Here, Sign This Petition To Make Obama Build A Death Star

As The Simpsons, no less, has told us many, many times, democracy simply doesn’t work. And now, here’s your chance to make sure it doesn’t work — by signing a genuine petition to force Barack Obama to begin construction on a quote/unquote “Death Star” by 2016.

The petition to make Obama build a Death Star is really a real petition, and is really available for your signature on the White House website. Currently, the petition only has about 5,900 signatures, but if it gets 25,000 signatures by December 14th, the White House is required by their own rules to review it. This “review process” will naturally consist of Obama making a professorial I’m-not-really-laughing-but-I’m-forcing-myself-to-pretend-to-laugh type of noise, as he so often is forced to when confronted with our antics. And then he’ll sensibly delete the entire petition.

Here is a screenshot of the petition:

As you can see, the petition urges the U.S. government to “secure funding and resources, and begin construction on a Death Star by 2016.” Which is kind of pleasingly modest, giving Obama four years to pull Death Star funding together like that.

And as the petition goes on to say, by focusing our resources on a “space-superiority platform and weapon system such as a Death Star,” more jobs will be created in the United States, “in the fields of construction, engineering, space exploration, and more.” Which sounds like a good idea. …Surely Obama can’t repel an innovative idea with firepower of that magnitude! …Star Wars reference!

Though it does make one wish that we had just gone ahead and elected Willard “Mitt” Romney, who surely would have already created a Death Star by executive fiat, without waiting for us peons to suggest one. Plus, Mitt Romney could have funded the whole thing with the change that trickles out of his pants pockets as he falls asleep on the sofa each night. He’s rich; yes he is. …And what we need is a Republican on the job — after, all how can Obama manage to build a Death Star when he can’t even build these Death Panels that we’ve heard so much about? … Outdated political humor reference!

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In case you were wondering how much a Death Star would cost in real life, Forbes figured it out for it us, since they have nothing much else to do, what with the economy collapsing and all. It turns out that a single Death Star would cost… eight hundred and fifty-two quadrillion dollars to build; or, if you prefer your numbers to be still terrifyingly big but also somewhat comprehensible, a Death Star would cost eight hundred and fifty-two thousand million million dollars… which still isn’t even that comprehensible — that’s how big that is, so forget it.

Anyway, it would cost 13,000 times the Gross Domestic Product of the entire world, which is really too much, even when you factor in how cool it would be to get to pull those toggle switches which let you blow up a planet:

The main problem with building a Death Star, it turns out — again, according to Forbes — is getting enough steel with which to build the Death Star. Steel comes from iron ore, and we actually do have enough iron ore on the planet Earth to build two million Death Stars — unfortunately, almost all of this iron ore is located at the earth’s core; and as an environmentalist, Obama is probably against removing the earth’s core like that.

So instead, we’d have to use lame boring regular steel from the earth’s surface, which is where the additional problem comes in:

…At today’s rate of steel production  (1.3 billion tons annually), it would take 833,315 years to produce enough steel to begin work. So once someone notices what you’re up to [with building the Death Star], you have to fend them off for 800 millennia before you have a chance to fight back.

…Which is… a problem. So the whole thing is kind of a boondoggle, and thus maybe not as great for our economy as one might have hoped, what with it taking nearly a million years and costing quadrillions of dollars like that. But hey! That’s what Democrats are good at — boondoggles, am I right? (Note: I am not right.)

But anyway, sign the petition, which once again is available right here. Sign it, so that Obama will have to vote on it, and then his eyes will probably roll out of their sockets at the ridiculousness of us, the people who he is now trapped into governing for another four years.

And now, here’s an obligatory video from Return of the Jedi. Admiral Ackbar, blah blah. “It’s a trap!” ha ha. Actually, it’s an economic trap, as this essay has just proven. Anyway, here’s the obligatory video; after the video, this essay is over, dunzo, done.

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