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.
But there's more. Star Wars may have taken place "a long time ago," but the technology of the Star Wars universe is well in our future. How far into our future? Well, Star Trek is about 300 years in our future, and the technology of Star Wars is obviously well beyond that. Let's call it 500 years. What will the world's GDP be in the year 2500? Answer: assuming a modest 2% real growth rate, it will be about 20,000 times higher than today. So we can figure that the average world in the Star Wars universe is about 20,000x richer than present-day Earth, which means the Death Star would cost about 65x the average world's GDP.
However, the original Death Star took a couple of decades to build. So its annual budget is something on the order of 3x the average world's GDP.
But how big is the Republic/Empire? There's probably a canonical figure somewhere, but I don't know where. So I'll just pull a number out of my ass based on the apparent size of the Old Senate, and figure a bare minimum of 10,000 planets. That means the Death Star requires .03% of the GDP of each planet in the Republic/Empire annually. By comparison, this is the equivalent of about $5 billion per year in the current-day United States.
In other words, not only is the Death Star affordable, it's not even a big deal.
Friday, February 24, 2012
Death Star Economics [Bryan]
Would the death star be economically feasible? Kevin Drum says yes:
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1 comment:
Fun post! Maybe economically feasible, if you divide it to be paid by 10,000 planets. But then this raises the question of the political feasibility. You either have to convince 10,000 different entities to contribute to something that they may benefit from very little, which seems daunting. Or you have to have a tyranny so powerful and far reaching that they can demand it from the 10,000 planets, which is scary. Economically feasible, maybe. Politically feasible, no way. Count me in as a rebel.
Kyle
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