1. If this has ever been revealed, it is in EU material that Disney/Lucasfilm has de-canon-ized, and so isn't relevant. I don't believe it has, anyway, though.
There was a storyline in
The Clone Wars (which is still considered canonical) that revealed the planet that was the "origin" of the Force or something like that.
2. Since Andromeda, our closest galactic neighbor, is more than two and a half million light years away, that's still pretty far, far.
This is a common misconception. There are a couple of dozen irregular or elliptical dwarf galaxies that are closer to the Milky Way, the most famous (and two of the closest) being the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. Those and about ten others are
satellite galaxies of the Milky Way itself. Andromeda is simply the closest large spiral galaxy like our own, one of the three spirals in the
Local Group.
I'm satisfied to take Lucas's "A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..." as a sort of "Once upon a time..." The point is, not here, not now - some other time, someplace magical.
Exactly. It's a riff on the classic fairy-tale opening, "A long time ago in a land far, far away." It's a blatant, up-front declaration that
Star Wars is a fairy tale, a fantasy adventure for the Space Age. There's a popular misconception that SW is science fiction, but George Lucas has always described it as space fantasy. One could also link it to the old "sword-and-planet" genre, stories that transposed sword-and-sorcery tropes to fanciful alien worlds -- like Edgar Rice Burroughs's Mars and Venus novels, or like
Flash Gordon. It was Lucas's failure to get the movie rights to
Flash Gordon that led him to create
Star Wars as a substitute.
The only reasons I *might* want to know would be if either a. there was a crossover with another fictional property that IS defined in time and space for us, or b. the story ends up actually involving something in OUR solar system somehow.
I think there was once an apocryphal comic-book story where Indiana Jones found the ancient wreckage of the
Millennium Falcon.
I assure you, it does: any attempts to try to "science it up", like the whole midichlorians nonsense, have been met with disdain or outright dismissal by the fans - and rightly so.
Not universally. I actually rather liked the midi-chlorian idea. It was the one genuinely clever and fresh idea in the prequels. It was clearly drawing an analogy with mitochondria, which are amazing in their own right. Mitochondria are symbiotic microorganisms that inhabit our cells -- originally separate life forms, with their own DNA, but utterly integral to our cell metabolism because they generate the energy our cells need to function. Midi-chlorians are a clever analogy to that -- independent organisms that create living beings' connection with the Force. Life forms in SW depend on them as a source of spiritual energy just as life forms in reality depend on mitochondria as a source of chemical energy.
I don't see that as "contaminating" the fantasy with science, because it's a Western assumption that the physical and the spiritual are mutually exclusive realms, and Lucas was influenced more by Eastern philosophy in which they're aspects of the same thing. So midi-chlorians as a spiritual analogy for something that's more scientific in our reality is actually quite an imaginative idea, a distinctive take on spirituality that could've been quite interesting to explore if it had been used as more than just an incidental plot beat.
(Of course, some would say the same about Trek really being driven by character development and social issues, and Sci-Fi is just the backdrop - but even if true, the Sci-Fi "wrap" is considerably thicker for ST than for SW.
)
Gene Roddenberry always wanted
Star Trek to be grounded in plausible science. In developing ST, he consulted extensively with scientists, engineers, and think tanks to help him construct a believable future. He often ignored their advice for the sake of dramatic effect -- which is the prerogative of a science fiction writer, because telling an entertaining story comes first -- but he was one of the very, very few SFTV producers who's ever even tried to ground his work in science. Most of his successors at the helm of ST have been much sloppier about the science, but he always tried to keep it grounded, even if he didn't always succeed. He also recruited a large number of respected science fiction writers to work on the show -- another practice that wasn't continued by his successors.
