So, You Wanna Build A Death Star?

Star Wars fans will be pleased to know that those geeky geniuses at Centives have actually sat down and tried to work out exactly how one would go about building the legendary Death Star.

However, any budding super-villains out there shouldn’t get their hopes up, their calculations suggest that although there is enough iron in the earth’s core to build approximately 2 Billion Death Stars, at today’s rate of steel production, you are looking at its construction taking something like 833,315 earth years.

That might not seem that long, if you have a super-long, super-villain lifespan, but for you and I, and the average villain, that might be information enough to make us admit defeat! The other hitch any potential Death Star constructors out there are likely to encounter will be the slight problem of extracting this iron from the Earth’s core, without say, getting caught and pissing off THE WHOLE WORLD!!

The other factor likely to throw a spanner in the works for anyone looking to bid to build a Death Star is the cost. Centives calculated that the amount needed for the steel alone (at 2012 prices) would come to roughly $8,100,000,000,000,000 or 13,000 times the world’s GDP. That’s just the steel, one can only begin to imagine how much all those snazzy weapons will end up costing!
Don’t bother smashing the piggy bank kids, I just don’t think it’s gonna cut it for this one!

According to Centives:

We began by looking at how big the Death Star is. The first one is reported to be 140km in diameter and it sure looks like it’s made of steel. But how much steel? We decided to model the Death Star as having a similar density in steel as a modern warship. After all, they’re both essentially floating weapons platforms so that seems reasonable.

Scaling up to the Death Star, this is about 1.08×1015 tonnes of steel. 1 with fifteen zeros.

Which seems like a colossal mass but we’ve calculated that from the iron in the earth, you could make just over 2 billion Death Stars. You see the Earth’s crust may have a limited amount of iron, but the core is mostly our favourite metal and is both very big and very dense, and it’s from here that most of our death-star iron would come.

As I write this, I can feel my own heart sinking, as I realise I am shattering so many dreams with this unfortunate information. But do not despair, all these figures relate to building an ‘actual size’ Death Star, if you really want one that bad, you could always build a mini one, for let’s say, the Borrowers, or any Lilliputians that might venture into your part of town. You could, theoretically kidnap these really tiny people and force them to re-enact your own version of the epic space battle to end all space battles!!