It’s been a while since I watched the prequels, but the idea I got was everyone knew the Jedi existed: they were major players in the galactic senate as you referenced. But very few people would ever get to see Jedis use force powers. They might see them brandish a lightsaber. Which to a culture who had space ships, blasters, and the ability to block lightsabers (even if the materials were rare), laser swords might have seemed antiquated and quaint.
And the powers the Jedi seemed to use in populated places the most often were mind powers which aren’t necessarily observable: even Luke watching Obi-Wan mind-trick a stormtrooper was baffled. Seeing Yoda throw ships around might be a thing only a handful of people saw in a century and became little more than legend.
Ooor I might be rationalizing a lot of plot holes without realizing it. :)
But very few people would ever get to see Jedis use force powers. They might see them brandish a lightsaber
Approximately 10,000 Jedi were in the Order at the start of the Clone Wars. At that time the galaxy was home to over one hundred quintillion (100,000,000,000,000,000,000) sapient beings. Almost no one ever saw a Jedi during their lives.
At that time the galaxy was home to over one hundred quintillion (100,000,000,000,000,000,000) sapient beings.
That…seems like too many. Earth will probably cap around 10B people. That’s 10B planets with Earth-like populations. A search says Coruscant has 1T people on it, so that’d be 100M Coruscants. But I have to assume Coruscant is on the outer edge of population densities. Most would probably be lightly colonized like most of the world we see in the movies.
But then Star Wars is well known for just being waay out there will numbers and not being even close to realistic. :p
Honestly, it may not be enough. People, including sci-fi writers, chronically misunderstand the scale of space and how populations could fill in that space in a true galaxy-wide civilization.
Estimates place the number of stars in the Milky Way at 100 billion. This would work out to 10 billion lives per star in the galaxy. That doesn’t seem unreasonable, when we know that ecumenopoli exist and smaller versions of them exist in much larger numbers. We also know that terraforming of otherwise non-hospitable worlds is readily achieved in the SW universe. On top of that there are 5-25 million different species of sapient life, bringing even more classes of planets into this calculation.
Space is big, bruh. I’m not sure if there’s a source on the size of the SW galaxy, but for the milky way, it’s estimated to have upwards of 400 billion stars. Assuming most of those have planets, that’s plenty of worlds for life given a galactic ecosystem like SW’s.
You’re not rationalizing anything they pretty much spell that out in the movies.
That and everyone seems to underestimate how much effort the empire had been putting in to hunt down remaining Jedi. Even saying the word Jedi was enough to be thrown into an interrogation cell and be subjected to who knows what kind of torture. When there’s that much fear around something it can fade into memory within a single generation.
It’s been a while since I watched the prequels, but the idea I got was everyone knew the Jedi existed: they were major players in the galactic senate as you referenced. But very few people would ever get to see Jedis use force powers. They might see them brandish a lightsaber. Which to a culture who had space ships, blasters, and the ability to block lightsabers (even if the materials were rare), laser swords might have seemed antiquated and quaint.
And the powers the Jedi seemed to use in populated places the most often were mind powers which aren’t necessarily observable: even Luke watching Obi-Wan mind-trick a stormtrooper was baffled. Seeing Yoda throw ships around might be a thing only a handful of people saw in a century and became little more than legend.
Ooor I might be rationalizing a lot of plot holes without realizing it. :)
Approximately 10,000 Jedi were in the Order at the start of the Clone Wars. At that time the galaxy was home to over one hundred quintillion (100,000,000,000,000,000,000) sapient beings. Almost no one ever saw a Jedi during their lives.
Imagine you think you see a jedi and you find out it’s just a Nightsister…
That…seems like too many. Earth will probably cap around 10B people. That’s 10B planets with Earth-like populations. A search says Coruscant has 1T people on it, so that’d be 100M Coruscants. But I have to assume Coruscant is on the outer edge of population densities. Most would probably be lightly colonized like most of the world we see in the movies.
But then Star Wars is well known for just being waay out there will numbers and not being even close to realistic. :p
Honestly, it may not be enough. People, including sci-fi writers, chronically misunderstand the scale of space and how populations could fill in that space in a true galaxy-wide civilization.
Estimates place the number of stars in the Milky Way at 100 billion. This would work out to 10 billion lives per star in the galaxy. That doesn’t seem unreasonable, when we know that ecumenopoli exist and smaller versions of them exist in much larger numbers. We also know that terraforming of otherwise non-hospitable worlds is readily achieved in the SW universe. On top of that there are 5-25 million different species of sapient life, bringing even more classes of planets into this calculation.
Space is big, bruh. I’m not sure if there’s a source on the size of the SW galaxy, but for the milky way, it’s estimated to have upwards of 400 billion stars. Assuming most of those have planets, that’s plenty of worlds for life given a galactic ecosystem like SW’s.
You’re not rationalizing anything they pretty much spell that out in the movies.
That and everyone seems to underestimate how much effort the empire had been putting in to hunt down remaining Jedi. Even saying the word Jedi was enough to be thrown into an interrogation cell and be subjected to who knows what kind of torture. When there’s that much fear around something it can fade into memory within a single generation.