Do You Want to Build a Death Star

Another day, another report on how much it costs to build a death star, this time from Twizzle. Just the cost of materials comes to 13 times the Earth’s Gross Domestic Product.

Twizzle presents a very nice infographic showing the Death Star would cost a total of $22,452,000,000,000,000,000. That figures in cost and availability of materials and other practical considerations.

The Twizzle graphic gets some of its data from students at Leigh University, who themselves projected costs to reach $8.1 quadrillion.

The Leigh University project also inspired a White House petition to begin building a death star by this year. The US government responded with a resounding no, stating

"“The Administration shares your desire for job creation and a strong national defense, but a Death Star isn’t on the horizon,” via an official statement titled This Isn’t the Petition Response You’re Looking For."

An independent estimate on death star construction costs, from a Canadian tech expert named Ryszard Gold, came in at $15.6 septillion and 94 cents. That’s very… precise.

It’s a Trap: Emperor Palpatine’s Poison Pill, by Professor Zachary Feinstein at Washington University in St. Louis, goes further. This very academic paper actually estimates death star costs in context of the Empire’s “Gross Galactic Product,” which Feinstein figures to be  $92 sextillion. The paper concludes that “the total cost of building two Death Stars in ‘A New Hope’ and ‘Return of the Jedi’ was $419 quintillion (billion billion) dollars when research and development are also factored in.”

The problem with all these estimates is that they are wrong.

Screencap via LucasFilms

Sure, one of them might be right, if it were America or the Earth building death stars. But we’re talking about the Empire here. The U.S. government, with all its rules (including its insistence on paying workers and not just killing them at the end of the job) could never take on a project the magnitude of a small moon. The U.S. is only one country on one planet, with no off-world resources. Unlike the empire.

Let’s address raw materials first. The estimates all base the calculations on steel. This is dumb, because we just don’t know what type of alloys they were using a long time ago in a galaxy far away. The estimates are also concerned with where to get enough steel to build a whole entire death star or two. Here’s the thing with that. ANAKIN SKYWALKER WAS BURNT TO A CRISP ON A MINING ***PLANET***. Not an asteroid, not a small moon: the whole entire volcanic planet Mustafar was a mine. There is no way the empire had only one mining planet in one single little star system. What about THE GALACTIC EMPIRE sounds that self-limiting?

And then there’s money. You don’t have to worry about budgets when your system of government is literally pure evil. This is the whole problem with the dark side system of government. The rebels weren’t rebelling over, like, stamp taxes. The empire destroys entire planets. They conquer moon and planets and confiscate their resources.  Then they steal all the supplies from rebel relief missions. They enslave entire populations. Labor costs mean nothing to the Empire!  If the workers can’t keep up, the empire just commits genocide and moves on. Why do you think the Jedi were so busy? Watch the Clone Wars and Rebels animated series: you’ll see how it was!

Do you want to build a death star?

Palpatine makes Donald Trump look like, well, the tiny-handed impotent baby that he is. Lawsuits? Making deals? Cheating on taxes? Ridiculous games. Ineffectual posturing. Palpatine isn’t just some phony orange hemorrhoid in a cheap, ill-fitting suit. Donald shorts his contractors, sure. And they counter-sue. But even if the Empire went as far as to hire professional contractors, imagine how that would go with the Emperor.

Lucky for us, some brave rebel leaked a previously unknown, classified document straight into Culturess’ anonymous dropbox. It’s a memo from Emperor Palpatine titled Acquisition Guidelines for Large-Scale Galactic Empire Construction Projects. And it is revealing.

Next: Check Out This Cool Real-Life Lightsaber Duel

There’s no accounting for pure evil.