The cost of the Death Star

Still weighing up whether you should join the Dark Side or not? Well, we might be able to help make your mind up.

If you're looking for a better wage then you might have to start embracing evil. Students at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania worked out how much it would cost to build the Death Star and came up with a figure of $8,100,000,000,000,000 ($8.1 quadrillion!?), which is 13,000 times the world's GDP.

How the hell did they come up with this though?

Well the first one was reported to have measured 140km in diameter and they believed that it was made of steel. They then looked at other modern warships and figured they would have a similar density. They calculated that from the iron in the earth, you could make just over 2 billion Death Stars.

But, before you start getting scared/excited then you need to know that, at today's rate of steel production, it would take 833,315 years to create enough steel to start building.

Patience you must have.

(Image: All Star)

[via Centives]