This visual timeline of the STAR WARS saga compared to years in the real world is blowing my mind

The population of the star wars universe is absolutely massive there are very few Jedi relative to the population. Much much fewer than the number in MI5 relative to the UK population.

Also they are spread over an enormous area. A better comparison would be to say that there wouldn’t be too many people in rural China who know what MI5 is.

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Mandolorian s2ep1 shows settlers in a remote village on Tatooine watching a report of the destruction of DSII. So something does exist in that galaxy.

I think people are really doing a disservice to the amount of history erasure and propaganda the Emperor put out against the jedi once he came to power.

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Rebels showed Imperial video/holo broadcasts and had some sort of wide-ranging radio broadcasting.

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“unpossible”

One thing the Year of Covid has taught me is that if I don’t shave for about five weeks, I start to take on an uncomfortable resemblance to Santa Claus, despite being only 53. I’ve decided that any guy growing old with beard will eventually resemble either Santa, Obi-Wan, or Hemingway.

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people have been just as quick to forget things like … the Iraqi Supergun

fixed :slight_smile:

Your dad saw quite a lot of big things.

1952 - the hydrogen fusion bomb
1958 - the semi conductor

In no particular order
Korean War
Vietnam War
Mid East Wars
Rock and Roll
Space flight
Manned space flight
Traveling to another heavenly body.
Personal computers
The internet
The civil rights movement
The women’s rights movement
The LGBT rights movement
Woodstock
Altamont
AIDS
The World Wide Web
Hand held computers and phones
Tons of assassinations
Tons of bombings in the 70’s
Several recessions
The gas crisis
The environmental movement
The Berlin Wall falling and the collapse of the Soviet empire
Peace in Ireland
Brexit
Covid
Salk Polio vaccine
The de industrialization of the US
The breaking of unions
Streaming video
Prell in an unbreakable bottle.

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So much, small and large, can change over the course of a lifetime. My great-grandmother was born in a poor rural village at a time when radio was still an inventor’s hobby and died in a prosperous Western city where she could watch her favourite movie on a over and over again on a VCR in the comfort of her own home. I’m also reminded of the eulogy for Bert Cooper’s secretary in “Mad Men”: “She was born in 1898 in a barn. She died on the thirty-seventh floor of a skyscraper. She’s an astronaut.”

Of course, it’s not always progress. From an article on the decline of empires:

Let’s say you were a woman born in a thriving market town in Roman Britain in the year 360. If you survived to age 60, that market town would no longer exist, along with every other urban settlement of any significant size. You lived in a small village now instead of a genuine town. You had grown up using money, but now you bartered—grain for metalwork, beer for pottery, hides for fodder. You no longer saw the once-ubiquitous Roman army or the battalions of officials who administered the Roman state. Increasing numbers of migrants from the North Sea coast of continental Europe—pagans who didn’t speak a word of Latin or the local British language, certainly not wage-earning servants of the Roman state—were already in the process of transforming lowland Britain into England. That 60-year-old woman had been born into a place as fundamentally Roman as anywhere in the empire. She died in a place that was barely recognizable.

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Indeed, by this calendar Yoda was born a year after the death of William the Conqueror and during the Jin dynasty a couple decades before the Mongol conquest of China†. :smirk:

†At least according to WP.

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Just as I came to understand that the version of the 50s we were fed in the 70s and the version of the 60s we were fed in the 80s were bunk, I hope that people nowadays understand that the version of the 70s, 80s, 90s etc. they have been fed are also most likely bunk. I long ago coined a blessing/curse for this: “may you live long enough to see the times you lived in become grossly oversimplified and mis-represented”.

Selective memory and distilling history down to less than a handful of bullet points is a hell of a drug. I find it entirely believable that in the SW universe facts would become vague rumors in such a short time.

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I think one of the points to remember is that Star Wars has science-fiction trappings, but is really more analogous (or supposed to be) to old Samurai stories or even sword and sorcery. I think the poster’s point about a sort of “Intergalactic Mass Media” is a good one – there wouldn’t be one here anymore than there would linking medieval Europe or Japan.

For all the issues with the prequels, Lucas does a good job of remaining somewhat consistent with that vision, establishing that even at the height of the Republic (in Episode 1) it’s reach and influence (and therefore that of the Jedi) are pretty limited to a relative handful of developed, participating planets. The majority of locales we see in Star Wars otherwise are backwaters, living in the shadow of the Republic.

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i think about how peoples idea if the 80s is all devo and gary neuman and cool dayglow punk stuff. but i lived in the 80s and it was more boring preppy people listening to lionel richie and kenny rogers (stranger things got that later one right at least. ha.)

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He’s seen a lot of FTL time, too.

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That part wouldn’t bother me so much if there hadn’t been significant tech changes between Phantom Menace and RotJ, or simple ways of greatly improving performance. It’s plausible that eventually technology development necessarily slows down due to some fundamental limits. If you’ve had hyperdrives and they’ve barely changed in millennia, then no way could Han have the galaxy’s fastest ship, no matter how good a mechanic he is. You also wouldn’t have new generations of star destroyers totally outclassing their predecessors after a few decades.

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Some people just age better than others, too. Mark Hamill is older in TLJ than Alec Guinness was in ANH.

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I love the list, and it reminded me of a few things my own parents witnessed. I just wanted to say, not sure what you mean by semiconductor, but the first transistor was built in 1947; the physics of them was mostly worked out by the late 1930s.

Weird that the collapse of the Empire ends up so close to the revolutions of 1989 and the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, though.

But even the Fall of Rome as being a bad thing is really just a creation of the Renaissance which wanted to dismiss everything good about the Medieval period. I’m currently reading a great book “Escape from Rome: The Failure of the Empire and the Road to Prosperity” which makes the convincing argument that despite the trope of the “Dark Age”, Europe couldn’t have developed as the powerhouse it did without Rome falling.

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reminds one a bit of folks who calculate the age of the earth using the bible, eh?

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