These weekends all fans of modern culture, including comics, board and computer games, movies, TV series, anime, books, and cosplay, got together in Kyiv. Kyiv ComicCon Festival is the follower of the world tradition to gather all young and active people every year in one place.

Of course, LuckyBooks project joined this event to draw the attention of even more young people to the modern science. This time the member of the LuckyBooks Expert Council Tetyana Skorohod was responsible for carrying out this role. Tetyana is the employee of the Space Research Institute of NASU-NSAU and the author of the education promoting website dedicated to space “education-project.space”. She is writing her dissertation on the dynamics of the inert gas at the ionosphere`s height and encourages Ukrainians to explore the space.

Moreover, she has been a fan of Star Wars since her childhood. She assures us that she has watched all episodes at least 20 times, undoubtedly from the beginning to the end. Meanwhile, the iconic saga of Star Wars has been creating its wonderful world for 42 years. But how this world is different from ours? Tetyana tried to find the answer to this question at her lecture.

It turned out that she is not the only one among the real scientists who loves good fantasy. Scientists took the movie universe seriously and compared it with ours at the fundamental level. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, has the same shape as the galaxy in which the actions of Star Wars take place. What is more, there are the planets similar to those that can be found in the movie, for example, Kamino which is entirely covered with the layer of water, Tatooine which is spinning around two stars simultaneously or Geonosis which is the desert planet. These facts bring hope to the fans since we are almost there where the Jedi and the Sith live!

However, the level of technological development of earthlings is still too far from the races waging Star Wars. We still have no knowledge of constructing the aircraft as fast as the Millennium Falcon or as massive as the Death Star. And the most important aspect consists in the fact that we don't have access to the sources of energy that would allow such technologies to existing.

During the discussion of the lecture, the fans of the saga shared their common opinion that it was not a problem but rather a new challenge for scientists on Earth. And those, whose interest in science is just beginning to grow thanks to the books of LuckyBooks project, may become the inventors of these technologies.

 

It may surprise a lot of people, but scientists are also people. They get inspiration from the world around us, from books, movies and extremely fantastic ideas. Many projects that could be initially found only in fantastic literature and looked like fantasy became our everyday life in the course of time. Telephone, helicopter and submarine, just to name a few. Who knows, maybe George Lucas’s ideas will be called prophetic one day, says Tetyana Skorohod.

 

The mood of the lecture Star Wars vs. Reality. What Space Can We Expect Behind the Screen? by LuckyBooks was created by the costume of the host. Who wouldn`t want to look at our world through Darth Vader`s eyes? The participants’ activity provided the pleasant ending of the lecture. They discussed the projects of Elon Musk`s SpaceX, ethical aspects of Mars colonization and possibilities of finding inhabited planets in our Galaxy.

 

I am a person who is far from the space researches, but it was incredibly interesting for me to listen to the lecture. Who doesn`t like dreaming about stars and pretending that you are a spaceship pilot or an explorer of new planets? Star Wars is the story that has been with us since the childhood. By discovering that it has a deep scientific ground we can look at it in a completely new way, notes Daryna, a visitor of Kyiv ComicCon.

 

The space topic is constantly at the center of LuckyBooks` attention. On the project`s Facebook page we consistently post the latest news concerning exploration of the Universe. In April schoolchildren from Kyiv visited the observatory commemorating Cosmonautics Day, and this month the educational gamebook The Solar System by Jeremy Clays was sent to the Eastern regions of Ukraine.