Building a Death Star

This isn't really a tech post, but being a Star Wars fan, thought this was worth a column.

When President Obama took office, he set up a website called We the People, where anybody can post a petition with some exceptions. If it gets 25,000 responses, (since updated to 100,000) then the White House will respond to the petition within 30 days.  Many crazy petitions have been posted.

But the single craziest was someone posted a petition that the U.S. should build a Death Star.

Surprisingly, 34,435 people signed the petition, including me.

On January 12, 2013, the White House responded! I'll save you the lengthy response, and zero in on the best line in the article.  Paul Shawcross, the White House's adviser on science and space said, "The Administration does not support blowing up planets." There are many other tongue-in-cheek responses, but it is a priceless response.  Any self-respecting Star Wars fan has to read this.  Clearly Shawcross is a fan.

That line alone is worth the read. Not just that it'd cost an estimated $850 quadrillion dollars.  And this doesn't count the inevitable construction cost overrun.

However, that didn't stop someone from starting a Kickstarter project to build one for us.   He asked for 20 million Euros, and established the estimated cost of $850 quadrillion as the "stretch" goal.  This was to provide "start-up" funds to build out the design before actually building the thing. Alas, only $438,402 (after currency conversion) was committed, so it did not fund.

I've been thinking we may need to invade Canada and Mexico to increase our tax base so that we can afford our very own Death Star.