At this point in 2020, if you looked into the sky tomorrow and saw a big ass death star looking mother, what do you think your first thought would be?

u/ravingwanderer: It’s all good. The Rebel Alliance has the plans to destroy it.

u/Lord_Quintus: oh goodie can’t wait for radioactive chunks of death star to rain down across the planet.

u/ravingwanderer: Wait.. the death star was nuclear powered?

u/MadGoalie: Dunno but we'd have to nuke it out of orbit so fallout and that

u/Giraffesarentreal19: Nukes actually don’t work as well as you’d think, at least when talking about space. The destructive power of an explosion isn’t the explosion itself, but rather it’s shockwave. In space, there is no atmosphere to make a shockwave, dramatically decreasing its effect.

The best bet would be to make the Earth a giant gun.

Let me explain.

Dig a hole several hundred meters down in a depopulated area. Maybe the Sahara desert, or Antartica if the Death Star is in a polar orbit. Fill the bottom up with several dozen hydrogen bombs, enough to level many cities. Fill the hole with water, and cap the hole with a steel cap weighing many tons. Repeat a few dozen times. Wait for the Death Star to pass overhead, and ignite the bombs.

The fastest recorded man made object was not a spacecraft, but a manhole cover. A nuclear bomb was ignited underground, and the blast was in part directed to a pipe with the only weak point being said manhole cover. A camera was pointed at the cover, and one frame it was there, the next it wasn’t. It was travelling at least 66 km per second.

We have just recreated this experiment, except many times more powerful.

The blast of the bombs turn the water into steam, increasing the pressure of the hole to many hundreds of atmospheres rapidly. The shockwave if the explosion coupled with the massive change in pressure makes the steel cap, weighing many tons, shoot of the ground going dozens of kilometers per second. This is repeated at the same time many times over in the same area.

The steel caps hit the Death Star’s emitter dish with gargantuan force, rendering the station useless. The only option for them is to use half of the station’s turbo lasers to bombard the planet from orbit. While disastrous, it buys the Rebellion time.

Meanwhile, Star Wars fans everywhere are quickly burning any memorabilia related to the Rebellion, Republic, and the Jedi, and hypothesize where we are in the timeline. Mass chaos ensues, and if the rebellion destroys the station, especially if it happens over Yavin, Earth makes contact via radio to tell them everything.

Everything. We now are omnipotent gods in the Star Wars universe, now ours. George Lucas is either labeled insane or a god, and Star Wars fans everywhere immediately go off world to find and collect lightsabers. r/prequelmemes will uselessly quote Revenge of the Sith, and the rest of the galaxy immediately add “I have the high ground!” to Earth’s image. Wookiepeedia becomes the new library of Alexandria, and Star Wars fans are seen as either mystical prophets or insane humans across the galaxy. 

Star Wars lore becomes a legitimate academic study, and, perhaps most intriguing, the galaxy now knows the true location of human evolution. It was long thought to be Coruscant, but now there is proof it is Earth. Theories sprout about how humans spread throughout the galaxy, from a world without sufficient technology. Earth technology expands rapidly, and our tactics and military prowess makes us a military force.

I may have gotten carried away. I’m bored out of my skull.