What if the Death Star was Real and Orbiting Earth?

Professor Mike Merrifield is the head of astronomy at the University of Nottingham, an expert on galaxy evolution, and a contributor to Deep Sky Videos explores what the results might be if we actually went ahead and built a Death Star, orbiting the Earth.

The Death Star, orbiting and the altitude of the International Space Station (400 kms), would be enormous: 45 times the width of the full moon! Merrifield’s back of the envelope calculate is that the Death Star’s superlaser would have required 2 x 10^32 watts of power to destroy an Earth-like planet (like Alderaan). That is 17 orders of magnitude more powerful than the most powerful laser on Earth. In other words, the Death Star would need 100,000,000,000,000,000 of these lasers. Then you’d need to solve the problem of how to power it, which is another giant problem.