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Could Humanity Really Build 'Elysium'?
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Miriam Kramer writes at Space.com that in the new movie Elysium, Earth is beyond repair, and the rich and powerful have decided to leave it behind to live in a large, rotating space station stocked with mansions, grass, trees, water and gravity. 'The premise is totally believable to me. I spent 28 years working on NASA's International Space Station and retired last summer as the director of ISS at NASA Headquarters. When I took a look at the Elysium space station, I thought to myself, that's certainly achievable in this millennium,' says Mark Uhran, former director of the International Space Station Division in NASA's Office of Human Exploration and Operations. 'It's clear that the number-one challenge is chemical propulsion.' Nuclear propulsion could be a viable possibility eventually, but the idea isn't ready for prime time yet. 'We learned an incredible amount with [the International Space Station] and we demonstrated that we have the technology to assemble large structures in space.' The bottom line: 'If you threw everything you had at it, could you reach a space station of the scale of Elysium in 150 years?' says Uhran. 'That's a pretty tall order.'"
I'm invoking Betteridge's law of headlines and saying "no."
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Look back at how things have changed since 1863 and you can't begin to comprehend where we could be in even 100 more years.
Is it just me, or is this movie being promoted through tons of tech sites/blogs?
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
when the earth has everything?
Miriam Kramer writes at Space.com that in the new movie Elysium, Earth is beyond repair, and the rich and powerful have decided to leave it behind to live in a large, rotating space station stocked with mansions, grass, trees, water and gravity.
So, Wall-E?
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
This sounds familiar
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
IF the people who live in the "bad" part of town actually wanted to make their part of town the nice part of town they could.
It is called beating their children to the point where they are pushed to succeed more than the previous generation.
Instead the mentality is "The 'hood was good enough for me, it is good enough for my son/daughter"
They wallow in their own failure as parents and thus their children are locking in a cycle of mediocrity. If a recent immigrant from Africa can come and within 10 years of hard work own a house and have well educated children, then what the hell is the problem with the people born here that are given every sort of assistance as a form of "birthright" , but repeatedly fail miserably?
We are no longer in an era where people of different races are discriminated against is becomming less and less each years and is almost non-existant, the only discrimination is self imposed where people in their own minds think that because they are white they are better and end up as white trash or because they are brown and the supposed "man is keepin' them down" they end up as brown trash. Trash = Trash no matter the color, it isn't genetics it is a crapped out culture(s) that is to blame for any race who fails and then uses the color of their own skin as an excuse or justification for their own failures as human beings.
The parent was discussing the unavoidable losses of atoms/molecules. Sure you can use photosynthesis, if you have the raw materials to hand, but that's not going to work if they've left the space station.
The truth is the US is a country with low upwards mobility, and is totally in denial about it. When you adjust wages for inflation and stop describing healthcare as "benefits" maybe the bottom hundred million Americans will be in a better shape to "succeed".
Weightless sex.
The truth is the US is a country with low upwards mobility, and is totally in denial about it.
Part of the reason for this is that in just about every society across recorded history, the degree of upwards mobility was much worse. We tend not to see this because it's much easier to compare our situation to other modern societies (i.e. European welfare states) or hypothetical utopias than to a past we never experienced. I don't want to idealize the American system, because it does have warts, but even the poor in America have vastly more opportunities (and wealth, and freedom, and political rights) than most people who have ever lived. That doesn't mean that we can't do better, just that a sense of perspective is helpful.
Just not in space.
This is already how the 0.1% live.
They live in gated communities with private police/security and second and third homes at ski, golf, coastal resorts.
They fly in private jets, or cruise in private yachts.
They have private rooms in private hospitals with access to the latest advances in health care. They get sick less frequently because they live healthier lifestyles with more leisure time, access to better food, and less stress.
They contribute to PAC's and politicians to make sure that legislation gets passed to allow them to keep more of their wealth and contribute less proportionately to the rest of society than at any time in the last 150 years.
Meanwhile, the 99% are increasingly disenfranchised, increasingly less likely to have job or retirement security, less able to purchase a first home, and with decreasing access to increasingly expensive and less effective health care. ... just not in space.
Its easy to compare the upward mobility now to the last 100 or so years of American history, which is pretty well recorded. Upward mobility in the US has been on a decline recently (last couple of decades or so) compared to US mobility rates in the previous fifty years. Wages have been tanking hard vs inflation, and while we're better off than serfs or slaves, that doesn't mean we have to be content about it. We can strive for better than "slightly improved over pre-enlightment Europe"
Just wondering: are 150 years projects viable at all? Is there any example of such an enterprise?
The biggest european cathedral have been build over very long period of time, some spanning a few centuries
(to the point that some have mixed architectural styles, because styles has changed as the centuries passed by during the building of different sections).
But I personally don't think that the building of the station itself is going to span that much time. Don't think of it as a space cathedral. (Where building it starts immediately now, and takes 150 year until you've brought all the needed parts into orbit and assembled them).
Think of it more with what hapened with genetics, and for human genomes.
- Quite some time has passed between the discovery of the chemistry of DNA and the sequencing of the human genome.
- Yet the sequencing it self only took a decade.
- Most of the time was spent developing technologie, and scaling up in speed and volume, only the last 10 years where spent sequencing genes.
- And same again, nowadays we have "personnal genomes". It took quite a few year for the technology to scale from the human genome to now, but the personalised genome itself only takes a few hours.
Very probably the same with a huge station:
- the first decade will be spent developing the space industry and scaling up capability. (Having Space-X and such grow, and be able to put more ships into orbit, for example).
- the station it self will probably get built over the last decade or two.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]