Putting Star Wars to the MythBusters Test

DangerTenor writes "The cast of the show MythBusters chat about their pasts with ILM, talk about some Star Wars myths (Can you avoid freezing to death in a blizzard overnight by gutting a dead animal like a tauntaun and getting into its carcass?) and why R2-D2 is the perfect sidekick." Not as cool as our interview, but pretty neat.

That Tauntaun thing...

[cnelzie]

...wasn't how they survived the entire evening. It was just to keep Luke warm while Han built the shelter... Geeze.

    (Yeah, I am a Star Wars Geek.)

Re:That Tauntaun thing...

[Mayhem178]

Right on. And Luke falling from the AT-AT, well, if you read the novelized version (written by Lucas), it explains that Luke didn't walk away from that unscathed, even though he tried using the Force to slow his fall.

Star Wars geeks unite!

A 50 footer?

[Otter]

Could you survive a 50-foot fall into a snow bank like Luke Skywalker did?

Huh? Jamie Pierre just broke the skiing cliff-drop record [localnews8.com] with a 245-footer in Grand Targhee. I haven't seen the video yet, but supposedly he didn't even land it cleanly. (The New Zealander who previously held the record hit a 225-footer into slush, landing on his back with a backpack full of foam.)

C'mon, a 50-footer won't even get you into a movie nowadays unless you throw at least a 720...

Re:Water cores

[Anonymous Coward]

Could you pilot a submarine through a planet's core?

"If it were possible to have a water core at the center of a planet, then perhaps, but the pressures would be significant," Imahara explains. "That would have to be some submarine."


The canopy to the submarine was an energy force field.

When the sub lost power, the canopy force field would have shut down (along with everything else), drowning the occupants.

Re:

[Mathiasdm]

It obviously ran Windows! Wikipedia:

The first Death Star held 27,048 officers, 774,576 crew including troopers, pilots and crewers, 400,000 support workers and over 25,000 Imperial stormtroopers. It also carried assault shuttles, Skipray Blastboats, strike cruisers, drop ships, land vehicles, and support ships as well as 7,200 TIE fighters.

As one can see, it's heavily armed. Imagine a botnet of Death Star zombies!

For surface protection it sported 2,000 Turbolaser batteries, 2,500 ion cannons and at least 700 tractor beam projectors, plus, of course, the superlaser.

There we have it! Anti-spyware protection, anti-virus protection, anti-adware protection... The whole lot!

Clearly, we're talking about Windows.

Re:That Tauntaun thing...

[mordors9]

Didn't I read that the pygmies used to do that with elephants. Although how cold could it get in da jungle....

Re:A 50 footer?

[VikingBerserker]

Even without skis or a snowboard, at least 130 feet is plausible without injury [myway.com].

Water Phase Diagram

[everphilski]

Water Phase Diagram [lsbu.ac.uk]

Note regions VIII-XI. With enough pressure yes, water will solidify. HOWEVER there is a temperature point at which the water will no longer solidify (not shown on this scale although you can see the "liquid dome" is increasing as temperature increases. Eventually if you go far enough to the right there is a point where only vapor exists, regardless of pressure.

So while GP is correct that pressure will solidify water there is also extreme temperature that will counteract the pressure. One must wonder why water cores don't exist in real life...

Re:That Tauntaun thing...

[Fishstick]

>those are just interns

They've elevated the others on the show this season. They used to be referred to as "the build team" or "Myth-terns", but they get billing as "MythBusters" the same as Adam and Jamie this season.

I don't think you're going to get Kari to crawl inside an animal carcas (she's a veggie). She could hardly stand it when they brought back a pig neck/spine with meat still on it to use inside a ballistics gel model.

The other thing is they seem to do is go out of their way to get animals that have died on the farm of "natural causes" as opposed to going to a slaughterhouse and carting away a freshly-killed carcass. I kind of doubt they are going to go get a horse or cow and kill it for a myth like this.

Re:That Tauntaun thing...

[ArsonSmith]

As someone who grew up hunting and skinned many a deer and elk I can say that the insides will stay rather warm for quite some time. While bow hunting you often have to track an animal the next morning because a bow wont kill it right away. While I think Hoth was suppose to be something like -60 or more I know that an Elk will hold heat for well over 12 hours in 0-10degree weather.

REMOVE Animal Guts

[ScentCone]

I think the real goal would be to dump the animal's viscera and use the large rib cage and fat/hide as a sort of shelter or smelly windbreak. The damp gutsy stuff in an opened-up belly would very quickly be a big old heatsink in the sort of wind and temps portrayed in the movie.

If you really a fun portrayal of this sort of thing, watch the evade-the-British-captors scene in the 1995 version of Rob Roy [imdb.com], starring Liam Neeson. That's a great movie, even without light sabers. Ye Old Ferrous Cutlery does just fine for those Baroque combatants. Tim Roth does a particularly slimy job as the primary villain. Highly recommended.

Re:The Real Myth

[MutantHamster]

"English is VSO (Verb Subject Object)."

No, is not English VSO. Is English SVO [wikipedia.org]. Sound VSO languages retarded.

Fifty foot fall

[Anonymous Coward]

My dad was in the paratroopers (I was born at Ft Campbell). On one jump, one of his fellow paratrooper's chute didn't open, and neither did the reserve.

Dad says the fellow fell 2000 feet (divide by three for meters), landed in a muddy, plowed field, and didn't break a single bone! He was in the hospital for his bruises for only 2 days (this was in 1951).

OTOH my Grandfather worked for Purina, and went four floors down an elevator shaft onto a concrete bottom (roughly fifty feet) in 1959. He lived, but he would have beeen better off if he'd died; he was a complete cripple and severely brain damaged, but he lived. But he didn't land in snow or a plowed, muddy field.

So yes, it's completely plausable to not only fall fifty feet into a snowdrift, but to get up and ride that funny looking horse.

-mcgrew

Re:Water Phase Diagram

[fjf33]

There is a temperature at which you don't have water anymore. In the presence of the right catalyst you may have a core that creates H2 and O2 if you get the pressure and temperatures right. You may not even need the catalyst.

Re:Water Phase Diagram

[hesiod]

> One must wonder why water cores don't exist in real life...

Well, perhaps the answer lies in how the planets formed to begin with. If it started off as mostly rocks and gaseous vapor (including water vapor) collecting together, the denser materials would collect towards the center of mass -- assuming the objects were collectively spinning with enough speed to create a force to draw the pieces together into a sphere/larger rock. Also, the water would remain a vapor until the solid rock nearby was cool enough for the water to condense. By that time, much material would have collected to form the core.

Keep in mind that I don't know jack about astrophysics and could be completely wrong.

Re:Water cores

[pegr]

There are twelve known physical types of ice. Look at the phase diagram carefully. Even at 10,000 gigapascals there are forms of ice. Most of these types are denser than water. What we typically think of as "water ice" is specifically called Ice-1 (there are two subtypes, cubic and hexagonal). Ice-2 through Ice-10 are all denser than water, with Ice-10 being 2.5 times as dense. That's some heavy ice. Ice-11 is less dense than water, but Ice-12 is again denser.

Just stay away from me with that Ice 9 [wikipedia.org], alright?

Re:The Real Myth

[TekPolitik]

Does talking backward smarter make you sound? Hmmmmm?

As somebody else mentioned already, some languages have the word ordering Yoda uses. Yoda is based on a blend of Japanese mystics, Samurai and martial-arts masters. Guess what word order is used in Japanese.

Re:The lightsaber myth...

[SETIGuy]

Even the most uninformed fan knows that it's not just the light, but it's plasma being shaped into a cylindrical shape approximately 1 meter in length (according to the Episode III novel) that gives the lightsaber its power. (Yes, and the Force, but let me just talk about the saber for the moment...)

I have a device that is very much like a light saber that uses no power at all. It consists of a thermal electron plasma which is contained by a matrix of positively charged ions. I can't get it to glow like a "light saber" unless I supply a lot of energy to it, but doing so weakens the ion matrix to the point where it might fail to stand up use.

Electrostatic repulsion and the strength of the ion matrix prevent it from penetrating another saber of similar design, but the same electrostatic repulsion, when focused to specific parts of the blade, is quite adept at slicing through flesh.

There is a picture of a saber of the type I describe right here. [medievaltimes.com]

Re:That Tauntaun thing...

[Anonymous Coward]

The scene with the gutted animal was probably inspired by the swedish movie Utvandrarna/The Emigrants [imdb.com], in which the main character (a 19:th century swedish farmer who emigrated to America) saves the life of his son when they are caught in a blizzard by killing his only oxe and sheltering his sons body in the carcas.

Re:The Real Myth

[the phantom]

Actually, Russian does not depend upon word order to determine the role of a word in the sentence. Rather, it uses case declensions. Certainly, there is a prefered order (generally, SVO), but word order is generally used for emphasis rather than meaning. For instance, "Ya tjebya lublju" and "Ya lublju tebya" both mean "I love you," though the stress in the first would be on the object (you), and the stress on the second would be on the verb (love). Basically, it is the difference between "I LOVE you" and "I love YOU." xander

Re:A 50 footer?

[Lord_Dweomer]

Your post got me wondering about the actual height of the ATAT. Estimates put it at roughly 22-23 meters tall.

In the process of googling it...I came across this [theforce.net] site that has WAAAY too much information on those sorts of vehicle specs. It is actually quite a fascinating read since they don't just give the height....they give about 10 in-depth bullet points of movie and merchandise analysis to scientifically try to determine the actual height.

And that's just the height....they try to figure out dimensions for the crew compartment, its weaponry, how big its feet are...etc.

And that's just the AT-AT section. And I thought that I had way too much time on my hands.

Re:The lightsaber myth...

[Jardine]

This is why the only thing (other than Chuck Norris) that a lightsaber can't cut through is another lightsaber.

What about cortosis?

Yes, in the Winter of the deep snow, 1830..

[the_rajah]

Here in Central Illinois, the story is well known of a circuit riding preacher who was caught out in the sub-sero temperatures of the initial blizzard that started on December 20th, 1830. He managed to survive the night by killing his horse and using it's body warmth. For over two weeks the temperature stayed below -12 degrees F. The article here [rootsweb.com]doen't have that story, but it does describe the conditions that Winter.