Accessories not included.

Sigh. Now, I love Star Wars as much as the next sci-fi nerd, and yes, I agree that Jar Jar Binks was the most offensively appalling character added to any science fiction series in the last fifty years, but sometimes we geeks take it a little too far.

The peeps over at Centives (which describes itself as an economics blog that “focuses on the quirky, fun, read: useless, side of economics” -ugh!) have burnt their scientific calculators to a crisp working out the approximate cost in 2012 US Dollars of building a life size, working replica of the iconic planet killing space station from Star Wars, the Death Star.

Well, they got as far as calculating how much steel would be required to construct the 1.08 x 10¹⁵ tonne station before quickly realising that the cost of just one of the raw materials needed to build the Death Star would bankrupt the earth’s economies many times over. By their calculations, the 1.08 x 10¹⁵ tonnes of steel required would take over 830 years to produce, at the maximum output we are capable of globally.

In comparison, they can knock out the steel required to build a 22 000 tonne aircraft carrier in about an hour. Oh, and by the way, all that iron ore is apparently going to come from the earth’s mantle- which is simply a case of drilling deeper than anyone ever has before to access highly volatile molten magma to synthesise into steel. Easy peasy, really.

The cost of all these shenanigans would amount to 13 000 times the current global GDP, or about $852,000,000,000,000,000. They did not however try to calculate how much cheaper the Chinese could build it for, which is a critical oversight, in my humble opinion!

One point of mitigation that they offer does ring true: If you somehow managed to con the inhabitants of this planet to cough up the resources to build this monstrosity- it’s not as if you’d ever have to make a single repayment. The only surety you need to offer your 7 billion creditors is this single image:

That’s no moon, it’s a budget overrun! If all these figures and plans have whetted your appetite for global annihilation, then you can also turn your gaze to these other nerd treasures, the blueprints of the Death Star as well as the amount of energy it would need to destroy a planet. Bwa ha ha!

[Source: Centives, IO9]