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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.
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).
Well, the movie is about exactly why this dystopian idea is dumb: people don't give up, especially when they have little to lose. The movie just shows the 'during', not the 'after'.
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
Global private wealth is about $50 trillion. The top thousand could handle $800 billion without exhausting their resources.
The problem is the economic instability it would create, as so much of the world's production capacity is devoted to a vanity project useless to 99.99999% of the population. Plus there is the fact that wealth is only as real as everyone else believing it is yours. Something like this would spawn a global class war, and rightly so.
Well, the connection becomes more tenuous. They can be absentee landlords, which is a common theme in history. As long as their agents planetside are properly taken care of, it can work, sort of.
Of course in that situation there is a lot of corruption and waste, which might be why a society that can build a space station also has everyone else living in slums. The Absentee Landlords blast off, their overseers start skimming profits, or using force and their derived authority to over charge the peasants so that the landlords get their cut and the overseers get extra money.
It would probably look much like the Ferme générale in France.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferme_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9rale
And like the Farm, it could well touch off a Revolution, although that is no bar to them trying to set that up anyway. Short term thinking and all that.