It’s a flaming sword. Except retractable. Flaming swords have had a pretty long run as objects of interest. Lightsabers just make the concept retractable and make the “blade” a form of unobtainium.
I wonder if people will even remember it in 1000 years.
"We believe it was used for ceremonial purposes..."
"Perhaps for some sort of fertility rite."
The guillotine was used for amputation. Prove me wrong.
I mean technically...
Or some sort of vegetable chopper for megaflora vegetables that didn't survive the Climate Wars.
"But hey, at least it's not a bat'leth!" (entire classroom breaks out in laughter)
If someone attacked me with that, I feel I could defeat them with basically any other weapon...
I don't know much about weapons, but to me, the bat'leth always looked like it was intentionally designed to harm the person wielding it. Like they put it on the wall as a booby trap.
It's the "Cow Tools" of melee weapons. It might work to an extent, but we've had millenia to perfect bladed and spiked weapons, and somehow never arrived at anything close to the bat'leth.
True, weapons designed for reach. Bat'leth is much better as a CQ weapon when tight spaces are a problem for long weapons. Of course, knives...
In fact, Worf doesn't use it
Bat'leth saber for the real tryhards out there
EDIT: I guess it would actually be called a light bat'leth
Why?
Unlike in history, we don't really lose information anymore. Not trivia about a massively popular fiction like that anyway.
For instance, Homer, the writer of the Iliad and Odyssey, is still well known. He lived almost 3000 years ago. He was known by the ancient Norse as well, so it's not like it's one of those things that was lost to history and discovered in the modern age.
But... I guess you might be trying to make a point that maybe by that point there are real light sabers and perhaps even have been for centuries. It'd make it sort of like the origins of the modern taser, which are also in sort of in scifi. Sort of. Loosely.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taser#History
Jack Cover, a NASA researcher, began developing the first Taser in 1969. By 1974, Cover had completed the device, which he named TASER, using a loose acronym of the title of the book Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle, a book written by the Stratemeyer Syndicate under the pseudonym Victor Appleton and featuring Cover's childhood hero, Tom Swift
Unlike in history, we don’t really lose information anymore.
We've developed an unfortunate habit of locking it behind paywalls, though.
Which evolves arm in arm with piracy, luckily.
I haven't watched ads or paid for content in like 15 years. Well, most of the time. I do frequent the movies and that at least is paying for content and there's no way to adblock the silver screen.
What do they mean I can't pay in qubluds?!? What else would I pay with?
We’ve already lost a ton of media from 30+ years ago due to lack of preservation and obsolete formats. Are there going to be VHS players in 50 years? DVD drives? Ways to play video formats that are now common? How about the impact of streaming and lack of physical media? What about in 300 years? Is such technology guaranteed to survive potential cataclysmic wars?
There are books
Yeah, ton of obsolete media. If there's lack of preservation, there's probably a reason for it.
I daresay there's enough copies of Star Wars that they'll found on hard drives for the unforeseeable future, and even if they weren't, the story isn't lost.
I'm sure all the original copies of the Odyssey have long since perished, but I still heard about Odysseus and the Trojan War growing up.
Literally the entire world is aware of Star Wars, more or less.
Unlike in history, we don’t really lose information anymore
I wonder if this thought was also articulated by librarians at Alexandria.
They might have, and despite being more than a thousand years from the printing press, they would've been more or less right.
It's a myth that the Library of Alexandria was the only collection and all sorts of information was lost. Sure, there were a lot of books that probably didn't have many, if any, other copies. But for the most part, most of the books in that library had copies in other similar (if not [all] as grand) libraries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria#Historical_background
The Library of Alexandria was not the first library of its kind.[3][12] A long tradition of libraries existed in both Greece and in the ancient Near East.[13][3] The earliest recorded archive of written materials comes from the ancient Sumerian city-state of Uruk in around 3400 BC, when writing had only just begun to develop.[14] Scholarly curation of literary texts began in around 2500 BC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria#Decline
Burning by Julius Caesar
Scholars have interpreted Cassius Dio's wording to indicate that the fire did not actually destroy the entire Library itself, but rather only a warehouse located near the docks being used by the Library to house scrolls.[88][82][8][90] Whatever devastation Caesar's fire may have caused, the Library was evidently not completely destroyed.[88][82][8][90]
No you’re incorrect we lose information in the contextual sense. We need to keep context just as much as we need to keep the information.
Yeah.
We still know where the Trojan Horse is from, despite literally thousands of years of culture, stories, translations and a complete lack of printing technology. I also know what the context is for a burning bush.
With our far superior technology, literally global popularity of Star Wars and the fact that we haven't lost stories of even much smaller scale from much earlier on, how would we ever lose the context of what a lightsaber is?
It would require pretty much the complete destruction of all media and the extinction of most people and if even one of the survivors was even slightly predisposed being a writer...
The amount of junk polluting the internet is growing exponentially. I won't be surprised if future historians have trouble separating the truth from fiction, shit posts and LLM craps.
It's not just about losing history, but also mixing it with incorrect/wrong retellings of the story and fake news.
For example, you mentioned Homer, the writer of the Iliad and Odyssey who lived 3000 years ago. Homer's existence is hotly debated, and even if he did exist, "he" probably didn't write both poems. It's far more likely that the Iliad and Odyssey were created as part of an extensive oral tradition by multiple travelling bards, who independently added, changed or removed verses; the story we know today as the Iliad is just one of many who happened to survive for a variety of reasons.
We also know very little of the broader trojan cycle (Cypria, Little Iliad, Sack of Troy, etc...) of which only fragments have survived. It would be as if, 1000 years from now, only the original SW trilogy survived, and only pieces or fragments of the other movies/TV series in the expanded universe remained - And to be fair, even this example is wrong, because it compares the Iliad/Odyssey to the "original" trilogy, but there's no consensus about the relationship of the two Homeric epics with the broader epic cycle: as far as we know, they could have been created independently, and later edited to flow from one to the other seamlessly.
I never said Homer authored the stories he wrote.
It's a collection yes, much like the national epic of my country, Finland. Those epics are still considered to be written by the person who actually... wrote them.
It doesn't matter though whether Homer is a single person or many, real or fictional. What matters is that we've not lost the context of the story.
In your argument, it's more like a 1000 years from now people would consider George Lucas to be the creator of the Mandalorian. It wouldn't be correct, but it wouldn't be too far off the mark, and most importantly, nothing important to the context of "what is a light saber" would have been lost.
The point is that writing hadn't even existed too long by the point that we managed to preserve stories to last until modern times.
Our current technology is undeniably far superior, and there are dedicated institutions and people who preserve important information, especially culture. Star Wars is undeniably a part of that.
There is pretty much no situation in which we'd lose the context of what a light saber is, except pretty much the destruction of the entire world, all media wiped out somehow (despite that meaning the destruction of literal nuclear bunkers) and the extinction of anyone who knows about Star Wars.
The scale of destruction would need to be such that humanity itself wouldn't survive it.
It's more than likely that Star Wars will outlive our species.
It doesn't matter though whether Homer is a single person or many, real or fictional. What matters is that we've not lost the context of the story.
We literally did. We don't know how much - if anything - written in the Homeric poems is true. If it did happen, we don't know when, only rough estimates.
For hundreds of years those poems were thought to be an accurate retelling of history, to the point that political diatribes between ancient Greek cities could be settled by consulting the Iliad.
If our civilization falls, there's no guarantee that our common knowledge survives. It could very well be that people see a lightsaber and think that we had the technology to build one.
We literally didn't.
The information that existed 3000 years ago is more or less the same as it was, except ours is better, because we have tve concepts of fact and fiction, and we know the Trojan Horse was a mythical wooden horse in a real historical war.
If you watched Band of Brothers 1000 years from now. They will still know that WWII was an actual war and that Band of Brothers was a dramatisation that was produced decades later. The difference would be that you'd also have access to the imdb from which you can read it's history.
Just like the Odyssey was written years after the Trojan War. Back then myths and reality weren't as distinct as they are today. That's why we still tell kids stories about humanlike animals acting this way or that. It's not that it's "not real", just because humanlike animals are fictional, as it still teaches real life lessons.
Just like the Trojan Horse might be symbolic for the Greeks outwitting Trojans.
If our civilization falls, there's no guarantee that our common knowledge survives. It could very well be that people see a lightsaber and think that we had the technology to build one
Sure, yeah, people "see" a lightsaber... where? A toy? In the movie? So they've lost the understanding of what toys and movies are? I would really like to hear a short synopsis of the scenario in which you think this is plausible.
Non-experts far in the future might consider us today naive for considering lightsabers future technology.
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.