I was having trouble blogging, so my fiance helped me. This is the result. Why should we build a Death Star? Here are his thoughts… (Okay yeah, mixed with mine.)

1. Economic benefits
Building a Death Star would be a massive capital project, causing multi-national economic stimulus. Such a construction project would require huge numbers of people and resources, generating jobs and all those other good things.

2. Unified Purpose
Building a Death Star would require a large scale coalition dedicated towards a common goal, helping to alleviate regional struggles and conflicts. If we really want to finish our Death Star, we can’t be stirring trouble up with our neighbors.

3. Technological Innovation
Building a Death Star would provide high pressure motivation to develop and test real-world, practical technologies. Obviously we don’t yet know how to build things in space or create planet-destroying lasers. We’d have to work on it. And think of all the other cool things we’d learn in the process.

4. Alternative Mining Methods
Building a Death Star would require massive amounts of resources. We would have to start mining meteors and other small scale celestial bodies. Note that developing the technology and doing so would likely reduce mining on earth, preventing further damage to our own planet caused by such activities. And who know what other industries we might relocate beyond our planet’s surface once the technology arises.

5. Life Boat
If things go bad on Planet Earth, we can abandon ship and hop on our Death Star. Theoretically, we’d have also developed space travel a little by then, and we could salvage a large portion of the planet’s population.

6. Asteroid Shield
There’s nothing like a gigantic laser to destroy asteroids before they can hit Earth.

7. Deterrent Against Potentially Hostile Alien Life
Who wants to screw with a Death Star?

8. Defense Against Less Intelligent Hostile Alien Life
Shouldn’t have screwed with the Death Star. Aliens go bye-bye.

Now, of course there are also reasons why building a Death Star might be bad (after all, we never abuse any technologies we invent), but that’s a story for another blog.

What do you think, readers? Are these good reasons to build a Death Star? (You know it would be awesome.)