It may feel like Episode VII only came out yesterday, but the Star Wars hype machine will never end. This got the folks at Twizzle party planners wondering just how much did it actually cost the Empire to build their behemoth of a space station? Well, the short answer is a LOT! They estimated that the total cost construction cost would be an eye-watering $22,452,000,000,000,000,000 (That’s just over $22 quintillion in case you were wondering!). So yeah, if you’re thinking of blowing up Alderaan any time soon, you’d better get saving!
Although considering it’s estimated that there’s only $80.9 trillion in the world anyway, you might be better off not bothering! So why exactly would it cost so much? Let’s take a little bit of a closer look at the data. Firstly, Star Wars fans seem to generally agree that the Death Star was made from steel, and the infographic suggests that with a diameter of 140km, a whopping 1,080,000,000,000,000 tonnes would be needed.
That means that at today’s rate of production (1.3 billion tonnes a year) it would take 833,315 years to get together the steel needed for the build, at a cost of $852,000,000,000,000,000. As an alternative, you could look at using iron, which the Earth has in abundance. In fact, the Earth has enough iron to build as many as 2 billion Death Stars! There’s just one problem with that though. The vast majority of that iron is found in the Earth’s core, so you might find excavating it a little tricky.
The final figure given only covers the outer shell of the space station, so you’d still need to consider all of the other costs such as the labour and staffing, weaponry, tractor beams and comms equipment. (But apparently not a guard railing…)
So what can we conclude from all of this?
- The Empire has a LOT of disposable cash.
- You might be better putting that money into a savings account!
(Twizzle also produced a similar infographic before the release of Captain America: Civil War, looking at how much it would cost to be Cap, and you guessed it, it ain’t cheap!)
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