It Would Cost $852 Quadrillion Dollars to Build a Real Death Star (Almost the U.S. National Debt!)

DVICE.com ^ | Feb 20, 2012 | Raymond Wong

[DogByte6RER]

It would cost $852 quadrillion dollars to build a real Death Star

That's 852 with 15 zeros following it. I know, that figure is insane. You know what that means. It means Emperor Palpatine and Darth Vader were rolling in the money like filthy rich rappers. I guess ruling the Galactic Empire isn't so terrible when you're ballin'.

Finally putting some questions to rest, the smart folk over at Centives calculated how much iron it would take to build the planet-destroying space station and even figured out how long it would take to build.

Here's the reality-check breakdown:

• Based on the density of a modern warship and scaled up, it would take about 1 quadrillion tons of steel to build one Death Star.

• The Earth's iron supply is capable of building 2 billion Death Stars.

• It would take 833,315 years to produce enough steel to start work on a Death Star, meaning you'll be long dead before you'll ever see it anywhere near operational.

It's a good thing Vader and Palpatine had a Clone army or else the Death Star could have taken an eternity to construct. Life's always better with clones. Don't you agree?

[ScottfromNJ]

“It would take 833,315 years to produce enough steel to start work on a Death Star, meaning you’ll be long dead before you’ll ever see it anywhere near operational”

Damn, and I was hoping to build one for my nephew by June, thought it would be a cool birthday present.

[chuckles]

Just abandon the space station and aim it to that black cube in Saudi Arabia and hit the thrusters. That will take care of most of our enemies if we picked the right day. It's already paid for and is rapidly becoming useless.

We could blame it on Allah.

[CodeToad]

Slacker.

[max americana]

How many illegals will be required for the construction?

[beethovenfan]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muaAZE0M3LU

[Secret Agent Man]

No offense but I think that’s lowballing it.

Especially if we’ve got Teamsters and AFL-CIO and SEIU folks working on it, and then the fact it’s a government project....

And that’s probably not even factoring maintenance.

[Secret Agent Man]

See the one thing (and literally, I mean the one thing) Lucas pulled off in the storyline was the surprise a second Death Star was being built somewhere else in the galaxy.

Unfortunately this story concept was stolen and failed absolutely miserably in the Jodie Foster career carrier “Contact”.

To sum up: A second Death Star far away in another part of the universe by the all powerful Galactic Empire: plausible suprise. A second enormous alien contact machine being built and finished that somehow doesn’t catch anyone’s attention anywhere else, not plausible.

[Secret Agent Man]

You’re going to have to settle for the LEGO version of the Death Star, then.

[baddog 219]

Now that’s funny!....And the truth.

[gogogodzilla]

Why not melt a nickel-iron asteroid, inject a bubble of air into the center, and then spin it to create centripedal force.

That, combined with the air pressure from the inside... and none from the outside, would then spin a nickel-iron bubble, which would then cool into a hollow sphere.

Which would be the external armor/skin of a Death Star. All you’d then need to do would be to cut a whole into it and then start working on the insides.

[irishtenor]

How much for a MOSTLY-DEATH Star?

[boop]

LOL! Yes, the “Give you a loogie-Star” WOULD be cheaper to build.

[dragonblustar]

[right way right]

Okay, let’s build it.
When its done we can tell the suckers that loaned the money for us to build it to get stuffed, or melt.

[LibWhacker]

Yeah, but you know how much a quadrillion dollars will get you in 833,000 years. So it’ll be a bargain.

[dangus]

Look at Episode I’s Galactic Empire: Buildings 1000 stories tall covering a planet.

Look at Episode IV’s Galactic Empire: Sustenance farmers surrounding a run down “truck-stop” lounge.

[PapaBear3625]

Meaningless speculation that does not take technology into account. Two thousand years ago, it would have taken more than the GDP of the entire Roman Empire to build a steel-hulled ship the size of a modern destroyer, if all you had were thousands of blacksmiths working over charcoal fires.

In the final analysis, cost is mostly a measure of how many man-hours of various skills it takes to do something. There are lots of things that are much cheaper now than they were decades ago, purely because the manufacture is more automated now.

In the future (if we ever manage to escape the Welfare State that is), you would not build something the size of a Death Star using metal mined from a planet. You would take an existing metallic asteroid and have robotic fabricators take it apart and make parts for your in-space structure.

[Eye of Unk]

They could just ask John Ringo the author on how he built the giant battlestation in his Citadel series.

[PapaBear3625]

Why not melt a nickel-iron asteroid, inject a bubble of air into the center, and then spin it to create centripedal force. That, combined with the air pressure from the inside... and none from the outside, would then spin a nickel-iron bubble, which would then cool into a hollow sphere.

John Ringo, in his "Live Free or Die" series, uses that concept, except he sticks ice at the center. As the heat approaches the center, the ice turns to steam which expands to metal bubble.

[Jack of all Trades]

Wonder what the cost we be if the plan was to ship all the tools and equipment to an an iron/nickel asteroid like Vesta, instead of boosting all the raw materials into orbit.