Just 48 years ago, film director George Lucas used the phrase “a long time ago in a very, very distant galaxy” as an opening of the first “Star Wars” movie, later labeled as “Episode IV: a new hope.” But at least four important aspects of the “Star Wars” saga are much closer, both in time and in space, of what Lucas showed.
One, the ability to add blue food coloring to milk was possible even at the time the first film was released. But in 2024, the blue milk of “Star Wars” was periodically available in groceries.
And we, an environmental health engineer and a civil engineer, know that there are at least three more elements of these ancient and distant stories of Lucas who may seem science fiction but that, in fact, they are the reality of science.
In that first film, “Episode IV”, Uncle Owen by Luke Skywalker was a farmer on the planet Tatooine. He cultivated water from the air in the middle of a desert.
It may seem impossible, but it is exactly what experts discussed at the Second International Summit for Atmospheric Water Collection organized by the Arizona State University in March 2025.
Every day, a human being needs to consume approximately the equivalent of 0.8 gallons of water (3 liters). With more than 8,000 million people living on the planet, that means that engineers need to produce almost 2.6 billion gallons (10 billion liters) of clean drinking water every year. Worldwide, the rains would be enough, but they are distributed very unequally, even reaching the oceans, where they immediately become too salty to drink them safely.
The deserts, which cover approximately one fifth of the earth’s earth’s surface, house about 1,000 million people.
Researchers from places like Berkeley have developed solar energy fed systems that can produce clean drinking water from nowhere. In general, they use a material that catches the air water molecules inside their structure and then use sunlight to condense that water outside the material and turn it into a drinking liquid. But there is still a long way to go before they are ready for commercial distribution and available to help a large number of people.
When the second star of death was destroyed in “The Return of Jedi”, made a great disaster, as expected by flying in pieces an object of at least 87 miles in diameter (140 kilometers). But the mythology of the film explains in a useful way a hole of hyperspatial worm that opened briefly, dispersing much of the rubble that fell throughout the galaxy.
You may be interested: The series ‘The Eternaluta’ shoots consultations by identity of Argentines born during dictatorship
Some of the ‘Star Wars’ aspects have already come true
As far as it is known, a hyperspatial worm hole has never appeared near Earth. And even if such a thing existed or happened, humans could not have the technology to throw all our garbage there anyway. So we stayed with a lot of things around us, even in space.
According to the Orbiting Now website, at the end of April 2025 there were just over 12,000 active satellites orbiting the planet. However, the United States and other space nations are trying to monitor almost 50,000 objects that orbit the land. And there are millions of spatial garbage fragments too small to be observed or tracked.
As on the roads of the Earth, space vehicles collide with each other if traffic is too congested. But unlike the debris that fall to the road after a clash on the earth, all pieces and pieces that detach themselves in a space clash fly at speeds of several thousand miles per hour (10,000 to 30,000 km/h) and then they can hit other satellites or spacecraft that cross their way.
This accumulation of space garbage is creating a growing problem. With more satellites and spacecraft that go to orbit, and more things that move and that could hit them, space trips are becoming more like flying the millenary hawk through an asteroid field every day.
NASA Engineers, the European Space Agency and other space programs are exploring a variety of technologies, including a network, a harpoon and a laser, to eliminate the most dangerous parts of space garbage and clean the space environment.
For most Earth’s audiences, force was a mysterious energy field created by life that unites galaxy. That was until 1999, when “Episode I: the ghost threat” revealed that force came from the Midiclorians, a microscopic and sensitive way of life that lives within each living cell.
For biologists, Midiclorians sound suspiciously similar to mitochondria, the energy source of our cells. The current work hypothesis is that mitochondria emerged from bacteria that lived within cells of other living beings. And mitochondria can communicate with other life forms, including bacteria.
There are many different types of mitochondria, and medical professionals are learning to transplant mitochondria from one cell to another, as well as transplant organs from the body from one person to another. Maybe one day a transplant procedure could help people find the luminous side of the force and get away from the dark side.
That the fourth, and the force, are with you.
*Daniel B. Oerther is a professor of Environmental Health Engineering, University of Science and Technology at Missouri; William Schonberg is a professor of Civil Engineering, University of Missouri Science and Technology.
This text was originally published in The Conversation/Reuters.
