On her ship, tied to the mast, to distant lands, takes both my hands, never a frown with golden brown… unless it’s 39 degrees, in which case I’ll sulk

Holy hells, it’s freaking warm.

Which makes me think of the ice planet, Hoth. Mmmmmm… I’d sure like to be there with all that ice, tauntauns, tauntaun sleeping bags, rebel scum, and wampas.

For the life of me, I’ve never been able to work out Hoth. Sure, it’s science fiction and, sure, George Lucas was more interested in creepy, creepy incest and inter-generational sex, but at some point somebody must have looked at Hoth and thought: the ecology is all wonky.

Wampas eat tauntauns and Jedi. This is understandable and perfectly plausible.

But what the hell do the tauntauns eat? The planet is a giant snowball (mmmmm… giant snowball planet). Unless they’re eating ice and somehow converting that into energy (some of you French scientists might be thinking cold fusion, but then Luke would have got nasty radiation burn when he huddled in the guts of a tauntaun).

The Expanded Universe says that there’s lichen fields. Lichen fields on a snowball planet? You’re a crazy person.

It’s times like these that I think of the feral camels in the Australian outback. Camels were brought to Australia to help bored Englishmen adventurate across the desert. Some of them got loose and they started several colonies. The end result is a damaged ecosystem as the camels run wild.

If you were going to set up a base on an ice planet, it only makes sense that you’d bring along some tauntauns from another planet with a more diverse ecosystem. Tauntauns probably eat some plant which has grown fond of extremely cold weather. You never know. It’s space. Anything can happen (except planets which are completely iced over and which have tauntauns and wampas. That certainly can’t happen – hence the length of this post).

Concerned that some tauntauns might escape, they also brought along some wampas to keep the population in check.

‘But Mark!’ I hear you cry from the future, ‘If the planet is incapable of supporting tauntauns, why would you need a carnivore to keep the population in check?’

Foolishly, you’ve ignored the possibility of tauntauns cannibalising each other.

…

…

Okay, the heat’s finally got to me.