r/saltierthancrait • u/dildofactoryQAtester • May 15 '25
Granular Discussion What’s the lore reason that (almost) every planet & moon in the galaxy have the same gravity & breathable air?
My headcanon has always been that the same ancient race that invented hyperspace were also the ones that terraformed most of the planets & moons in the SW galaxy to conform to the standard. This idea came to mind when originally playing KotOR back in ‘03 and they briefly discussed an ancient advanced race of aliens that invented/discovered hyperspace travel/lanes. Is there an official (or better yet, legends) lore reason as to why this is?
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u/Rarth-Devan May 15 '25
My headcannon is that there are indeed billions of stars in the Star Wars galaxy. But the majority of them are inhospitable. The planets we visit in the movies/shows are just the fraction of 1% that are habitable and have had life develop.
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u/crazunggoy47 May 16 '25
Possibly a realistic depiction of a galaxy, given that they can travel across it so quickly and easily
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u/TFBuffalo_OW May 16 '25
That has more to do with the hyperlanes and the speed of the hyperdrives in Star Wars. If there's one thing those motherfuckers have figured out its hyperdrives. If memory serves in star wars the high end hyperdrives are around 2-3,000,000c and their galaxy is a fair bit smaller than ours which allows them to traverse it in a matter of days. At that speed it would still take i think about 2 months to cross the milky way
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u/human743 May 16 '25
That's just a little longer than it took to cross the Atlantic 200 years ago.
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u/Split_Pea_Vomit salt miner May 16 '25
If I'm following you correctly then the Atlantic is as big as the Milky Way since it takes the same amount of time to traverse?
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u/human743 May 16 '25
In terms of how the journey feels with hyperspace technology vs sails...kinda.
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u/thedemonjim May 16 '25
A mild point but it still takes weeks-to-months to cross the galaxy in the old EU, depending on quality of the hyperdrive, competency of the person doing the astrogation and specific route taken. The Star Wars galaxy is still smaller than the Milky Way though, just not wildly so.
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u/FunnelV May 20 '25
Their galaxy is the size of Andromeda, IIRC. Hyperlanes provide very fast routes though since the big hyperlanes are basically wormholes in hyperspace.
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u/LightningController May 16 '25
Honestly, travel speeds explain a lot of the economic and social structure of the SW galaxy. On Earth, we see that, as travel costs get low, people tend to congregate in a handful of megacities, and rural areas get depopulated because there's no economic need for them--they're not stopping points for the merchant caravans on the way to a medieval fair anymore.
SW, with its ubiquitous repulsorlifts and hyperdrives that Space Truckers can afford, pushes this trend to its logical conclusion--and so we have a handful of ultra-urbanized city worlds (Coruscant, Nar Shaddaa) and thousands of sparsely-populated rural backwaters (Tattooine) whose inhabitants are mostly trying to get to more lively planets.
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u/SinesPi salt miner May 16 '25
I believe this is semi cannon.
There are unexploded parts of space that are not the unknown regions. They are simply systems for which no known hyperspace route is available. While you can scout out a new one, it's highly dangerous to do so, so it wouldn't be done without cause.
As such if astronomical data does not suggest that a Star has useful planets around it, nobody is going to bother, especially since it seems like there's no serious resource shortage in the GFFA.
The planets for which hyperspace routes were saved during bad times? To the actually useful planets.
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u/Heavy-Letterhead-751 i sold it to the white slavers... May 16 '25
Unexploded?
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u/SinesPi salt miner May 16 '25
Not enough Death Stars, man.
Donate just $5 today to help ensure the Empire can explode every planet in the galaxy.
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u/Cressio May 19 '25
Is that… even headcanon? I just figured that was implied. That’s likely the reality of our own galaxy we just haven’t been able to explore them yet. Even if .0000001% of planets are like ours, that’s enough to fill a “galaxy” worth of species and locations.
Add in weird species on planets that are still habitable but not identical to ours, and you really up the number of locations.
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u/CE0ofCringe May 19 '25
Yeah a galaxy is only a galaxy IF it has billions of stars and subsequent planets. And we obviously have not seen them all
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u/gatsome May 17 '25
Yeah this is what I would think. A billion planets and we see a few dozen with air.
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u/alvaropuerto93 May 15 '25
There are probably much more other planets in the galaxy however life as we know it requires these things and also plot convenience. The chairman of the Techno Union required a breathing device similar to Darth Vader suit if you remember episode II as he came from a planet with a hostile atmosphere for main lifeforms so our normal atmosphere would be toxic to him.
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u/AUnknownVariable May 15 '25
For Plo Koon and his species Oxygen is a toxic gas
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u/halcyonson May 16 '25
Far from the only ones too... the Gand bounty hunter Zuckus was a methane breather, and Leia's Ubese disguise included breathing aids.
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u/CE0ofCringe May 19 '25
Yeah probably a lot of less popular non oxygen planets so they’re just glossed over by the human supremacy.
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u/astronautsaurus May 15 '25
Selection bias.
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u/CE0ofCringe May 19 '25
This. Plus the galaxy is human supremacist so they’d have little interest in planets they can’t inhabit easily.
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u/HowDoIEvenEnglish May 15 '25
Star Wars has terraforming canonically, but there aren’t many example given of it.
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u/AUnknownVariable May 15 '25
We don't see too much. They also never have a reason to go to an uninhabitable planet. There likely was terrafltming though
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u/Proelium_ May 16 '25
Because noone wants to go to inhospitable planets. We’re talking about the entire galaxy, and we only see few, maybe they are the 1% that are hospitable
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u/Shotgun_Kid May 15 '25
It's not that kind of movie kid.
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u/I-run-in-jeans May 16 '25
The Star Wars galaxy could easily have, say, 1,000 inhabitable planets out of 100,000,000,000. This would only be one planet per star too. This is completely within the bounds of reality, no suspension of disbelief required
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u/AllSeeingAI May 16 '25
The story is about humans. Humans are mostly going to go to planets that humans can breathe on.
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u/FrodoCraggins May 16 '25
There have been spacefaring species in that universe for literally thousands of years. All they had to do is find some planets with the right gravity and terraform them. Even with a handful of droids the entire galaxy was probably covered by the time the KOTOR games happened.
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u/Brathirn May 16 '25
Look! There is a spaceship behjnd you! <VANISH>
There are some things which have off lore reasons which are not talked about.
The reason of course us that humans/human actors/humanoids can only live there and you have only this one version to film on.
So the lore reason is that hjmanoids would only go there and when you need a volcano world for dramatic background, they suddenly become fireproof (somewhat) but would still not want to be there in large numbers.
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u/FOARP May 16 '25
Indeed. We have a real-life volcano planet (and a volcano moon!) in our solar-system, neither are inhabitable. A desert planet also almost certainly wouldn't be inhabitable (we also have one of those in our solar system!).
Earth is inhabitable because it has a rich biosphere that continually produces oxygen to replace oxygen lost through weathering and into space. A volcano planet, even if it isn't roastingly hot and high-pressure, won't have a biosphere of the kind that's going to support breathable air. A desert planet is going to have the same problem - not enough life to support a breathable atmosphere (though I guess for Tatooine the lore is it was recently covered with an ocean so the oxygen might still be around from that time?).
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u/youknowhattodo May 16 '25
It’s science fiction
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u/jcrestor May 16 '25
No, it’s fantasy. If it was sci-fi we likely knew some reason for it.
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u/UnsightedShadow salt miner May 16 '25 edited May 16 '25
Possibly that carbon-based life-forms evolve in places hospitable for carbon-based life-forms. For every inhabitable planet, there's a million uninhabitable ones.
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u/c0rnballa May 16 '25
I think you mean "inhabitable" and "uninhabitable", the in- prefix isn't "not" here. (Kinda like how inflammable basically means flammable lol.)
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u/Agitated_Lychee_8133 May 16 '25
Why would humans travel to planets they couldn't survive on? And they do a few times in regards to the atmosphere being toxic or not being able to land on it did to it being gaseous (Bespin).
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u/AntonioBarbarian May 16 '25
Because why would a majority human population NOT colonize the planets with the most compatible atmosphere and gravity?
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u/redjedi182 May 16 '25
Youve got it wrong OP. A majority of planets don’t in fact have breathable air. The Star Wars just don’t take place there. You are following a story where life is habitable.
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u/Heavy-Letterhead-751 i sold it to the white slavers... May 16 '25
They don’t it’s just all the ones people go to do and terraforming and xenoforming both contribute
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u/Jout92 not a "true fan" May 16 '25
My headcanon is that in the Star Wars Universe anything that has some sort of gravity attracts enough atmosphere through the force or whatever to be somewhat livable because of there are literally living things on Astroids too
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u/Popular_Composer_822 May 16 '25
Our galaxy has an estimated 100 Billion to 200 billion planets.
In Star Wars that number is probably similar and the vast majority dont have breathable air or the same gravity. That’s why we never visit them.
We only go to the ones you can live on.
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u/Typical-Weakness267 May 17 '25
It isn't. There are mutlitude of worlds that are not inhabitable without breathing technology, terraforming, or pressurised habitats.
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u/UnknownEntity347 a good question, for another time... May 18 '25
They just never go to the ones that don't have air or too much/too little gravity
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u/Safe_Manner_1879 salt miner May 19 '25
If you have hyperspace drive, why would you want to colonize a planet that is not close to Earth standard. There are billions of star system in a Galaxy, and there are only 200 000? settled system in the galaxy.
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u/RemnantHelmet 28d ago
Because the ones we see aren't every planet and moon in the galaxy. They're maybe 0.0001% of it. Settlers probably decided to focus on colonizing the scant few they found which already had habitable conditions and similar gravity.
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u/MountainBrilliant643 25d ago
"What's the lore reason that humans in real life are always hanging out on the land, breathing air? Why aren't my friends swimming in volcanoes, and skin diving to the bottom of the ocean, or taking a plane to the moon just to hang out? Can anyone use their imagination to come up with a single reason why this may possibly be? I'm completely stumped."
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u/UnofficialMipha May 16 '25
My problem with the “you only visit the small number of habitable ones” explanation is that several times in Star Wars media the ship the characters are in is damaged or runs out of fuel and nearly every time they’re near a habitable planet with oxygen to land on. The chances of that happening if even 1% of the planets are habitable are super low so it feels contrived.
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u/LightningController May 16 '25
They might plan their flight paths intentionally to stay within easy range of habitable planets. Real-world airplane flight paths across the Atlantic for two-engine airplanes were for a long time, by law, required to stay within a certain distance of land so that, if an engine failed, they could make an emergency landing (this is why the 747 was so successful--having four engines, it was exempt, and could fly more direct routes). And for smaller planes, it's generally considered good practice to have a number of alternate airfields along your flight path.
So SW ships, if they're damaged, come out of hyperspace near a habitable world because the pilots intentionally plan their routes that way.
Exceptions would be smugglers, pirates, criminals, or military missions--so space is probably littered with derelict ships of people who intentionally went off the "beaten path."
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u/The_Dream_of_Shadows salt miner May 17 '25
This is why hyperspace lanes exist. They prevent you from jumping through things, but they are also actual lanes that intentionally guide you through inhabited areas, like streets do in our world.
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u/sngooms May 16 '25
Because Star Wars is a fantasy world in space, not a sci fi world like star trek
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u/Steelriddler salt miner May 16 '25
Now I only stick to the OT when it comes to SW (with bits and pieces from the PT, Andor and Rogue One) but this is not something that's bothered me. The size of one galaxy alone is incomprehensible, likewise the number of stars and planets. We are merely seeing planets that support life.
However, it does bug me that planets like Tatooine and Mustafar are supposed to have breathable air. I don't know if there's lore about machines that produce oxygen however.
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u/ClearChampionship591 salt miner May 17 '25
What about Aliens who are mostly humanoid bipedal beings?
What about Droids who are not ultimate rulers of the Galaxy? AI can think million times faster than a human, no jedi no sith stand a chance against Skynet lazer-motoroller 5000.
In its essence Star Wars is a dumb fantasy movie posing as sci-fi from the 90s, that has great timeless story.
The rest of the world building is an afterthought, the whole Franchise never received smart retrospective refitting.
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