Ancient spoiler alert!
...Sorry about that. I mean sure, Luke loses his hand at the end of Empire Strikes Back, and gets an artificial replacement. But that's hardly the first thing you think of in relation to Star Wars.
An even worse example came up last week, when a science article talked about the possibility of "Star Wars-style shields." True, as any geek will tell you, the X-Wing fighter did have shields. But really, the "shield" concept was a bigger part of Star Trek. You never heard Han Solo say "shields down to twenty per cent, she can't take much more of this." Though I suppose Chewbacca might have been saying that, for all we know.
If you're going to try to describe things in terms of popular sci-fi in an effort to make the article more accessible, it would make more sense to use the franchise most focused on the technology. That prosthetic arm for instance, would have been better described by analogy with the Six Million Dollar Man.
Not that we really need these metaphors to understand these things. "Artificial arm? What's that mean?"
"You know, like in a throw-away plot development in a movie from thirty years ago."
"Oh, now i get it!"
Lots of speculated technologies have appeared in popular science fiction, or just been discussed in the media. So we really don't need it related to something in a movie in order to understand it.
So let's not be naive, it's really about click-bait. Putting Star Wars on a story gets lots of people to click on it, and show some more ads. So congratulations, Trekkies, in the perennial battle between science fiction's two big franchises, you may not have the most money, most collectable Action figures, or the best video games, but you are the least gullible.
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