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Star Wars City Doomed By Sand Dunes
An anonymous reader writes "The buildings and set of the fictional city Mos Espa are set to be swallowed by migrating sand dunes in the Tunisian desert. From the article: 'Ralph Lorenz, from Johns Hopkins University, US, together with Jason Barnes, from the University of Idaho, and Nabil Gasmi, of the University of Sousse, Tunisia, visited the Mos Espa site in 2009, and noted that part of a nearby set used in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope had already been overrun. Using satellite images of the site, they were able to determine the speed of dune movement, which is approaching the buildings once inhabited by such luminaries as Anakin, his slave owner Watto, and rival podracer Sebulba.'"
Archaeologists will study these homes, and come up with all sorts of explanations for their features or lack thereof.
if only the sand could swallow up those horrible prequels as well . . .
From the series of photos and shape of the dune, it seems like the set itself altered the wind pattern and caused the very same dune that is going to engulf it?
Why was the set left in the desert? Was the film crew asked to leave it, or could they just be bothered to spend money removing their trash when they were finished shooting?
Barf: Chief... I can't... I can't go any further. I can't go any further.
Lonestar: Just one more dune to go.
Barf: That's what you said three dunes ago. I got no more left. Oh, waiter... cheque please.
[collapses, dropping Dot]
Lonestar: Must go on... MUST GO ON! Must go on...
[stops]
Lonestar: Who am I kidding?
[Drops Vespa, collapses]
There's a reason why the Sand People are nomadic. And they don't call the Jawa transports 'sand crawlers' just to be mean either.
Who builds in a dune anyway? Man, have I got some property in Dagobah to sell you!
It seems a new hope was duned from the beginning. I thought everything looked a little grainier from Episode IV onward. Hope they can clear things up in the future.
I've was reading a thread last week were some bloke said about how when his dog died, he buried it wearing a paid of swimming googles and a towel wrapped around the dogs neck like a cape. He then went to his shed and got a whole pile of assorted metal pieces and welded them together in a few different collections of strange shapes and parts. Then he buried them around his dog.
In the future when the dune moves and this city is uncovered, hopefully we could really screw with some archaeologists head!
This space for rent
That's no dune.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
They weren't required to restore the dunes to their native state after the shoot?
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
The sarlacc is just below that sand waiting for prey fool enough to dig in those ruins.
Lucas and Spielberg both destroyed the US film industry. What remains are translations of comic strips and live action video games. It's all the average attention of that particular audience demograph (fourteen) that these "motion pictures" are aimed at . Apart from the first one, the entire "Star Wars" serial is infantile rubbish interlaced with endless shots cadged from Metropolis and the Sith/Jedi mythology being endlessly and (retrospectively) rehashed. eg. Yes Luke you are your own mother and father, as you went back in time had a sex change and married yourself. As Harrison Ford once put it: "You can type this shit, George, but you sure can't say it."
AccountKiller
Can they put the original reels for the prequels to die with the set
Consumed by the desert, wiped clean by the wrath of god.
The sandworms are back!
Oh wait, wrong story.
Maybe they should have put the Dune set there instead. ;-)
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
I wonder about future historians and archeologists.TThere are now more web pages than people. Several 24/7 news channels document everything in excruciating detail. Will people in the future wonder about anything that happened in the 21st century, or will they merely need to decide which stories are interesting enough to tell in history books?
With the technologies Facebook is developing and knowledge graphs being pioneered for Google Now, will historians of the future even need to compile narratives, or will Google 3000 interpret the database and narrate the story in real time when you query it? "Siri, tell me about my great-great-great-grandfather."
The Sarlacc always wins in the end.
They need one of these...
http://imgur.com/gallery/7s0ALeF
Now just need to add the proofs.
Now PETA's goals will be challenged. Do we kill such a harmless and wonderful creature?
Everyone knows Mos Eisley is where it's at.
The spice must flow...
...that Dune is better than Star Wars?
I can totally see that as long as we're talking about books, not films. There are some many parallels. Both started great. Eventually sequels turned both to crap. Course Dune has no good sequel. Both are messiah stories. Both have deserts. Both have magical powers inside people. Holy shit. Dune IS Star Wars!
poised to bury a famous Star Wars film set
It's a set from EP1 .. I think the author meant to say 'infamous Star Wars film set'. It may not be dead and buried, but 1 out 2 aint bad.
The movement of dunes was kept in check by whomp rats, docile creatures who only eat sand, and things stayed in balance til the whomp rats were wiped out by human predators introduced by none other than Lucasfilm, who used to bullseye on them.
Meh... So what... Maybe people need to re-learn how to let go.
Let it go.
Disney's freaking out: "Quick, buy the Dune franchise!"
Table-ized A.I.
Mos Espa? That must be from episode 1. God wants to forget the prequels too!
-- QED
... I'm sure we could hire a small army of Tunisians with trucks and get the abomination buried faster!
on the Sith
I sat down to write a new sig tonight and all I did was make the chair warm.
I suspect you are right. Mass data aggregation wasn't done. We know a great deal about what important people thought, but we don't have much information about how common their views are. So we what we have are just editorials and we make guesses as to how much to weigh those editorials and what facts ban be derived from them. Our historians are very skilled at that since this technique still exists in parallel with mass aggregation of data. But 500 years from now when people have good statistical data about everything they might not be good at sorting through non-representative editorials and trying to reverse engineer what was going on.
and Dune taketh away.
These remind me of Gliders. I wonder if we can make a self replicating spaceship with these dunes if we had a few bulldozers.
Dune will conquor all. Watch out for the sand worms.
http://duncandavidson.com/blog/2013/05/starwars/
In fairness, I do agree with you that it is very different and since different news sources exist, it should be easier to see what the views of the day were, but other things still apply. For example while quotes may be accurate, they can quote or not quote who they like. With or current level of perspective we can fairly easily pick this out, but the entire point of news media has become to present views in a certain light and without the perspective of the times it may be very hard to sort out these biases and pull the gems from the noise.
In the past we had a few pieces of information regardless of quality. In the future they will have overwhelming amounts of information of mixed quality and bias to the point that practically sorting out the truth may be difficult.
It will be interesting to see what happens though, even if none of us are here to see it.
AJ Henderson
Thanks for all the constructive responses. It's worse than I thought, see this slashdot article ..
"The Book That Is Making All Movies the Same"
AccountKiller
Can't be buried fast enough I say. If only a sand dune would have buried Jar Jar Binks or the career of Jake Lloyd before he could be cast. If only...
Indeed. Also in a case like the old testament, not only is it scrambled as it's retold, but the original refers to "fire from the heavens" and the like. Is that a severe lightning storm? Meteors? Volcanic eruption? We don't know because they didn't know.
More and more evidence suggests that the old testament is kind of like Saint Nick - based on a true story, and evolved over time.
None of these characters were in Episode 4! Duh!
That's what happens when you borrow the idea of a planet being entirely desert from a SF legend. :-)
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)