Newt is thinking way too small – Let’s start building a Death Star

The Death Star Is a Surprisingly Cost-Effective Weapons System
[Via Kevin Drum - Mother Jones]

There’s been a lot of loose talk about the Death Star lately. I want to put it into a bit of perspective.

As background, some students at Lehigh University have estimated that it would be a very expensive project. The steel alone, assuming the Death Star’s mass/volume ratio is about the same as an aircraft carrier, comes to $852 quadrillion, or 13,000 times the world’s GDP. Is this affordable?

Let’s sharpen our pencils. For starters, this number is too low. Using the same aircraft carrier metric they did, I figure that the price tag on the latest and greatest Ford-class supercarrier is about 100x the cost of the raw steel that goes into it. If the Death Star is similar, its final cost would be about 1.3 million times the world’s GDP.

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Sure, it will take at least 500 years for the world’s GDP to get large enough to pay for it but by that time there will be almost 2 million other planets to help.

The sooner we start, the cheaper it will eventually be.Think of the stimulus this will have on the economy.

How many new jobs will be created? How much will the manufacturing base increase? It could easily house over 30 million people and, if we want to use military levels of personnel complements, it could fit over 50 trillion people.

Think of all the innovations that will help all of us as we work to create a planet-busting ray of destruction.

Especially now that we know about those thermal exhaust ports. We have already made a great start with the PR page. As they state, “It pays for itself.”

The first candidate who seriously comes out for this project has my vote.