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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?
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.
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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).
the ultra-rich are risk adverse, they already have a planet with resources, nice places to live, and serfs / two-legged product
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.
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?
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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.
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.
or about 10 months worth of bailout money for the banks. Sounds doable to me...
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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.
Part of the star trek mythos is that those jobs are virtually unnecessary. No one needs to shovel shit or scrub bathrooms or mine coal. Keep in mind that the vast majority of the people ever shown on Star Trek are those that set off to do things that are potentially dangerous and unpleasant because they are also rewarding; things like exploration and research.
$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.
Seriously, your biggest argument is that a science fiction series isn't 100% accurate to currently known laws of physics? How far back in the past do you think we'd have to go before our technology would look like magic to them?
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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.
That is actually quite simple today. If you think about it the seal only has to prevent leakage for a Differential Pressure of ~13psi. Everyone thinks of the vacuum of space being this harsh constant sucking force, but the reality is it is jsut a void and your own mass is trying to equalize pressure with it. In industrial processes it's normal to have rotating seals that can't leak (think explosive gases) at more than 600+psi differential pressure between internal and external.
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