Savage Chickens by Doug Savage for October 19, 2012

And I can eat a pizza in 4 meters!…For way too much thought about this, seehttp://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Parsec .

It was much closer in those days.

Just to put the SW geek spin on this, it was retro explained in a SW book. The shorter the distance of the run, the closer the ship got to the dangerous black holes in the Kessel system.

As a long-time reader of science fiction I’m not really used to taking science fiction movies very seriously so, when I first saw Star Wars, I blew it off as a lame space opera. Once I realized that R2D2 was the real protagonist and Han Solo was only a background character this sort of analysis started to become interesting. I mean, any tech-savvy ten year old knows that a parsec is a measure of distance so why would an (allegedly) sophisticated writer come up with a line like that? OK, I’ll buy the black hole explanation but that still leaves a grammatical error doesn’t it? I mean shouldn’t it be “at 12 parsecs” or “within 12 parsecs” rather than “in 12 parsecs”?

Actually the original intent of the line was to show that Han was blowing smoke and didn’t know what he was talking about.

space and time are inseparable, so a measure of distance is also a measure of time.

For those of you straining your brains, here’s the link to the Wookieepedia page on the topic.

@simpsonfan2 well it was more logical then starwars