How possible is Star Wars? Part 1: Is faster-than-light travel possible?

Back in 1977, a movie inspired people to dream of a galaxy far, far away. It also caused a lot of kids to demand their parents buy a seemingly never-ending stream of action figures.

Forty-one years later, many of those same kids are still collecting. Expanding beyond action figures into clothing, props and other mass-produced artifacts.

What’s this movie that continues to not only inspire across decades, but generations as well?

That movie is of course “Star Wars,” as everyone called it at the time, or otherwise known as “Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.”

For all five of you left that have never seen the movie, it takes place in a time of a galactic civilization, where humans are dominant, alien species live alongside them and robots have minds of their own. The galactic civilization is controlled by the Empire, which is headed by, of course, the Emperor.

In honor of the 41st anniversary of the release of “Star Wars,” I will be sharing a series of columns looking at the things that are more “mundane” as far as Star Wars go, the things that make a high-tech galactic civilization possible, which exist in some form today: space travel, space colonization and artificial intelligence.

This week, we’ll look at space travel.

Light years to Terran minutes

Space travel in Star Wars is similar to Star Trek in that one can travel hundreds, if not thousands, of light years almost instantly. This means the spacecraft are either going faster than light or folding space.

Both are probably far off. The fastest spacecraft we have right now is the New Horizons which travels 36,000 mph. At that speed, it took New Horizon 78 days to pass the orbit of Mars, which is 35–63 million miles from Earth (orbits vary). Now, compare that to a light year, which is 5.9 trillion miles miles. So, at its current rate, it would take New Horizon 18,641 years to travel a single light year. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is approximately 100,000 light years in diameter, which would take 1,864,100,000 years to cross in New Horizon.