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Comment by ghurtado | Hacker News Reader

If we're taking suggestions, I'd like to propose "parsec" (not to be confused with the unit of distance of the same name)

That way Han Solo can make sense in the infamous quote.

EDIT: even Gemini gets this wrong:

> In Star Wars, a parsec is a unit of distance, not time, representing approximately 3.26 light-years

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> That way Han Solo can make sense in the infamous quote.

They explained it in the Solo movie.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MovieDetails/comments/ah3ptm/solo_a...

Making a whole movie just to retcon the parsec misuse in Ep IV was a choice

They made a movie to make money. I doubt anyone holding the purse strings cared one iota if that bit were corrected or not. It’s not really a retcon either because they didn’t change anything.

That had more or less been the explanation in the books for decades, and even in George Lucas' notes from 1977:

> It's a very simple ship, very economical ship, although the modifications he made to it are rather extensive – mostly to the navigation system to get through hyperspace in the shortest possible distance (parsecs).

Parallax arc-second -> distance.

For Star Wars, they retconned it to mean he found the shortest possible route through dangerous space, so even for Han Solo's quote, it's still distance.

It was already fine, because it’s a metric defined on a submanifold of relativistic spacetime.

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