With todays technology, do you think a 'death star' can be created?

Well, it depends how literally you want to match the movie version. With enough effort and money we could shoot a whole forkload of steel into orbit, construct some really large sphere, get it spinning to create artificial internal gravity, mount a laser on it, and fill it with air and people.

But is that a "death star" Not really. It's not fast, it's massively economically stupid, it's militarily valueless, and so forth. But it's kind of death-star-ish.

But the cost of such an enterprise would surely cost many times more than the GDP of the planet and would take decades...maybe centuries...to complete. In reality no such project would ever clear political muster, and any politician who embarked on it would be voted out of office in no time flat.

I think that Armageddon will be brought about by swarms of tiny armed drones that are too small to escape. In fact, this was talked about in one of those tech magazines. As such, authoritarian regimes and terrorists will find them to be more affordable than a moon-sized death star.

I sure hope not

No. We don't have nearly enough technology to even make it out to space to make that sort of thing (which would take so many years to take supplies to and from the site where we'd create it). It takes days and years to get to a certain place with our most powerful transportation methods like rockets and such. The construction of something like that would take much more than our entire lifetimes.

That's just the construction part--imagine how impossible it'd be scientifically. Which is why it's a movie. Movies are meant to outlive our most daring dreams and fantasies.

I think the Sun would swallow Earth before we get that far.