Originally by: Kazuo Ishiguro

---

You're ignoring the volume of my collection of station warehouses. Each one, while still packaged, occupies 2 km^3. This is a good start. A full stack of 2^31 - 1 has a volume of 4,294,967,294 km^3.

In order to take advantage of the escrow lockers, I create 100 stacks of station warehouses at a time, and put them into item exchange contracts. With corporation contracting V, I can have 60 outstanding contracts at a time. Add on another 21 personal contracts for contracting V. I have maxed out trade skills, so I can set 305 sell orders, each containing a full stack. I have another 1,000 stacks in my personal hangar. So the number of stacks so far is (60 + 21) * 100 + 1000 + 305. This part of my collection has a total volume of 4.04 x 10^13 km^3.

Now, assuming the entire population of eve joins in using the same method, the numbers get a bit bigger. I'll assume we have about 800k characters over 300k accounts. Each character can hold a collection equal to my own as listed above. We now have 3.23 x 10^19 km^3 of station warehouses between us.

If I'm short of contract slots or hangar stack space, one of my options is to open a few trade sessions. I think each of these can hold another 1,000 stacks of items. Now, suppose every player in the game logs on to Jita, docks in 4-4 and opens a trade session with every other player (and the node somehow performs well enough to allow this). That creates space for a few more stacks. To be precise, 300,000 x 299,999 / 2 * 1,000 = 4.5 x 10^10 of them.

Now we have to start drawing on the resources of the corporations who have rented offices in 4-4. Each office has 7 divisional hangars, and every corp has a deliveries hangar even if they don't have an office. So that's another 8000 stacks per corp. Now, you might think that as there are only 25 offices available, this isn't going to make much of a difference. But suppose every character in eve waits in line to start a corp, rent an office in 4-4, fill all the hangars and unrents the office, so the items are impounded. This adds another 8000 x 800,000 = 6.4 x 10^9 stacks (albeit at a cost of about 3.2 x 10^14 isk in rent per month, and goodness knows how much more in impound fees to get the stuff back again). It might be possible to exploit this idea even further, but I'm not very familiar with how the impound process works.

There are probably some other opportunities I've missed for stashing even more station warehouses, but those are the main ones. This places a lower bound of 5.89 x 10^10 on the number of stacks of station warehouses that can be stored in Jita 4-4, and thus a total volume of at least 2.53 x 10^20 km^3, implying a radius of at least 3.92 x 10^6 km.

As each of these containers has a mass of 1.8 x 10^7 kg, I thought it was worth checking what the Schwarzschild radius was for the pooled collections. The total mass is about 2.28 x 10^27 kg, about halfway between the mass of the Earth and that of the Sun on a log scale, and about 3/2 times that of Jupiter.

The corresponding Schwarzschild radius turns out to be approximately 3.7m, so the inhabitants of Jita 4-4 need not worry about any impending supernova or runaway star formation. Yet.

---