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Could Humanity Really Build 'Elysium'?

Posted by samzenpus on from the plenty-of-space dept.

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.'"

6 of 545 comments (clear)

  1. Betteridge's law of headlines by intermodal · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

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    1. Re:Betteridge's law of headlines by tnk1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  2. 150 years is a long time by hsmith · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:150 years is a long time by i+kan+reed · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  3. Movie ad's disguised as science news? by malakai · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

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    -Malakai
    A Dragon Lives in my Garage
  4. Re:The real question by Blaskowicz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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".