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.'"

Comments

Betteridge's law of headlines

[intermodal]

I'm invoking Betteridge's law of headlines and saying "no."

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines

[tnk1]

He's simply postulating that religion didn't *stop* us from advancing. And that's not a postulate, it appears to be demonstratively true, given our computers, smartphones, medical tech and just science in general. We have had religion for some significant portion of our advance through civilization and all the way through our scientific advancements. And we're using the technology that religion did not stop to complain about religion stopping technology.

Now you could argue that it slowed us down. But you could also argue that since most universities started as schools of theology in the West, and that at many points religion actually encouraged scholarly and literate discussion about topics, that it may well end up being a wash in the end.

Point being, if you want to blame religion as a general cause of all that is evil, and suggest that deleting it would delete many problems, you are in no way able to do so by simply pointing at history. The world may not be a great place, but it's the best place it has ever been, and it did that even with a bunch of priests holding the occasional Inquisition or the occasional Crusade or Jihad.

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines

[Burz]

Internet and iPads notwithstanding, we're not advancing here in the US. For one thing, we seem to think it high-minded to discuss this type of sub-topic without the contributions of philosophy ever occuring to anyone. The rest of you Anglophones are being dragged behind us into the same morass of mawkish religion and consumerism (the worst of both materialism and metaphysics).

As for religion, it has an ability to short-circut the process of questioning and preventing the digestion of new data. As such, its a major contributor to overpopulation and other forms of ecological distress. That won't pan out well over multiple generations in constrained artificial environments.

150 years is a long time

[hsmith]

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.

Re:150 years is a long time

[i kan reed]

Totally fascinating insight, we also don't know if the Hospitallers used M-16s in 1066 because we weren't alive back then. Or you know, we have this study called history that tells us things about the past without us having been personally present.

Re:150 years is a long time

[gsslay]

I think we're working to the mind-set of "If I can't see/feel it myself, nothing you can say will ever prove anything."

Very popular position amongst conspiracy theorists.

Re:150 years is a long time

[Hatta]

IBM has an artificial brain with as many synapses as a human brain right now.

I bet it has 10 times as many atoms as a human brain. Not that that has anything to do with anything.

Fusion energy is on the verge of a breakthrough

And will always be on the verge of a breakthrough.

3-D printers are almost cost effective on a per-household basis

Sure, if your household needs hundreds of shower rings for some reason.

solar power is dropping to the cost of coal power

Perhaps at the quantites we can produce today. Try scaling solar power up by a factor of 1500.

Moore's law has held steady for decades..

Exponential decreases in the size of transistors can't continue forever in a granular world made of molecules.

We are at the start of a second industrial revolution

Or we're at the end of an incredibly bountiful time, where man has used a limited resource to pick all the low hanging fruit off of the tree of knowledge. Fossil fuels are going to run out, and nothing comes close to meeting todays needs, let alone projected growth. Climate change will disrupt economies across the world, making warfare a much bigger priority than science, even more than it already is. And without cheap energy, any science that gets done will take longer and longer to accomplish.

The world will be totally unrecognizable in a hundred years.

I agree with you there. But I expect it to look more like Mad Max than Elysium.

Re:150 years is a long time

[Jason Levine]

And it's made all the more worse by another "default mode" of human thinking: Once I've come to a conclusion, admitting I was wrong and/or changing my mind is A Bad Thing.

So you start out with X must be wrong (where X is the moon landing or vaccines being safe or the Holocaust having happened) because the individual didn't personally experience it or has anecdotal "evidence" to the contrary (even if said evidence is that a friend of their uncle's neighbor said it). Then, once their opinion has been set, they refuse to change it no matter now much evidence is presented to them because altering their opinion/admitting being wrong is A Bad Thing. It's better (in the person's view) to decide that the mountain of evidence pointing to them being wrong is itself wrong (or part of some conspiracy) than it is to admit that they are wrong.

Movie ad's disguised as science news?

[malakai]

Is it just me, or is this movie being promoted through tons of tech sites/blogs?

Re:Movie ad's disguised as science news?

[edawstwin]

I think the promotion is a side effect of legitimate questions being asked about its premise. Aren't you curious if this is possible in the foreseeable future? At least it's more "real" science-fiction than something like Transformers.

Re:Movie ad's disguised as science news?

[Nadaka]

Transformers isn't science fiction, its explosion porn.

Elysium may be, at least somewhat.

Moon is the pinnacle of science fiction for the last 20 years.

Science fiction isn't simply a story that takes place in the future or involving technology. It is an exploration of the human condition, societal issues or ethics within an environment plausibly different from our own.

Done

[LordLucless]

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?

Re:why would i want to live on a space station?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

when the earth has everything?

And even a pretty fucked-up-dystopian-hellworld version of earth still has convenient gravity, atmospheric pressure and loads of raw materials. Short, possibly, of a good, enthusiastic, all-out, nuclear war (which would also...reduce...the odds of magnificent space-constructs), there isn't much you could do to earth that would make living on a space station cheaper and easier than just throwing up some habidomes with climate control and a ring of razor wire and killbots to keep the proles away.

Re:What about air?

[Athanasius]

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.

Re:The real question

[Blaskowicz]

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".

We already are building Elysium...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:why would i want to live on a space station?

[SoupGuru]

I heard someone once say in response to space colonies: Try building a self-sustaining colony in Antarctica. And when you realize how freaking hard that is, remind yourself that at least you can breathe the air and you won't pop if there's a hole in the wall. Antarctica is a bazillion times more hospitable that any space colony would be.