Short answers, pulled from the story.
Star Wars has influenced or anticipated several real technologies. The DEKA Arm System prosthetic, nicknamed "The Luke" after Luke Skywalker's arm, was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration after eight years of development. Ralph McQuarrie's datapad designs preceded the tablet computer by decades, and ion propulsion was used by NASA's Deep Space 1 spacecraft, the first to employ the technology.
Carbonite freezing in Star Wars is based on the real concept of cryonics, the practice of freezing a living organism to maintain suspended animation. Professor James H. Fallon speculates the fictional carbonite is a carbon dioxide mineral kept at very low temperatures. In 2020, researchers successfully preserved Panagrolaimus superbus nematodes in a Gallium liquid-metal cage for seven days and recovered them alive.
Zachary Feinstein, an assistant professor at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, estimated the first Death Star would cost $193 quintillion USD. A separate 2012 student project at Lehigh University calculated the steel alone would require 1.08 quadrillion tons and take 833,315 years to produce at then-current manufacturing rates.
A partial version was built by Boeing in 2015: a plasma-based force field that protects vehicles from explosion shockwaves but cannot block solid matter. In 2014, physics students at the University of Leicester developed a plasma-based deflector shield module inspired by Star Wars, but found it would block visible light, making it impossible for anyone inside to see out.
Real human cloning requires somatic cell nuclear transfer, which involves removing the nucleus from an unfertilized egg and fusing it with DNA from the subject, then using a surrogate mother. Star Wars cloning bypasses this entirely, using machinery to process DNA directly and produce thousands of clones. Science-fiction writer and former NASA astrophysicist Jeanne Cavelos identifies accelerated clone growth rates as the element not currently achievable by real science.
Scientists have produced working tractor beams at small scales since the early 2010s. A team at the Australian National University created a doughnut-shaped laser that moved hollow glass spheres 7.8 inches, several times the distance of previous experiments. Researchers at the University of Bristol demonstrated that precisely timed sound waves could create low-pressure zones capable of levitating objects.