"The individual beams would just pass by each other and keep going in their own directions." īrooks Peck, curator at the EMP Museum in SeattleĪlthough generating enough metal to build a Death Star would be "bonkers," technically speaking, it would be possible, Peck said. If that's not discouraging enough, Burks pointed to the famous "Star Wars" scenes where several lasers from the Death Star all converge into a point, somehow combine and amplify, and then strike a doomed planet with a single beam. "In producing all that energy, you would produce a lot of heat - like enough heat to melt the Death Star," Burks said. The Death Star would require roughly a million billion times more power to blow up a planet, she said in the video. In the video, Burks (who wasn't available for an interview before this article's deadline) explains that the most powerful laser beam on Earth is a 2-petawatt (2 quadrillion watts) beam constructed in Japan. In 2015, the American Chemical Society released a video about the Death Star's laser, featuring Burks. Raychelle Burks, assistant chemistry professor at St. The real-world feasibility of such a device is suspect. The Death Star uses a convergence of laser beams to destroy planets. "Of course, in 'Star Wars,' they used 'hypermatter' to power the Death Star," he added, "so who knows what might be possible with this new and improved source of destructive power?"
But even the most advanced current military lasers would have trouble changing the flight path of an intercontinental ballistic missile as it careened towards Earth, he said. In "Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope," the Death Star's lasers are used to blow up the planet Alderaan, which is similar in size to Earth. Putting it into a higher orbit is possible but would require a "prohibitive" amount of rocket fuel, Pyle said.
Although small objects can remain in low orbit around the Earth for hundreds of years with no propulsion, an object that large would fall out of orbit more quickly and crash into the surface. The Death Star is at most 100 miles (160 kilometers) in diameter, and would not be able to survive long in low Earth orbit. "The best way to build a Death Star would likely be to mine asteroids and possibly the moon for metals, print the massive parts, and then transport them to the neighborhood of the Earth or whatever planet you want to destroy," he said.īut even then, there are problems, he added. The cost is also difficult to bear: $850 quadrillion, according to the White House's response to the online petition, which is many times the U.S. Rocket launches to send all that metal and other building materials to space would "pollute the atmosphere to the point that anyone left who could use the Death Star would have to live on it - Earth would be uninhabitable," Pyle said.
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