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Former Director of the ISS Division At NASA Talks About Science Behind 'Elysium'
Nerval's Lobster writes "In the new movie 'Elysium,' Earth a century and a half from now is an overtaxed slum, low on niceties like clean water and riddled with crime and sickness. The ultra-rich have abandoned terra firma in favor of Elysium, an orbital space station where the champagne flows freely and the medical care is the best possible. Mark Uhran, former director of the International Space Station Division at NASA headquarters, talked with Slashdot about what it would take (and how much it would cost) to actually build a space station like that for civilians. It turns out NASA did a report way back in 1975 describing what it would take to build a Stanford torus space station like the one in the movie: rotation for artificial gravity, a separate shield for radiation and debris, the ability to mine materials from astroids or possibly the moon, and $190.8 billion in 1975 dollars (the equivalent of $828.11 billion today). Looks like the ultra-rich are stuck on Earth for the time being."
And still artificial gravity experiments languish.
if the rich are in the station and the poor people on earth have no money, how do the rich people make more money to pay the bills?
They could start a brothel and come up with this kind of money in NO TIME. We know from what has gone on in the media over the past couple of decades that SEX SELLS.
Just sayin'!
captcha: champion
A good thing for all Americans !!
Maybe my memory isn't so great, but isn't that less than a couple bailouts the US had a few years ago?
Wouldn't a project of this magnitude do a lot more in job creation and technology growth than salvaging the US auto industry? I thought saving GM et al cost a trillion?
this is off topic, but there is lots of history that shows that some of these dystopian ideas are dumb. the USA and Australia were both originally populated by criminals, slaves, and people the UK didn't want. both became greater than the mother country because people don't just give up and die.
lots of other examples from history like greece, the middle east, ancient rome where the colonies became greater than the original
Think about this: for less than the cost of the war in Iraq, or for three F-35 development programs, or any number of measures, the war machine is incredibly expensive.
War on Earth seems to be holding us here.
I just totaled up the net "worth" of the top 25 people on Forbes 2013 billionaires list, and I got $839.8 billion. Not quite sure how $828.11bn is out of reach if certain people were sufficiently motivated, when it only takes the top 25. Now, if we were talking about something that cost $10 trillion or so, then I might consider it functionally out of reach, as that probably surpasses the net worth of the top several thousand.
GStreamer - The only way to stream!
Tessier-Ashpool
Villa Straylight
Freeside
what is the amount of $ spent each year for military equipment, world wide?
Then again, they probably couldn't agree on the champagne brand alone
According to Wiki, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbes_list_of_billionaires, the 1,426 billionaires in 2013 have a combined net worth of $5.4 trillion. So those people could afford to build 6 of these structures and an additional one about half its size (assuming the cost to size ratio is linear).
$190.8 billion in 1975 dollars (the equivalent of $828.11 billion today). Looks like the ultra-rich are stuck on Earth for the time being
The estimated total net worth of the Forbes 400 (400 wealthiest USAians) last year was 1.7 trillion USD. And that's just the top Americans. Throw in some Russian tycoons, Middle East oil sheiks, European industrialists, assorted media tycoons from around the world, and include corporate resources they control in addition to personal assets, and that second statement (we are all stuck on Earth for the time being) has nothing to do with the first (it costs a lot of money to get in to space in any large scale).
Easily doable if we changed our priorities a little bit. You know what I'm talking about..
the ultra-rich are risk adverse, they already have a planet with resources, nice places to live, and serfs / two-legged product
$190.8 billion in 1975 dollars (the equivalent of $828.11 billion today). Looks like the ultra-rich are stuck on Earth for the time being.
Last September, Forbes wrote: "The combined net worth of the 2012 class of the 400 richest Americans is $1.7 trillion."
So why exactly are the ultra-rich stuck on Earth? 400 private citizens from a single country could band together and build this thing and still not spend even HALF their money.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
... but you wouldn't want to live there. The cost of transporting the essentials of a rich person's life -- all the food, the drinks, the furniture, the disco balls, the fast cars, the drugs -- would surely exceed the cost of building the station itself. However, a space station that la riche can visit once a year, like a month in the Riviera only in space, now that would work. Plus, what's the point of being ostentatious if there are no peasants to impress? Better to have a least some people you can lock the gates on, just to feel like you've made it.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
I think by now SpaceX has shown that the private industry can accomplish things for MUCH cheaper then NASA can. I'd suspect that if Musk decided he wanted to live in a orbiting fortress overlooking the world could figure out a way to accomplish it.
The article states that it would take nine metric tons of material to shield a single torus. The table in the original paper says 9.9 Mt. That's megatons, not metric tons. Slight difference...
The only problem of Elysium is the necessity to loft lots of cargo. May be, INITIALLY loft lots of cargo since after they begin mining Moon for titanium, hydrogen (poles) and oxygen they will not be in short supply of main expendables. And I see at least 2 methods for it that should work using our existing knowledge base: Skylon and Nerva.
Then they will have one of 2 problems for their choice: either they will have lots of everything except energy (I mean colonization of systems of gas giants) or they will have energy and nothing else (nearer to Sun than Earth). And I don't know any method to resolve this dilemma.
Sum of wealth of Forbes top 100 Billionaires: $1885.30B
Cost of space station: $828.11B
% of wealth... 44%
They can probably write it off on their taxes anyway...
When I first saw the trailer for Elysium, I was struck by how similar the idea was to H, G. Wells The Time Machine. You have a society stratified into the underclass whose lives are nasty, brutal and short and the elite class who live like kings of old. Morlocks and Eloi in Wells' case; groundlings and spacers in the case of this movie.
I've never heard of this movie Rotation, is it any good???
So we could have had a space colony with asteroid mining, but instead we invaded Iraq? AMERRRRRICAAAA, FUCK YEAH!
If each of the 1226 billionaires in the world chipped in $675 million, you could build that $828 billion dollar space station, and they'd each still have at least $300 million to be super wealthy on the station.
Seriously. Rich people could definitely come up with $1 trillion if they really wanted to. So if they wanted to, they could definitely hire a bunch of engineers and scientists to make them their paradise in the sky, and then say "So long, suckers!"
Why don't they? Probably because they would rather have lots of minions around to boss - otherwise, what's the point of being rich?
I am officially gone from
How, pray tell, are we going to mine one of those? Would it really kill the editors to run things through a spell checker? Would it, really?
You can learn a lot about a person if you just take the time to inject them with sodium pentathol
I don't think that you can just adjust for inflation to get the proposed current cost of the space station. We are only 40 years on from the original report, and we already have greatly improved manufacturing and production efficiencies. Our computers are smaller, lighter, more power efficient, and have fewer moving parts. That alone means that transportation costs would be reduced overall, and reliability increased. We have new materials to work with, lighter, stronger, sometimes self healing. I'm not saying that it would be free, but maybe up to 1/3rd less than advertised.
somehow though the synopsis reminded me of ZARDOZ
Not enough Matt Damon in Pretty Woman hooker boots.
828 billion. Isn't that around the stimulus bill? I would rather have a space station.
I having trouble grasping why the Elysium world is contrived to be dystopian.
So even if it was just a class thing where the rich didn't want to associate with the rif raf why would they care if they are living it up in another space station somewhere? In this scenario are the rich, every single one of them, sadists?
"$828.11 billion"?
That is not outside the realm of possible. The U.S. spent more than that in Iraq for a lot less effect.
I suspect the real price needs another zero. And then you're talking relatively impossible,
Oh, and current technology would not permit this to be self-sufficient. We still need minions down here. I'll be looking for work sending stuff up, ans there will always be that need in my lifetime.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
A not-so modest proposal (not mine, just some dude with a space blog)
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Just remember the bank bailout. I can imagine a scenario where a space station is financed by the tax payers' money and then privatized for peanuts.
Oblivion
After Earth
Elysium
Gravity
Europa Report
Space rules!
Here are two short snippets about this script.
" two classes of people exist: the very wealthy, who live on a pristine man-made space station called Elysium,
and the rest, who live on an ***overpopulated***, ruined Earth"
"... but IF [the main character] succeeds, he could save not only his own life,
but millions of people on Earth as well."
Call me picky but sounds like an utter script failure from Hollywood yet again.
So how are saving millions of people going to help an already OVERPOPULATED Earth?
Sure, not everything in a science fiction story plays out as reality. If it did, the stories would be under the headings of "prophecies" instead of sci-fi!
But the part I constantly find interesting with science fiction is how often it suggests ideas which seem unbelievable at the time, but which more or less come true eventually.
Taking the 1984 example (since you brought it up) ... Many would insist that the entire "war on terror" the USA is waging is exactly like the Eurasia scenario. (Govt. finds it useful to control the masses by keeping them in a constant state of fear and declared war.) The "Big Brother is Watching" theme throughout it certainly resonates with people today, too. The differences between the book and reality today are the "small elements". (EG. In the book, everyone was viewing broadcasts created by the government while cameras watched them back, and were apparently monitored at random at some central facility. In reality today, everyone views broadcasts which are ostensibly not affiliated with government, but which regularly feed us the versions of the news the government wants us to hear, and the distractions govt. wants us to stay entertained and occupied with. The cameras watching us back aren't centralized or placed in our TV sets, but rather, are strategically distributed all over the landscape, with each serving a specific purpose of controlling one aspect of people's behavior. One set to enforce stopping at red signal lights, one set to enforce speed limits, one set to record one's actions in front of any FDIC insured banking institution.....)
If you read other dystopian science fiction like Brave New World, you'd find that today's society is probably more like a "mash up" of what it envisioned and the 1984 world.
As for The Jetsons? It was just a cartoon. I find it a little bit insulting to famous book authors to put it in the same category of science fiction, though it was a perfectly good cartoon series in its own right.
Isn't this film just Metropolis in space?
Choose your allies carefully, it is highly unlikely you will be held accountable for the actions of your enemies
Typical Hollywood slant on the state of the world. Always blame the rich, but they leave out themselves, for the problems of the world. None of this could happen if the government was not involved so blame the corrupt policies coming from our governments, yes that includes your lord and savior Obama. Can’t wait for the name calling to begin.
I'm throwing as fast as I can!
Get these MUTHERFUCKING RACOONS OFF MY MUTHERFUCKING SPACESTATION!
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
ahhhh, slashdot...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Star Trek gets away with the no-money concept because it's a post-scarcity society where you can conjure up almost anything from your replicator or holodeck.
They don't really get away with it because Star Trek basically relies on magic. They just call their magic wands replicators and they conveniently ignore any bothersome laws of physics or economics if they get in the way. Space travel probably would be a lot easier if you could ignore relativity completely like Star Trek does. Star Trek's economy makes no more sense than the economy in the Harry Potter universe.
Even if we did have this technology today, people would still want to do something meaningful with their lives.
Some people would want to do something meaningful. Most would probably just prefer to be entertained and comfortable. I wish I shared your optimism that the number of the former would outweigh the number of the later but I very much doubt it.
I would think that on /. of all places, people would recognize that some people do just work for no reason (FOSS anyone?)
That doesn't mean people will in sufficient numbers work on necessary tasks for no reason, particularly if they are unpleasant, dangerous, overwhelming and/or boring. The good news is that there are always a few willing people but the bad news is that there are always just a few.
The top 200 richest people have 2.675 Trillion
Top 1% of the world command 52.8 Trillion
Wikipedia states the stanford torus was designed for 10,000 to 150,000 people.
If there is a demand, it could be done. Think of how much the nutty doomsday preppers spend.
Now for the problem. Since these are rich folks the money is not stuffed in a mattress. If they decide to re-allocate the capital other industries will likely suffer. Kinda like using corn for fuel instead of food. Might make the poor earth of the movie.
One upside is that if we get good at making them the cost should go down and once the infrastructure is in place making more would be less difficult. It would be cool and would definitely kick us in the butt developmentally.
I had a space tech class as a freshman years ago and couldn't figure out how to solve 2 problems for my torus design (it was a conceptual project):
1. How do you dock with it? Is it going to be an Elite-like approach where you sync rotations? That seems pretty ugly, especially when you get inside and need to actually dock.
2. If your hangar is stationary at the wheel hub and the living areas are gimballed to rotate around the hangar, how do you seal your living quarters if there's a constantly rotating connection inside the station? It would seem that wherever the two meet will constantly leak air.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
or about 10 months worth of bailout money for the banks. Sounds doable to me...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
So, we could take one year off of funding our military and build one. Of course, eurasia or oceania or whatever would attack us immediately.
$190.8 billion in 1975 dollars (the equivalent of $828.11 billion today). Looks like the ultra-rich are stuck on Earth for the time being.
You realize this is almost the exact amount (only a few tens of billions of dollars off) that the ultra-rich in the United States alone gave themselves from our tax money just over five years ago?
The only thing lacking in building such a space station is vision, not resources.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
So somewhat less than governments have wasted on middle east wars in the space of a year or thereabouts. And considerably less than was lost from pensions and investments when the bankers got greedy and broke various laws?
Two HUNDRED BILLION Dollars!
Quite a lot of our techniques for refining metals require vast quantities of water and oxygen, and gravity.
Then why aren't we developing refining systems that don't? The answer's in the title. If ever there was a space tech development that would pay off on Earth.
this is off topic, but there is lots of history that shows that some of these dystopian ideas are dumb. the USA and Australia were both originally populated by criminals, slaves, and people the UK didn't want. both became greater than the mother country because people don't just give up and die.
Did you spend three seconds thinking about this before you posted? There was about a billion people in 1800. We now have seven times that number, and far more by the time Elysium rolls around, unless a whole lotta people start dying from climate change or disease. Nearly every inch of the earth's surface is claimed by one nation or another.
And the people in 1800 were looking at a world of, from their point of view, infinite resources. We've already passed peak oil and are finding limits to important resources like zinc and helium.
So what land and resources are your 'criminals and slaves' going to be able to use to better themselves now, much less 140 years from now?
Does anyone else think that a price tag of under a trillion dollars puts this thing closer to actuality than you previously thought? Wikipedia says there are over 1200 billionaires (in US$) in the world right now.
OK LETS DO THIS.
Blue Danube Waltz.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
If Nasa says it would cost $828.11 billion then really what that means is "ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD" because NASA is not known to keep their projects under budget.
Of course, why build 1 when you can build 2 at twice the price. Another Jodie Foster reference.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
$828.11 billion is really pretty cheap. The US spends that much in a year on its military. If you could finance that over 30 yrs, it would be totally doable.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
It would be really nice to build a big space station like that. But I think that we should fix our world so everyone can benifit from such things. Nevermind, its easier to just forget about the sick and poor. Just go ahead and look away, but when in our entire history have we been able to shed the evil that plagues humanity. It can be possible to seperate yourself from this world that will be extinct if things keep going the way they are. But it will only be a matter of time before the same problems come back to those who survive. It may take a hunddred years, or ten. But ignoring a problem never solves it.
My: "Self-Replicating Space Habitat graduate school purpose and plans from 1988" http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
Some of my inspirations:
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/book.php?titleID=28
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/book.php?titleID=29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Running
The cheapest way forward may be to create an open source plan for an automated seed that could be sent to an asteroid where it would begin to grow into a space habitat. Then the habitat could duplicate itself by making more seeds. The habitats could create space craft to land on earth and solar space satellites to launch them back into space with people on-board. So, all it takes is crow-sourcing and the cost of the first seed and the first launch. Well, of course the first might fail, but by the tenth try it might work. So, it might be doable for only a few billion dollars in real money for materials and the first launches. Testing could be mostly done via simulation.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
said the guy who doesn't know we spent 10 trillion dollars, on absolutely nothing, since 2010.
Only $828 Billion? Didn't we borrow that much from China this year? Seriously... let's do this.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
but i've come to expect it from the same people that don't believe in God. Most of the advice and sentiment and argument i see here is really lacking on both sides because they worship money. And they don't even know why. just for the record, i prefer being rich. but it's probably due to enjoying what i work for. some of the best times of my life were on a very low budget.
http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/08/02/194243/paper-evolution-favors-cooperation-over-selfishness
"Conventional wisdom has suggested selfishness is most beneficial evolutionary strategy for humans, while cooperation is suboptimal. This dovetailed with a political undercurrent dating back more than a century, starting with social Darwinism. A new paper in the journal Nature Communications casts doubt on this school of thought. The paper shows that while selfishness is optimal in the short term, it fails in the long term. Cooperation is seen as the most effective long term human evolutionary strategy."
That said, here is something I wrote a few years ago: ... I agree with the sentiment of the Einstein quote [That we should approach the universe with compassion], but that sentiment itself is only part of a larger difficult-to-easily-resolve situation. It become more the Yin/Yang or Meshwork/Hierarchy situation I see when I look out my home office window into a forest. On the surface it is a lovely scene of trees as part of a forest. Still, I try to see *both* the peaceful majesty of the trees and how these large trees are brutally shading out of existence saplings which are would-be competitors (even shading out their own children). Yet, even as big trees shade out some of their own children, they also put massive resources into creating a next generation, one of which will indeed likely someday replace them when they fall. I try to remember there is both an unseen silent chemical war going on out there where plants produce defense compounds they secrete in the soil to inhibit the growth of other plant species (or insects or fungi) as a vile act of territoriality and often expansionism, and yet also the result is a good spacing of biomass to near optimally convert sunlight to living matter and resist and recover from wind and ice damage. I try to recall that there is the most brutal of competition between species of plants and animals and fungi and so on over water, nutrients (including from eating other creatures), sunlight, and space, while at the same time each bacterial colony or multicellular organism (like a large Pine tree) is a marvel of cooperation towards some implicitly shared purpose. I see the awesome result of both simplicity and complexity in the organizational structure of all these organisms and their DNA, RNA, and so on, adapted so well in most cases to the current state of such a complex web of being. Yet I can only guess the tiniest fraction of what suffering that selective shaping through variation and selection must have entailed for untold numbers of creatures over billions of years. To be truthful, I can actually *really* see none of that right now as it is dark outside this early near Winter Solstice time (and an icy rain is falling) beyond perhaps a silhouette outline, so I must remember and imagine it, perhaps as Einstein suggests as an "optical delusion of [my] consciousness". :-) :-) The best I feel we can hope for is balance (like Ursula K. Le Guin's writings):
http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-rant-on-financial-obesity-and-Project-Virgle.html
----
Or as I wrote elsewhere in my own words:
So much for "world peace" when even the tranquil seeming forests have so much Yin-Yang complexity going on within and around the trees.
http://www.ursulakleguin.com/
or maybe, transcendence to some form of universe certainly way beyond our present understanding; example, with its own flaws:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis_of_Prime_Intellect
But still, no matter what examples the universes sets before us, or in what proportion,
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
creating artificial scarcity with the tools of abundance http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
So, yes, with the trillions spent on the Iraq war, we could have made the US energy independent with solar panels, created household gardening robots, developed both hot fusion and cold fusion devices, and ended most cancer and heart disease in the US by encouraging better nutrition and exercise, and on top of all that built a space habitat. Instead hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are dead, tens of thousands of US soldiers were crippled, sections of Iraq are radioactive wastes from Depleted Uranium, there are many children (both Iraqi and US) born with birth defect from the radiation and other hazards, there are now huge numbers of people in Iraq who hate the USA who did not before now that they have lost a family member and so are more likely to become terrorists, and so on.
Of course, a few people are richer or more politically powerful for all that suffering. As Major General Smedley Butler said "War is Racket":
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
So, yes, AC, as you say: "War on Earth seems to be holding us here." Or more generally, competition. See Alfie Kohn for alternatives.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
...I wonder if the makers of the Deponia series will sue the studio.
We all know that $828.11 billion would soon turn into 10 trillion. I am a big supporter of NASA but they never finish a project on budget. If they would start by telling everyone it would be 10 trillion and then finish at $828.11 billion they would be heros.. Just my "02" cents.
That's a steal!! We should build that thing tomorrow and send the damn super rich there BEFORE they turn this place into anymore of a s**thole. They can move the stock exchanges up there too. Just think, they could wave down at main street while we go about some honest business for a change.
Every rule has more than one consequence.
Yes, but is the movie any good.
Ptth, who cares about your puny human space station! Now a Ringworld is what we really need!!!! (But without the Vampires ... or if we have to have them, put the Twilight fans with them!)
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)