Only one week to go till the final Star Wars movie. How the time flew. Seems like only yesterday it was 1977. In honor of the historic event we'll hit a few Star Wars related sites, just for the hell of it.

First up, The Darth Side. Some people don't think it's funny. To help you make up your minds, here's an abridged excerpt. Needless to say, read the whole thing.

Boba Fett is one of the few people with whom I will share a meal. He was horribly disfigured by acid years ago, and I feel we hold a bond in common in that respect. He has never so much as winced at the ghastly noises that come through my ventilator while I chew, because he is a gentleman.

He is also a bounty hunter, which is why I have invited him over to chat...

"By the way, your scars are looking quite good."

"I've been using a new cream," he told me.

I did my famous corpse of Mace Windu imitation, which made Fett snort wine through his nose. "This party's over," I quipped, and Fett howled. Long ago Windu was First Speaker of the Jedi High Council, a fierce warrior who slew Boba's father and tried to kill my master. In vain, of course. These days the Emperor uses Windu's purple light-sabre to trim his hedges.

Anything at all? Try another.

At the top of my game. Capturing Cloud City. Breaking Solo's will.

The signal from Boba Fett came in the early morning, and we took the fleet to Bespin. Shadowed by the girth of the gas giant the armada's sensitive sensor network marked the approach of the rebel freighter. Admiral Piett contacted me down in Cloud City: "M'lord, the Millennium Falcon has entered the system."

"Very good." I turned to face the metrosexual city administrator as he strained to appear at ease, sweat running down his brow in a constant, beading film. "Calrissian: escort Captain Solo and his party to the dining hall first thing in the morning."

Still nothing? Cheez, you're a tough audience. Try this one.

"Have you tried one of these Ewoks, m'lord?" asked Admiral Piett, offering me a crisp kebab. "Delectable!"

Veers himself was surrounded by a cadre of identical troopers holding their helmets in one hand their drinks in the other. "Lord Vader!" Veers greeted me. "I'm so glad you could join us. Did somebody get you an Ewok?"

Best served cold is what I've always heard. How I loathed the furry little brutes. But they got theirs. Hushed up it was, but still inevitable. I blame the laws of physics.

What happens when you detonate a spherical metal honeycomb over five hundred miles wide just above the atmosphere of a habitable world? Regardless of specifics, the world won't remain habitable for long.

Yes. It's The Endor Holocaust. Blow up a Death Star. Ruin the world it's parked next to. The dinosaurs could tell you a thing or two...

No animal larger than a few kilograms and incapable of long sheltered hibernation could survive the Endorian calamity. The air might even have been poisoned and deoxygenated for a few years until simple plant life could return to growth. If so then it is possible that all animal life perished. In any case any ewok on the surface who was not equipped with impressive high-technology survival gear and a nuclear shelter must have died.

For those unfortunate beings not painlessly obliterated by the impact concussions, the initial night of celebration would linger on and on with days of darkness. A chill would fall, the waters would turn to ice and the vegetation would wilt into death or dormancy, depending on species. Provided that radioactivity was insignificant and the air remained modestly breathable (a very generous assumption) the doomed ewoks might survive for days or weeks huddling around bonfires, until they starved.

You have to love the purity and focus of a dedicated Star Wars fan. Diana Schaub should take notes. If you're going to cite science fiction, you should bloody well do your homework.

Next up is a site that does that homework and then asks for the extra credit assignment. Michael Wong asks whether or not the Federation could take the Empire in a fair fight. With a name like Stardestroyer.net, I think you can all guess the answer. Caprica and those other eleven colonies aren't even in the semi-finals.

Mr. Wong has done an amazingly detailed job. Here's an example...

The absolute lower limit for the gravitational binding energy of an Earth-like planet is 2.2E32 joules (click here for the derivation of this figure). There are many different ways to damage a planet, but you can quite literally slice, dice, melt, or vaporize a planet without destroying it. The only way to destroy it is to scatter its mass at incredible speed, so that gravitational forces cannot re-assemble it.

Of course, absolute limits are usually much lower than realistic figures, and this is no exception. If Alderaan exploded at mere escape velocity, it would have taken more than ten minutes to double in size. This obviously wasn't the case; the planet exploded very violently. Scaling of the Alderaan destruction scene in ANH leads to the conclusion that the approximate speed of the debris cloud's outermost region (not the meaningless pyrotechnic "ring" seen in the SE's) is roughly 1.8E7 m/s. Therefore, if we assume that the average velocity of the "cloud" was roughly 1/3 this amount, then a more accurate energy estimate is 1E38 joules (click here for the evidence behind this figure).

It is often stated that the Death Star takes one full day to charge its main weapon for a planet-destroying blast, although this is actually over-conservative since the original Death Star destroyed Alderaan and was already charged and ready to destroy the rebel base on Yavin's moon later that day. Nevertheless, we can use the 1-day figure to determine that it must generate at least 1.2E33 watts on a steady-state basis to charge the weapon, plus whatever it needs to power the station's systems and propel the station through space. This amount of energy is enormously large- equivalent to 3 million times the power output of our sun!

Which should be definitive enough for anyone. The squirming Federation Cultists may refuse to accept defeat, but their rebuttals are less rigorous. Time to move on and leave Star Wars behind us.

I'm very pleased to mention that J. Storrs Hall has a new book out. Josh used to moderate the old sci.nanotech newsgroup (happier times) and wrote a number of interesting essays on various speculative topics, such as flying cars, utility fog, and ethics for machines. His notion for a high volume space launcher never really got the exposure it deserved, but since you need construction diamond in vast quantities to make it work, we still have plenty of time. I actually prefer it over space elevators. It would be sturdy and durable.

Being a cock-eyed optimist, I've enjoyed everything Josh has ever written. Bring back the fun future. In fact, most any of his stuff would make a fine addition to The Carnival of Tomorrow over at The Speculist. Hint, hint.

And as long as we're talking about The Speculist, I should mention that they are offering an early review of Joel Garreau's new book, Radical Evolution.

Radical Evolution is a gold mine of information about coming technology. I especially enjoyed the section on DARPA. Just a quick example: Garreau mentions DARPA's "Unconventional Pathogen Countermeasures" program. The goal of this project is to create super-soldiers that are resistant to all disease.

"The object of the game is to discover the essential part of life common to many of these pathogens...and interrupt them. An example would be finding an enzyme that appears only in bacteria, but not in us... Another [method of attacking disease in general] is "genomic glue" - something that sticks onto the genome of the pathogen so tightly that it prevents the genome from being read..."

How far along is DARPA in the development of this kind of wonder drug? The interview subject wouldn't say, but there is this tantalizing clue:

"The nice part, so far, is that the bugs have not been able to develop resistance to the treatment no matter how hard the researchers have tried to induce it."

Check out the entire review. This one sounds good.

Over and out.

FURTHER THOUGHTS: Mr. Wong has put his finger on at least a couple of the reasons why I find the Star Trek universe an uncongenial role model. The Federation is a communist polity.

Goodbye, Wall Street: The concept of an investment portfolio is so alien to them that when a frozen 20th century tycoon was thawed out in "The Neutral Zone", Picard was completely dumbfounded at the man's desire to check on his portfolio. He couldn't even understand the concept, and complained that he couldn't understand what the man was talking about!

Obviously, this is typical of a communist state, but hardly typical of a capitalist state. Even before modern stock markets and investment vehicles, the concept of investment still existed. Businesses started with the aid of financial backing, loans, etc. Banks and other financial institutions existed long before NASDAQ. But according to Star Trek, they didn't last into the 24th century.

State seizure of transportation (leading to reduction or elimination of freedom of movement): 100% implemented in the TNG era Federation. Vehicles in Star Trek are either government property, or they travel outside the Federation (eg. Ferengi vessels, ships from non-member systems, etc).

They're all company cars: What was the last time you saw a privately owned personal starship? Starships are either government warships, diplomatic vessels, or transports. The only one-person vehicles (apart from non-Federation vehicles such as Quark's ship or Bajor's spacecraft) are runabouts and shuttles, and they are always government property. Some might argue that starships must be very expensive or difficult to operate and therefore impractical for personal use, but Quark's ship disproved this idea.

A palpable hit. And weren't Picard and Sisko just a little too fond of busting freighter pilots for hauling contraband? What about the Prime Directive, Ben?

Vin Suprynowicz had much the same thing to say a few years ago. I went looking for "Where Are The Federation Death Camps?" and found this instead...

But inevitably, a universe concocted for us during the administration of Lyndon Johnson must wear at the edges, irrevocably betraying its socialist/utopian roots.

In all four "Star Trek" series, the good guys represent the shadowy "United Federation of Planets," headquartered in San Francisco (historical birthplace of the U.N.) to which aspiring cultures have to "apply for admission," based on their having "matured" to the point where, so far as I can determine, no more than one government is tolerated per planet, and all have agreed to foreswear money, salaries, arms dealing, or eating meat, in favor of the fair and equal sharing of the reconstituted soy protein that pours forth in endless profusion from the omnipresent "replicators."

Now, this Ivory Tower future does seem to be breaking down a bit in the last two spinoffs, where folks do wager "replicator rations" (rations?!) at the D'abo tables, and some smuggling (what? a lingering demand for commerce?) is occasionally acknowledged. But only rarely does the slightest qualm surface over the fact that, to be "admitted to the federation," the planet Bajor will apparently be expected to "integrate its militia into Star Fleet."

Compare such status-quo worship of centralized authority to the Hugo Award-winning "Babylon 5," where the commanders have recently seceded from Earth after the home planet's takeover by a totalitarian regime, providing us with a set of heroes routinely referred to by the earth government as "seditious traitors."

"The Prime Directive doesn't apply, Bones. They're not a living, growing culture."