The Star Wars TV series Andor, whose second and final season aired in May, deserves all the praise it has received. In two dozen episodes, Tony Gilroy’s prequel to the film Rogue One offers an unprecedented glimpse into the inner workings of the Galactic Empire that adds depth and texture to more than 40 years of Star Wars films and shows before it.

But Andor does more than show us the people behind a villainous regime typically represented by Stormtroopers, bumbling droids, and decrepit wizards. The show grapples with many problems familiar to 21st-century Earthlings, including government surveillance, mass incarceration, and, much to my surprise and delight, the messy politics of thmining.

Season 2’s main plotline, about the Empire’s quest to obtain a rare mineral needed to complete the Death Star, reveals a dark side of modern technology: It requires a lot of mining. Technologies ranging from electric vehicles to smartphones to artificial intelligence rely on so-called “critical minerals,” a geographically and chemically diverse suite of resources united by the fact that they’re damn useful and hard to replace. Add in rapidly rising demand and a steady exhaustion of the best-quality reserves, and it’s no wonder we are now seeing a 21st-century gold rush for unpronounceable elements. 

Unfortunately, as Andor shows, real communities are bearing the cost of that.

Andor tells the story of how the Rebellion got started from the perspective of Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), a thief who falls in with the leaders of the nascent Imperial opposition movement.

Season 1 follows Andor’s personal transformation from cynic into revolutionary as he’s chased across the galaxy by Imperial security forces, helps a group of paramilitary radicals pull off an Oceans 11-style heist, gets thrown in an Imperial labor camp, and eventually orchestrates a mass breakout for thousands of prisoners. 

In the background of all this drama, the nascent Empire is busy building its first superweapon. 

Season 1 ends with a chilling post-credits scene in which we learn that Andor and his fellow prisoners were helping build the lenses of the Death Star’s central firing dish. (The heinous killing machine looks eerily similar to NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, which is on a mission of peaceful discovery, but that’s a conversation for another day.) 

The scene turns out to be the perfect curtain-raiser for Season 2, which opens with a top-secret Imperial meeting in which we learn that the Empire needs a rare mineral, called kalkite, to complete the Death Star. Kalkite, Imperial weapons director Orson Krennic tells the assembled bureaucrats, is required to coat the weapon’s kyber crystal lenses so that they can focus enough energy to generate a planet-destroying laser beam. 

And there’s only one place in the known galaxy with enough high-quality kalkite to get the job done: Ghorman, a small colony world whose only export of note is luxury silk harvested from the local spiders. 

Unfortunately for the people (and spiders) of Ghorman, the “gouge mining” process used to extract kalkite is violently destructive. Harvesting enough to finish the Death Star could lead to the total collapse of the planet, a scenario the Imperials are preparing for in classic evil Empire fashion: By turning the broader public against the people of Ghorman through an elaborate psyop campaign.

It’s a drama of galactic proportions. 

But the Empire’s urgent need for Ghorman kalkite, and its whatever-it-takes attitude to extracting it, is a clear allegory for what’s happening across our planet today. While oil was the currency of power on 20th-century Earth, it is now being replaced by obscure minerals needed for computer chips, smartphone screens, solar panels, batteries, and yes, sophisticated killing machines. 

What we are willing to do to obtain these resources says everything about the type of future we are building.

Take lithium. The lightweight metal is essential for the batteries that power everything from smartphones to electric vehicles. But extracting it from the earth means blasting it out of hardrock deposits of the lithium-rich mineral spodumene, or sucking it out of lithium-containing brines that sit beneath dried-up lakebeds. 

Hardrock mining involves first removing vegetation and soil, called “overburden” in mining parlance, before using explosives and heavy machinery to break apart the rocks underfoot. The process scars the land, creates air and water pollution, and spews planet-heating greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. (Rock crushing is energy-intensive, and most of the equipment used runs on fossil fuels.)

Brine mining, meanwhile, can deplete local water supplies in regions that are already water-stressed. Today, much of it occurs on or near Indigenous lands, often without full community consent. 

Partly in response to the problems with lithium mining abroad, the Biden Administration made moves to onshore production. The Trump Administration is now accelerating that effort. 

But America’s most significant new lithium project, a giant mine under development in Nevada, is being opposed by a coalition of local Native people and environmental groups concerned it will destroy sacred sites, pollute local water sources, and harm biodiversity.

It’s a similar story with other high-tech minerals.

In the Russian Arctic, mining giant Nornickel has spent decades polluting the waterways and lands indigenous people rely on to hunt and fish in the process of producing nickel, a key metal for electric vehicle batteries. 

In northern Myanmar, the mining industry has robbed local communities of their land and turned mountain jungles into post-industrial hellscapes in its quest for rare earth metals needed for car motors, wind turbine generators, and water pumps.

It’s not just the people and ecosystems living near mines that suffer from our mineral lust. So do the workers digging them out of the ground. 

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, cobalt is mined “artisinally” by freelancers, many of them children, working in backbreaking conditions for a dollar or two a day. My reporting has shown that even people who are employed by one of the region’s large mining companies often work grueling hours without enough food or water.

Against this backdrop, Ghorman’s misfortune looks less like an aberration and more like an intergalactic example of the resource curse—a pattern political scientists have noticed in which mineral-rich regions are more authoritarian, more conflict-prone, and ironically, more economically and ecologically impoverished than their neighbors.

After the cloak-and-dagger meeting where bureaucrats plot to grind Ghorman into a pile of gangue, the Empire beefs up its presence in the capital city and launches an undercover effort to foment local opposition (all part of the larger plan to turn galactic opinion against Ghorman). Eventually, Ghorman resistance to Imperial activity results in tragedy when a peaceful protest becomes a bloody massacre. Hundreds, if not thousands, of Ghormans are killed. 

Shortly thereafter, the Imperial mining operation kicks into high gear. While we never learn what, exactly, befalls the planet and its 800,000 citizens, considering the Empire succeeds in obtaining the kalkite needed for the Death Star, one can assume the worst.

The resource curse is a historical pattern—but it doesn’t have to be a blueprint for our future. 

As the world transitions from fossil fuels to clean energy technologies that require more rare minerals, we are beginning to have a conversation about how to obtain them without creating new environmental sacrifice zones. There are many options.

We can recycle more. Today, the International Energy Agency estimates that less than 1% of lithium and rare earths are recycled from spent devices. Even metals like copper and aluminum, which we’re pretty good at recycling, still wind up getting thrown away by the millions of tons every year. All of that lost metal will have to be replaced to build tomorrow’s power grids, which will mean more dirty mining and refining. 

In some cases, we can invent our way out of mineral dependency. The EV battery industry, for instance, is moving away from cobalt-rich battery cathodes in part to avoid the human rights concerns tied to cobalt mining. Startups are now trying to build EV motors that don’t rely on rare earths. However, substitution often comes with performance tradeoffs (as Krennic notes, the Empire tried and failed to find a replacement for Ghorman kalkite), and eliminating problematic minerals can itself be problematic for communities that depend on mining revenue.

But we don’t have to eliminate minerals entirely: We can greatly reduce the impact of mining by using less of them. 

As a recent white paper showed, if the US expanded its mass transit systems, reduced the size of EV batteries, and scaled up recycling, lithium demand in 2050 could be slashed more than 90% compared with scenarios where we don’t do those things.

Perhaps most importantly, we can give the people on the front lines of mining a much larger say in whether—and how—extractive projects should proceed. We can follow the United Nations’ guidelines for free, prior and informed consent for indigenous people, and design mining projects to ensure the communities bearing the cost also benefit the most.

If we do all of these things, we can build the future we want with less pain and pollution along the way. And we can ensure that future generations watch Andor for entertainment rather than in history class.