If the government refuses to help us defend against impending threats, the people have no choice but to take up the project themselves. And since the White House has officially thrown water on the people’s demands to build our very own Death Star, it means that we have to turn to crowdfunding.

Over 500 people have pledged over £70,000 to help kickstart the construction of a functioning Death Star on Kickstarter. I’m sure you caught the “£” – that’s because the Kickstarter project was actually started out of Leicestershire, United Kingdom. Kickstarter only went live for U.K.-based projects back in October, 2012.

Last month, a petition to start building a Death Star on the White House’s “We The People” site garnered enough signatures to force an official response from the government. The carefully-worded response suggested that “the Administration does not support blowing up planets,” and that the project would be economically unfeasible anyway.

Some estimates have given such a project an $850,000,000,000,000,000 (£543,000,000,000,000,00) price tag, but the new Kickstarter project is only asking for £20 million at this point, in order to develop “more detailed plans and enough chicken wire to protect reactor exhaust ports.”

The project creators, gnut.co.uk, acknowledge that it’s all a joke and that the goal is set high to ensure it is never actually fulfilled:

“The main challenge is assuring Kickstarter that this is a joke and not a serious project. As proof, the goal has been set high enough to make successful funding almost impossible.”

That’s probably why 500+ backers over the past 48 hours have felt safe in making pledges.

Still, you have until April 1st (fittingly) to make your pledge and help reach the £20,000,000 goal. Wouldn’t that be hilarious, if this thing was actually funded?