We know very little about the lovable creature that The Mandalorian series has made fashionable. For not knowing, we do not even know his name, but we have all agreed to call him Baby Yoda because clearly he seems to share at least a race with Yoda, the Jedi master of the Star Wars saga.
In addition to being characterized by speaking like a West Indian and looking suspiciously like a Gremlin, Yoda was also one of the most powerful characters in using Force, an omnipresent metaphysical energy field created by things that exist and that permeates the universe. Among other abilities, the Force gives you the power of telekinesis . The biggest display of her in the galactic saga was probably the moment when Yoda pulled the X-Wing , Luke Skywalker’s fighter jet, from the Dagobah swamp.
Because we know that the mass of an object by the force of gravity times the height to which it rises is equal to the energy required to lift said object, we can thus estimate Yoda’s energy production .
After leaving NASA, American physicist Randall Munroe became a professional web comic artist, world famous for xkcd , calling himself “a web comic of romance, sarcasm, math and language.” Munroe has also written some books where he tries to answer seemingly trivial questions to understand the basic science behind them.
One of those questions is precisely the calculation of energy that Yoda can generate with the Force. Here Munroe has to make a few concessions to the imagination, as well as rounding off some figures whose precise magnitudes are unknown. For example, the mass of an X-Wing has never been mentioned in Star Wars , but its length (12.5 meters) has been mentioned, which is similar to that of an F-22 fighter. Since we know the mass of this real fighter, we can extrapolate it to Luke Skywalker’s fictional fighter: about 5,600 kilograms (kg) .
He also estimates that the X-Wing rises at 0.39 meters / second (m / s) because the front of the landing gear emerges from the swamp in about three and a half seconds and it is about 1.4 meters long. We also know from Wookieepedia that the gravity of the planet Dagobah , Yoda’s home, is 0.9g. Finally, these data are sufficient for Munroe to calculate the peak energy production: 5,600 kg x 0.9 g x 1.4 meters / 3.6 seconds = 19.2 kW.
But how much is 19.2 kW? As Munroe himself explains in his book What would happen if …? : “That is enough energy to supply a block of houses in a suburb of a city. It also equates to about 25 horsepower, which is more or less the power of the Smart’s electric model motor. Electricity, Yoda would be worth about $ 2 an hour. “
The bad news, according to Munroe, is that in the event that we could enslave the mysterious species to which Yoda belongs to become our main source of energy, leaving nuclear or hydroelectric aside, then we would be making a bad business for two very important reasons.
The first is that we would need about 100 million Yodas to meet the current demand for electricity worldwide, which is estimated at 2 terawatts. The second is that we only know three members of this species: Yoda himself, the enigmatic Baby Yoda, and Yaddle , a Jedi Master and a member of the Jedi High Council during the last years of the Galactic Republic. As Munroe concludes: “In any case, switching to Yoda’s energy is probably not worth it, although there is no question that it would be green.”
