Adventures in Wookieepedia

you didn't like the last one at all. But today we're going to talk a little bit more about tractor beams. That's what we discussed in our last episode, but we wanted to get a little more wacky and crazy and talk about the science fiction side of tractor beams. Yeah, because in case none of you could tell, we are all kind of fans of science fiction. Yeah, we're nerds. I'm not Joe watch Joe watches a lot of science fiction, but he does so begrudgingly, with a scowl upon his

face and his fist clenched and furious anger. Well, I hate pleasure and us. Yeah, that's that would be why. Uh yeah, no, Whereas I'm actually the son of a science fiction author, so I grew up around science fiction all my life, so it was bound to seep in one way or the other. I did not rebel against my science fiction upbringing, so it is definitely part of my personality. So let's let's talk about a tractor beams. Guys, we can see it come through and your your captain's

chair PERSONA. Yeah, where I I before every podcast I leaned back and say, engage bones. Yeah, well, now we're mixing up our our captain. You got Kirk on my picard? Alright, where does this come from? Where does that concept come? Possibly? The very first reference to tractor beams in fiction was from something called The Skylark of Space. WHOA, that sounds wonderful. It was a space drama by A. E. Smith, originally serialized in and later published as a novel in nine Wow.

So back in the twenties we had this concept. So, as far as you know, was the tractor beams some thing that was designed to immobilize or bring forth something or was it just the first mention of a tractor beam? I cannot personally speak to that, as I have not read the story, but nor have you watched the serial? What the watched the serial? Yes? Never heard the serial was it radio or was it movie? It was it was magazine, magazine, cereale. I'm thinking serialized because I'm akin

of the old serialized, as in like Charles Dickens serialized. Yeah, so even more so, not like The Shadow. I was getting a little too science fiction before you were that. There were no Theramans that I know of involved in this particular writing. That would be another great podcast as Theremans. But okay, so wait a minute, what was that year?

How early did we have tractor beams in fiction? That's earlier than I would have thought, But without having read the serial, obviously, we can't be sure that the tractor beam and that is the same thing we think of in science fiction today. Probably was just seems like it's the kind of concept that would carry over into future incarnations in science fiction. Uh so, yeah, this this whole notion of I'm in space. I've got this big old

spacecraft that I'm in. Uh, there's something coming at me that I want to move out of the way and not necessarily blow up, or I want to bring it into my spacecraft. How do I do that? I capture it with energy and then I pull it in using my tractor beam, which is really just shorthand for magical thing that makes stuff behave the way I wanted to. Did you realize while you were talking there, you almost for a second had a Scotti accent? Did I? Yeah,

almost for a second, capture, I didn't. That was horrible. I can't do a Scotty accents. I'm not even gonna try. Okay, well, who was it that operated the Star Trek. Let's not get into Star Trek Star Trek. We can talk about Star Wars, Star Wars. Yeah, you've got some info on Star Wars and tractor beams, right, Well, Star Wars was the first place I ever heard about a tractor beaming. So you're talking about Star Wars episode for a New Hope, right,

and that was originally called Star Wars. I love how yeah, yeah, yeah, the actual first one. Um. I loved how that they don't really explain what it is, right, you just you know it's something that the Millennium Falcon gets trapped caught an attractor beam. They're pulling us in. Yeah, I know. It's it's the Death Star that has the Millennium Falcon in attractor beam. So, yeah, they arrived, that's no moon

and then they get sucked into the docking bay. Right, Um, turns out that the size of the death Star that you see uh sucking in the Millennium Falcon and actually before that, I think a star destroyer sucks in Princess Leia's ship too, doesn't it. Well, you certainly see the star destroyer. Take the the Karelian freighter that is, actually it's not a fraighter. It's a correl. It's a CORRELLI blockade runner. Yeah, actually I think I think they call it a corvette in that it's a corvette. It is

a blockade runner. They take that into the docking bay, but they don't actually say that it was caught in a tractor beam. I don't think. Maybe maybe see three p O does remember. Well, in any case, you're you'd later be led to assume that, right, right, because obviously I doubt that the ship just well, I'm going to go park up in this other ship here or that or the other ship is. We have exactly matched the

trajectory and and they had a really bad pilot. You know, we were able to we were able to just scoop it up like it was a net for a fish accidentally parallel parking in space getting away from Okay, tractor beams. Um, well I have I was like, I wonder how, uh Star Wars fan because obviously the movie's never explained. I wonder how Star Wars fans have explained how the tractor beams work, because there's a lot of filling out of the technical especially through through the non canon media of

all of the video games. Yeah, so everything in Star Wars essentially gets explained away in the extended universe, not just tractor beams, everything from hyperspace to lightsabers to even how the force works, which we got some more in formation on an episode one with the whole medic Gloreans thing, but uh uh yeah, we don't need to go into that, Okay, right, Um, I have here a selection of crowdsourced wisdom from ye old Wikipedia, Wikipedia, the Star Wars themed wiki. Okay, and

this is the from their article on tractor beams. I'm going to read. So in the Star Wars universe, a tractor beam was a projected force field us by spaceports, planetary bases, space stations, and starships to effectively grasp and guide vessels to a safe designated landing. They could also be used to forcibly capture enemy ships. The first death Star was equipped with seven hundred and sixty eight tractor beam generators, enabling it to constrain ships such as the

Millennium Falcon with ease. That's from the overview, and I'm going to read the uh technical description section. Please do okay. Technical description A human being wrote this, h A tractor beam relied on the inertia of the craft it is based upon, as compared to the craft being affected. Now, I think that's interesting. I'm gonna come back to that um. Ships with high inner ship typically meaning high mass, could affect smaller vessels with little strain on their own propulsion.

Capital ships could tract or small freighters, for example, But if a freighter attempted to tract or a capital ship, it would actually affect the smaller freighter's trajectory. For two ships of roughly equal size, the attraction was equal, but could be affected by the relative speeds of the two vessels. So you're talking about mass and speed, You're really talking

about momentum here. Yeah, And so if the momentum of one body is greater than the other, than the tractor beam would be would affect the smaller the less massive, less fast of the two objects more than the other one. So it's kind of it's kind of talking almost about like about like a controlled orbit effect almost. Yeah, yeah, because I mean, like now it makes sense because you've got the Death Star. You've got the which has in an mismass to the point where it could be mistaken

for a moon. Uh, and then you have the Millennium Falcon, which was a freighter ship and obviously much smaller. So even though the Millennium Falcon might be able to move through space far faster than the Death Star could, I don't know, never saw the Death Stars specs on how fast it can make the kessel run. Well, we know the Death Star moved around pretty fast because it traveled between systems, right, It's like, well we got to go to this other system to blow up the hyper drive

hyperspace hyperspace. Yeah probably. Yeah, But even so you're you're still you know, you still don't know how fast it can go compared to the Millenium Falcon, which as the junka junk in the galaxy. I mean that's what they've

established that this cannon. I somewhat appreciate this technical description from Wooki pedia, because honestly, I had never thought before about how the tractor beam as depicted in fiction would affect the ship that was putting out the beam, right, right, But that actually it makes sense to me now, especially if we imagine it as something like gravity, right, because gravity is a force that we believe to be exerted by anything that has mass um And so you know,

when you're at uh, you know, five thousand feet and you're falling towards the Earth, you're getting attracted to the earth gravity, but the Earth is also getting attracted to your gravity. Right, You're both exerting a force on each other. It's just that you're so much smaller it doesn't really matter to the Earth. And the same thing is going on here with the millennium falcon in the Death Star. Yeah, the gravity is the relationship with gravity is between two bodies, uh,

their masses and the distance between them, right. So that's basically what you have to be concerned with with gravity. So yeah, I think that this kind of makes sense in a in a roundabout way. I mean, obviously they still don't explain how the force field is actually generating right right there. Yeah, they're talking about some kind of mechanism that's creating a focus for this. Yeah, and so, uh that's kind of the magical placeholder, right. It's and

to be fair, Star Wars is more magic. It's more fantasy than science fiction. It's it's it's fantasy that's set in outer space, but it's really more I know a lot of science fiction fans who would argue that that Star Wars is really a fantasy film and it doesn't you know, they're they're helped by the fact that George Lucas himself has referred to it in very uh, fantasy oriented ways, like calling a lightsaber magic sword, um, you know, kind of all that's that's that's pretty much a fantasy trope.

So I agree with that interpretation. I mean, the technology and Star Wars is more like magic than science, right. But I I also I appreciate this filling out because I think this is actually a pretty clever qualification to add to the technical view of how attractive being would work. Yeah, I think Lucas apologists are some of the most intelligent people when it comes to justifying very weird decisions that Lucas made when it comes to the Star Wars franchise.

That was that was harsh but probably true. Um, it's it's it's also I'm a huge Star Wars fan. I do this mainly because I like to I like to

ruffle feathers. He kids because he cares. Um uh well. Also, also it's interesting because in in the Star Wars universe, you don't see a physical like a physical a. You don't see a beam of light reaching out of the ship the way that he didn't say star trek right, right, And so this might be a good time to just do a quick reminder on what we talked about in our last podcast, which is that so we actually have made some tractor beam like uh set ups in a

few lab conditions, but they all involve light, don't They involve light, and they involve objects that are on the nano or micro scale, so far far smaller than what you would see in one of these movies. Yeah. And also, as we discussed in the last podcast, if you were to scale up one of these laser tractor beams, it would almost certainly destroy the target. Right you blow me right? Um,

maybe that's it. Maybe the Death Star was just malfunctioning, like it was trying to give that's what That's what Lauren said in the last podcast, and I did point out that Grandmoth Tarkan was very clear as to what the Death Star was meant to do. I didn't think that he was a man to be taken lightly. He was not someone who would just like j K. He was just Josh and us. Yeah, sure, well, all right,

looked so sweet and talked. We talked about Star Wars and the fact that that is more or less a fantasy. Let's talk about something that's at least usually lumped more into the category of science fiction one above in geek here than Star Wars. Well, that's that's it's a tough argument to make. But we're talking Star Trek now. So, Lauren, I know you had some info on Star Trek in its first use of the term tractor beam. Yeah. The first time that Star Trek used it was in the

original series and in episode twenty four space Seed. Okay, so space Seed, and this is in nineteen sixty seven. So space Seed is the episode where they introduced the character of Khan, who is one of several former warriors turned convicts who had been put into cryogenic stasis and then shot into space. Wouldn't he like some evil eugenics

experiment or something. The idea was that there it was in the Eugenics Wars, and they created this this sort of genetically modified race of superior human beings to act as warriors, and then the warriors did their jobs so well as to go on to attempt to conquer large

portions of Earth. So the the everyone else said, you know, this was a great idea for its time, but that time has passed, So let's zap them into sleep and then push them off into space, which is what they did, and so they put them in a ship called the Botany Bay. That's the kind of thing that could only happen in the setup for a later episode. Also why

it was also never hear from them again. It was also supposed to take place in the nineties, and I think you could easily imagine in the nineties we'd say, let's just shoot him into space. Um so, uh spoiler alert that did not actually happen in the nineties for those of you who aren't paying attention anyway, So they the Botany Bay gets shot off into space. The Enterprise comes across the Botany Bay spacecraft and then decides to

check it out. I mean, they're They're all about exploration and finding out what is this mysterious spacecraft that's out here. Do they use a tractor beam? They do. They do use the tractor beam in orders for them to be able to get access to the ship and then find out what it is that's aborted. And UH that's when

they find out that it's Cohn and his people. And then Con attempts to take over the Enterprise, UH quite effectively at first, but he's not very good at three dimensional thinking, as his later uh explored in the fantastic movie Star Trek to the wrath of Cohn, and so ultimately Kirk and his crew end up stranding Con on Set Alpha five, which was originally a lush planet filled with life, but that changed dramatically between the the the time of Space Seed and Star Trek two. Maybe con

ruined everything. Um really, really it was the six that ruined everything. But those horrible ear monsters that those were not really prevalent until Star Trek two. This is all explained tractor beams. The way the way that Star Trek explains tractor beams is that they are graviton force beams. Interesting gravitons of course, being the hypothetical particle that um that explains why gravity works mathematically? Now, So am I

right in thinking that? At least I want to say that in Star Trek the episodes I've watched, a tractor beam was represented by a beam of visible light like blue blue, glowy light. Or is odd when you think that it's gravitons, which are obviously not visible because we haven't seen them. Maybe maybe they're maybe they reverse the

polarity of Yeah, they've got that. I don't know why they don't just build a switch on the console that just says reverse the polarity, because that was always the number one thing they need to do, and especially the board were involved. I wonder what happens if you rotate the polarity nine degrees instead of just reversing it. Yeah, you're just getting too Maybe it would only work halfway then, But yeah, it is odd that there was a visible

um effect there because gravitons are not visible. If they were visible, we would know if they actually exist instead of just hypothetically exist now like like you were saying, Lauren, they hypothetically exist in the sense that when you start working out the math for the way gravity behaves then it's kind of again like a mathematic placeholder as opposed to you know this, we need to have something here to explain how we fix this, this problem that we

would face if we were actually in this situation. Mathematicians, physicists, scientists, they actually do use placeholders to represent a an unknown quantity that must behave a certain way in order for stuff to behave the way we understand it to behave. Keeping in mind that we may are understanding maybe faulty, so it may turn out that there isn't any sort of such thing as a graviton, and maybe that we

just fundamentally misunderstand the nature of gravity. But based upon our understanding, this sort of hypothetical particle would be the the agent through which gravity is is working right, right, Well, we we have detected gravitational waves, which are ripples in space time moving moving at the speed of light that are caused by objects, especially objects of great mass and um and so yeah, so, so gravitons are the kind of logical Yeah, it's kind of like what we would

think of as photons with light. Right, these are the fundamental particle that would be predicted. It's predicted by by Einstein's area relativity. So so if we are able to ever actually detect and furthermore manipulate these, then something like a graviton based tractor beam could be completely possible. Here's something interesting that I thought of just based on what you said. So if you did have a graviton based tractor beam, there would be some limitations on what speed

it could act, right, Um, sure we don't. We never get a very good sense or at least I don't. Maybe I'll will disagree from the movies and other sci fi uh of exactly what the range of a tractor beam is. And it's kind of whatever it needs to be. If if the ship needs to get away, then it gets away, and if it doesn't then right, so you've got to say the Millennium falcon is as far away from the Death Star as we are from Mars or

something like that. Right, If the action of a tractor beam moves at the speed of light, it might take what fourteen minutes for the beam to reach the falcon and start pulling it, actually, depending upon where Earth is and its orbit and where more hypothetical. So so, so you're talking about the distance the same distance that would have been between Earth and Mars when the curiosity rover land. All right, that's where that number comes from, right, because

that changes. Um, yeah, yeah, exactly. A gravity beam would only behave as fast as the I guess we would probably gate at the speed of light. Wouldn't be instantaneous. Now, and most of these cases, if the and what it weakend as it went on. Also, that's another good question. Now, if it didn't weaken, then would that just mean that you had to pour increasing amounts of energy into the beam in order for it to have a strong enough effect.

I mean, like, how do you manipulate the gravity in the first place so that you can create more gravity at wherever the tractor beam is coming out from without crushing everything that's inside the ship? Like how do you direct the gravity so it's actually pulling another object toward it, not just increasing the gravity everywhere within that area so that you know, you suddenly have vulcan paste inside the enterprise.

Although the actual research that was done in a lot of it, interestingly was done in the nineteen sixties, just a couple of years before The Star Trek the original series was being filmed. UM was involving the vibration of piezoelectric crystals to to detect and um attempt to manipulate

these particles. Well, that's interesting, though, I mean, I'm very I'm really curious, Like I wish this is one of those moments where I wish I could jump into the future, like a hundred and fifty years, just to see if we ever figured out this graviton thing and whether or not we could actually manipulate it in any meaningful way, because it's really hard for me to wrap my head

around it. But then again, we're talking about part of physics that has confounded some of the most intelligent physicists out there, let alone some idiot who has a podcast. So I mean, it's obviously I'm not surprised that it's confounded me. I I just I want to see what the end result is, very very much, because I it would be an incredibly useful tool. It's just really hard for me to imagine how it would work. Then again, I don't think I would have imagined the actual tractor

beams we talked about in our last podcast. I kind of still can't imagine them. Honestly, I've read a whole bunch about them, and I'm like, well, sure that makes sense. On a quantum physics kind of everything is so big sort of, you know, just eventually I start going all two thousand one and not really understanding where I live anymore. Whenever things get really small or really big, that's when

it starts to blow my mind. You know. I can deal with the macro scale fairly well, but once you get beyond that, it's in either direction if you go cosmological or or quantum. I need I need to take a break and have some fruit juice. That's when it's time to put on Genesis and lay down with the bean bag chair and just think about the universe. Groovy. Alright, Well, I think that wraps up our discussion about about contractor beams, and now we're gonna go listen to some wait wait

Jennis Genesis. Yeah, but what era Genesis are like early Jennis? You're talking like, you know, like the weird stuff. So okay, all right, then we're cool. We're cool. I was just making sure that we weren't talking like late Genesis. What sense would that make in in context of a bean bag chair in the universe. I just all Jonathan is saying is that we already fired you last episode. We

don't want to have to fire you again. Fair point. Alright, So guys, if you have any suggestions for future episodes, like you think these these wacka doodles need to tackle some ridiculous science fiction. I just want to hear them talk about firefly for like thirty minutes. Let's know, we'll do that. Um. You can email us our address as FW thinking at discovery dot com or go to FW thinking dot com. That's where we have the blogs, the podcast, we got links to our social media. Get involved, get

be part of this conversation. Let us know what you think, what has you excited about the future. We are excited to hear from you, and we will talk to you again really soon. For more on this topic and the future of technology, visit forward Thinking dot Com. Problem brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places,