Think about your favorite space operas. Star Trek, BSG, Mass Effect, Firefly, these are all epic stories of course, and I personally put Trek above all others, but Star Wars has a serious advantage that these other galactic masterpieces don't; their timeline is motherfucking ENORMOUS. Look at the timeline I provided above, the earliest date there is 25,783 BBY but that's just when Jedis first began. There are timelines out there that begin with the first life on Goroth Prime, at 5,000,000,000 (yes, 9 zeroes) BBY, like the official timeline at Wookieepedia.
As imaginative as interstellar sci-fi can be, its range of history often feels limited. Star Trek's universe is massive, and the timeline goes back to the big bang, but it doesn't really get interesting until space travel begins. Yes, Star Trek has that crazy human civilization that pollinated multiple worlds with our DNA 4 billion years ago, but Star Wars has ancient developed space traversing civilizations that pre-date that by hundreds of billions of years. What makes Star Wars' history so unique is that you are entering a fictional universe that has been running a massive cohabited intergalactic community of trillions for longer than planets have existed in the real world. Look at how hard we have to work to learn about daily life in ancient Pompeii, or how we don't know for certain who really discovered America first, the Star Wars races have had space flight longer than we have had a sun.
This is what makes Star Wars truly unique, not Death Stars and lightsabers. What would civilization look like 4 trillion years after space flight? Where we stand now in the Star Wars universe, in the time of Luke and Leia, is pre-dated by hundreds of mega civilizations rising and falling, several all-inclusive universal wars, and countless prominent force users. Luke Skywalker is mathematically insignificant regardless of how good he is with a plasma sword or who his dad is. He is crucial right now, but the tiniest of little blips when looked at from a historical standpoint. If the ancient Star Wars universe interests you at all, then I encourage you to play Knights of the Old Republic. It takes place 4,000 years before the Empire is founded, which is the span of time between the ancient Egyptians and the internet.
There's something I want to complain about before I end this. If you read the Star Wars timeline you'll discover the Kwa. The Kwa are an ancient race that pre-date all Jedis and Sith. The Kwa, like so many other advanced asshole races, thought that their superior technology gave them the right to speed-up or slow down the progress of other races. Encountering the primitive Rakata race, the Kwa taught them how to use the force before you know, checking to see if they were evil or not. If you dig back deep enough, you find that the underlying truth of the Star Wars universe is not balance and inevitability, but randomness and the consequences of stupid decisions. The Rakata, if left alone, would have developed normally, and probably eradicated the first time they tried to invade another civilization. Had the Kwa bothered to check, they would have quickly realized that the Rakata culture is an extremely violent one, a fact that the Kwa did eventually discover when the Rakata annihilated them. This good vs evil, light vs dark perpetual war that is waging currently could have been easily avoided if the ancients' egomania had been controlled. It's amazing how sci-fi reflects the real world so purely, no matter how innovative and different the subject matter is.
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