Last weekend, my associates, the Frankos, had an extra ticket to the TCU game.

I had no idea what I was in for. TCU was trounced by Kansas State. And sure, the students didn’t seem particularly excited to be there [back home in Ohio…

But those issues paled in comparison to the halftime show. The band came out and started by playing a Beatles song. I kind of stopped paying attention, but by the end of the show, the band had formed a Death Star and a Starship Enterprise and the PA announcer instructed the crowd to cheer for whichever installation they wanted to win in an “epic battle.”

Like that would ever happen in real life.

First of all, we know the star wars took place in a galaxy far, far away. The farthest galaxy that’s been discovered is 13.1 billion light years from here. Figuring conservatively, I’d place a galaxy that’s not the farthest, but “far, far away” ten billion light years from the Milky Way.

Anyone who’s ever googled “how fast is hyperspace” can tell you there’s no consensus on how long it would take to travel ten billion light years, but it wouldn’t happen quickly.

Among people who think about this sort of thing, hyperspace is anywhere from three to 833 light years per hour. There is a consensus that the Death Star can travel no faster than one third of “true hyperspace.”

Figuring aggressively this time, let’s place hyperspace at 600 light years per hour and let the Death Star travel at the full one-third of 200 light years per hour. At that rate, traveled constantly, it would take 50 million hours, or roughly 5,700 years, for the Death Star to reach the Enterprise, given the Enterprise was docked on earth at the time.

Personally, you could put me in the camp of people who think the Death Star isn’t even capable of traveling at hyperspace. It seems difficult to believe you could power a faster-than-light engine with no exhaust outlet except a two meter port.

So even if a “long time ago” is long enough ago so that the Death Star could make the trip (and, again according to the people who think about these things, it isn’t), the Empire would long have since been defeated before the facility was ready to take on the Enterprise.

“But Alan, you beautifully rational man-hunk,” I can hear you snapping at your computer screen. “If this is truly a battle, wouldn’t the Enterprise speed toward the Death Star? How fast is warp speed?”

It doesn’t matter how fast warp speed is. The Enterprise was on a mission to explore new worlds, it would never take on an offensive position. Anyone who’s familiar with the Kobayashi Maru knows that.

Also, why would the Empire send the Death Star to exterminate a simple Constitution-class ship? That’s a job that could easily be carried out by a fleet of TIE Fighters or, at most, a star destroyer. For crying out loud, the Enterprise was brought down by a Klingon bird of prey!

Listen, I was in the band myself back in high school [until I was kicked out for being an agitator, that is], but apparently, the TCU band thinks we’re all a bunch of patsies who believe Emperor Palpatine would take a weapon he commissioned specifically to rule through fear and tie it up on a ten thousand year trip halfway across the universe to knock off a ship that never even did anything to him.

If TCU is stripped of its status as a Tier 1 research university, I think we’ll all know who’s at fault.