iStock/Thinkstock (LONDON) — While Star Wars isn’t science fiction, with the release of Rogue One, brilliant people have been examining some science facts with regard to that galaxy far, far away. That’s how we just learned, for example, it would take $7.8 octillion to run the Death Star for a day.
But now, they’re drilling deeper, and undergraduate researchers at the University of Leicester have determined that to fire lightning from your fingertips as did Sith Lords like Darths Sideous and Tyrannus — AKA Emperor Palpatine and Count Dooku — you’d need to consume a trillion calories.
That’s 1.85 million Big Macs.
The researchers crunched the numbers, using plate capacitors as stand-ins for a Sith Lord and his zapped victim. It’s as thorough as it is confusing for non-eggheads, with graphs and all, but the conclusion is easy to follow:
Essentially, any Sith Lord you encounter would appear more like Jabba the Hutt than the late Christopher Lee’s lithe Dark Side user.
“We can thus conclude that without drawing power from some other source, it is unlikely a Sith lord could healthily produce lightning,” the scientists conclude.
The findings were published in the Journal of Physics Special Topics, with the title, “How to be a Healthy Sith Lord.”
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