null, neither true nor false, just sequences of words that form grammatically valid sentences that communicate no meaning.
If "space opera is a subgenre of science fiction" is to be true, then "space opera" and "science fiction" both need to have definitions, and the definition of the latter must include at least everything included in the definition of the former. If either or both has no definition, then the statement has no meaning, and cannot be said to be true or false.
For
* The written definition, as found in the dictionary and/or agreed upon by the tiny subset of hardcore fans who care.
* The loose popular definition, which varies for each person but tends to include the broadest set of common basics: lasers, robots, spaceships, etc.
When referring to the written definition, it makes sense to say, "It's space opera, which is a subgenre of science fiction," as long as you're saying it among folks who appreciate the distinction. But when referring to the popular imagination, it's not a stretch to say, "There's no definition of "science fiction," because it means something a little bit different to each person.
The words "science fiction" mean something. They're a map pointing to some territory. They don't mean the exact same thing to everyone, but close enough to be useful.
Attempted definitions of "science fiction" attempt to point at the meaning. They're maps pointing to a map.
When I say "there's no definition", what I really mean is "I've never seen a definition that points to a good map of the territory".
In particular, a lot of definitions point at maps which don't point to Star Wars, and those are bad maps.
"definition" and "meaning" are the same thing.
> You don't need to be able to define a word, to know roughly what it means.
The degree to which you know what a word means is precisely the specificity to which you can define it. Those are different phrasings of the same content.
> The words "science fiction" mean something. They're a map pointing to some territory. They don't mean the exact same thing to everyone, but close enough to be useful.
I kind of disagree with this. The words "science fiction" mean different enough things to different people (and even to the same people in different contexts) that those definitions are not close enough to be useful, except where social convention, mutual agreement, etc., act to align the definitions to, if not precise alignment, very close alignment within some very narrow subset of the space of all the definitions the term has when considering all possible contexts of use.
Often, a key aspect of making the term useful in a particular exchange is agreeing on a definition.
> When I say "there's no definition", what I really mean is "I've never seen a definition that points to a good map of the territory".
I think the problem is that you fail to recognize that the different uses aren't various fidelities of "maps" pointing to the same "territory", they are -- to borrow the map/territory metaphor -- maps pointing to different territories that are share a name, the way the same name might refer in different contexts to the juridical territory of a city, the territory of the county of the same name in which the city is located, the territory of a metropolitan area centered on the city that is not coextensive with it or the county, or a geographical feature associated with and overlapping the boundaries of the citiy. A map of any of those territories would differ critically from the other, not because it is a bad map of the territory, but because it is a map of a different but overlapping territory.
> In particular, a lot of definitions point at maps which don't point to Star Wars, and those are bad maps.
I think its a bad map in the way that a map of Los Angeles that doesn't include East L.A. [0] is a bad map.
[0] An unincorporated community in Los Angeles County, but not part of the City of Los Angeles.
Given that I've explained the distinction I'm making, this is a super unhelpful thing to say. It makes me disinclined to engage with the rest of your comment.
In 1865, Jules Verne's _De la Terre à la Lune_ was science fiction. By 1903, Tsiolkovsky made it space fantasy. By 1960, it was back to science fiction again, though it will never be usable for manned launches until we find some way to make >100g accelerations survivable.
As such, I don't find it useful to divide the genres too strictly. A Charles deLint fairy tale novel and a Cunningham/Carruthers Men in Black comic are in the same genre: low modern urban fantasy. Laser guns and magic wands are the same thing. Lightsabers and vorpal blades are the same thing. Robotic automata and servitor daemons are the same thing.
In most cases, the fantasy elements keep the story interesting, and the sci-fi elements lend it an air of future plausibility. You don't have to explain a magic wand, but you might have to mention that a laser rifle uses an Er:YAG laser and a heavy air-breathing lithium battery, only in very arid atmospheric conditions, to literally explode the water in a human target into steam from hundreds of meters away. But a shock cannon uses a different type of laser to ionize the air between the user and the target, and uses a voltage multiplier circuit to shoot an artificial lightning bolt down the conductive pathway, grounding through the target. If it isn't explained, it's another magic wand.
I have read books that started out looking like high fantasy at the beginning, until the characters learn that magic is the result of an AI--from the colonization ship's navigation computer--performing weapons research on the human descendants of its former passengers, and that the creatures formerly described as demons are actually aliens.
Try to pigeonhole that one into the right genre.
(For the first half of the description, I was sure I knew what it was, but hesitate to say so out loud because that would be a spoiler.)
Star Wars = Fantasy.
Science fiction answers the question "What if science?". It explores how the human condition may react to the new circumstances presented by advanced science. That's why it is almost universally set in the future, even where quazi-magical (Dune).
But Star Wars separates itself from frame one. What is the first thing lucas says in star wars? "A long time ago..." so this isn't anything that might happen in the future. And "in a galaxy far far away" ... it isn't anything to do with us. Lucas couldn't be more blatant. Star Wars is not science fiction.
It's basically LOTR+lasers.
Fantasy is the same, except that instead of science you have some form of magic as part of the plot.
Then you can mix to create a hybrid of sorts. Of which, because of the Force one could make an argument that Star Wars is a hybrid. Except that it is part of canon that there is scientific reasoning for it all.
Trek is about how science affects society. Quite often there's some dilemma thrown up by by technology, and the characters have to deal with it. The characters are ordinary people who happen to have some training and some intelligence, working in groups.
Star Wars is an opera. You have heroes, with heroic skills, fighting epic battles of historical significance. It's very much about individuals, and not terribly much about groups. Technology is purely incidental in Star Wars. We have light sabres, so let's have a duel where we can investigate some emotions.
If Lucas hadn't thought of light sabres, but just given them samurai swords, not much would change in your assessment of the world. You'd think the same of the characters, and it would be just as entertaining.
If Trek didn't have FTL travel, it would be a very different show.
I prefer this definition, too, but by it, quite a lot of Trek stories (even just the canon, on-screen stuff) are space fantasy of the same type as Star Wars; there's lots of SF-by-that-definition in Trek, too, which Star Wars pretty much completely avoids, but its not a black-or-white, all-or-nothing distinction with ST purely on the SF side of the fence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_fantasy
From conversations in the movies I'm led to believe the Death Stars followed the same premise. For that amount of mass it has to be impressive technology though.
As noted, that's a lot lighter and easier to move than a rock the same size.
Given that the first Death Star only made a limited number of journeys and the second one never went anywhere. The fuel cost savings never got to be found.
TL;DR At 2012 prices, about $852,000,000,000,000,000
Hypermatter production however...
Skip the big weapon. The propulsion system is your weapon.
It's a good thing Earthican engineers can use stories received from distant galaxies as cautionary tales on how not to build non-planetary habitats.
Ah, the Kzinti Lesson.
But I think that a hollow asteroid that big would be difficult to aim, and to move - you're a very slow sitting duck that may not be able to swing its guns around on the enemy in time - and that's assuming there's only one target at a time.
Space combat is won by the guy who detects the enemy first.
>_>
https://mises.org/blog/blowing-death-star-didn%E2%80%99t-des...
1.5 Trillion (with a T) USD for just F-35 Joint Strike Fighter:
http://www.cnbc.com/2014/07/31/how-dods-15-trillion-f-35-bro...
V.s:
"While noted science fiction fan Paul Krugman may point to the number of jobs that the Death Star created, Hazlitt is also ready with a response. Using the example of government building an unnecessary bridge:
[F]or every public job created by the bridge project a private job has been destroyed somewhere else. We can see the men employed on the bridge. We can watch them at work. The employment argument of the government spenders becomes vivid, and probably for most people convincing. But there are other things that we do not see, because, alas, they have never been permitted to come into existence."
The economy has many variables and assuming that a condition holds for all situations is ideological, not factual.
Creation of Death Star had a direct political goal: unity of the Galaxy under united government. The methods that were used to achieve this goal, were, of course, horrible and inhumane — but these characteristics have little economic effects. The united government, as opposed to a fragmented states in a quasi-federation named Republic, which we had an opportunity to see in first three episodes, however, has a direct effect on economics.
Do I really need to explain how different is trade, commerce and business in the world of united Galactic Empire with brutal, but effective police enforcement and bureaucracy as compared to thousands of states of the Republic, that could actually wage war against each other? Or, for that matter, how different was in that regard the world of 18th and 19th century, with constant wars between economic behemoths, compared to the world of today, where all "western", "1st-world", and essentially economically powered world is ideologically, economically and even military united as never before?