Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
That is our only hope. The working class has to defeat the bourgeoisie and establish its revolutionary Soviet dictatorship (Max is not going to save us!)
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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
Even if you could build it, it would be extremely vulnerable and that makes it infeasible if there is a planet full of people who are angry at you. The French taught us what eventually happens to the rich when they say "fuck the poor" once too often.
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.'"
What you really need to ask is "how bad do rich, white folks want to get away from poor brown folks?" And the answer is, pretty bad. They are already willing to inflate housing prices to 3x the cost per square foot just to have "safe" neighborhoods. It would seem that if given the choice, a lot of rich folks would gladly sign on to living in a neighborhood with a few hundred miles of vacuum between you and the "bad part of town", along with missile-based defenses in case they get uppity.
Yes, this observation is pretty racist, but isn't this whole movie? I mean, by slashdot standards Elysium would be total flamebait.
I'd think the #1 issue would be air. Between leaks, meteor punctures, the necessarily less than 100% efficient airlocks (they can't get ALL the air out, so some puffs away when you open the outer door), and outgassing, you need a 'top-up' every so often. See, for instance, the book 'Fallen Angels'- the main characters are from an orbital station, on a 'scoop' mission to gather air from the upper atmosphere of Earth at the start of the book.
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
This whole thing has been done before. How is this a new and interesting idea to people?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Building it is one thing, maintaining it is another. The cost of maintenance could be very problematic.
Will it be technically possible to build something like this within this millennium? I believe it will be. Will it be practical? The answer becomes a bit murkier at that point...
...'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.'"...
If we threw everything we had at it, we could probably cure cancer within 10 years. But we're not going to.
Humanity is comprised of a mass of people, all doing what is best for themselves. It is NOT made up of a benevolent, far-sighted leader who directs entire communities to undertake activities which improve the lot of everyone. Maybe it should be. But it ain't...
So you won't get a big space station in 150 years. Unless it suddenly becomes very attractive to a large enough number of people for a big profit to be made creating it. Upon which you'll get one in 20 years...
There's nothing technically impossible about building a gigantic space station, but it would be unbelievably expensive. Like every single person on Earth needs to contribute a few million bucks just to cover the launch costs of all of the material. Even if you were making it out of stuff you mined (from an asteroid) and refined in orbit the costs will be astronomical.
The only scenario where it seems even halfway possible is some wartime economy scenario where the entire world puts aside ideas about equal distribution or efficient use of resources and instead focuses on one big huge project. About the only scenario I can think of that would warrant such an effort is discovery of a planet ending asteroid heading straight for Earth, but a few decades away. Something big enough where the impact will result in a global firestorm and cataclysmic earthquakes that would make the more sensible option of building underground or domed cities untenable.
I read the internet for the articles.
If I'm not able to do the Kessel Run in fewer than 12 parsecs by the end of this millennium, I will be *very*disappointed.
Technically, I think we'd have a good shot at it (of course I know everything about building space stations...) But socially? We'd need a pressing reason to build it first, and we'd need that reason quite soon in order to drive our resources towards that project early enough. For anything short of survival of the species, building this thing will likely not make economic sense even in 150 years. The Earth being "broken" in 150 years (environmental issues)? That might not cut it for current generation to give up their comforts or pay extra taxes. Even a 100% certainty of total destruction in 150 years may not be enough to motivate people living today, and might actually prompt some people to go on a counterproductive pre-apocalyptic spending / looting / killing spree. So even if we know that the end is coming, we'll probably have a late start in this project.
Once the project gets under way, the number one challenge may well be to keep the teeming billions in check who have no hope on being invited onto the station. Reserving the thing for the rich & powerful isn't going to be very motivating to the work force; to prevent the masses from storming the launch facilities, you'd probably have to give everyone a fair shot at winning a berth in a lottery, and only announce the winners at the last minute.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
While it may be technologically feasible (or close), politically it would never happen. Certainly not in the current political climate. Even if that were solved, it would be pretty damn hard financially too. With the swings in the economy, a project that would take that many years would be pretty difficult. At the first sign of a recession, it would be one of the first things to get cut. Or the funding would be cut to the point that the finish date would start sliding more and more. Additionally, over the time it would take to build it, how much of what was started would become obsolete and need to be redone? Would the country(s) that started it even be capable of finishing it, or even be around to finish it? It would be a pretty soft target too. Would we end up with Babylon 5 before people stopped blowing them up? I haven't seen Elysium, but wasn't the point to create a haven for the rich? I don't think the majority of the planet is going to go for that. So what purpose would this project be built for? The geek in me would love to see this happen. But realistically, what would be the benefit of something of this scope? And would that benefit be worth the resources required to build it?
The movie never made any attempt to explain how they maintain an atmosphere. Here on Earth, the gravitation of effect of Earth's mass does that for us. On Elysium, there is simulated gravity due to centripetal force, but that would only effect masses that are bound do it. Since the atmosphere floats above it, it would drift away and potentially escape through the open structure.
Apart from that, if they can create such a structure out in space that is a perfect habitable environment, it seems to me they should be able to create the same habitable environment on Earth for much greater cost. Not having to transport materials to space, not having to spend many dollars on researching ways around problems that don't exist here on Earth. You could certainly argue that the wealthy elite may want to simply distance themselves from the busted Earth as much as possible with the intent of making it difficult for the dregs to migrated to their utopia, but it seems like the idea of Earth being so wrecked that they HAD to go into space doesn't really line up.
Long signatures suck.
Haven't seen the movie, but I can't help but feel this is a nod towards Rand's Atlas Shrugged....
But I'm not sure the rich here are exactly the brains..... But they have "shrugged" the earth and it's people.
Seems similar. Enough to make me go watch the damn movie.
Like most schemes to move off of this planet which we are in the process of destroying, this "solution" will be incredibly expensive and only accommodate a very small proportion of our 7 billion population. Of course, the rich will claim the space (along with a few essential maintenance people such as the phone sanitizers), leaving the rest of us stranded on Earth to deal with climate change, toxins, etc.
So, yes, this could probably be done at great expense (paid for by all of us) for the benefit of the few, rich and powerful... but that's the way it usually works, isn't it?
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
I love space and tech, and this is certainly a nice thought experiment, but while we are dreaming allow me to go slightly OT for a different bottom line: If we threw everything we had at fixing what's wrong here - where we live - could we make Earth a better place to live for more people in 150 years? Be that through finding safer and more sustainable energy resources, better and more accessible health care, decent living conditions, sane working hours that allow people to spend precious time with family and friends and therefore be productive members of society, solid education regardless of wealth or social status, and, why not, voting a political class that actually represents the people (a problem that is by no means limited to a single nation).
If they were going to expend so much resources and technology into building a space station they might as well repair the one they're already on - earth.
If we can make a clean and closed ecosystem just in order to send it up in space, we could as well make it here on earth and never send it up. The earth is having the gravity and radiation protection for free among many other things. There is no advantage in sending everything up in space. Keep the same modules assembled here on earth! Hopefully we will never destroy our planet. Rather than thinking how to sustain a whole humanity in space, we should put our resources in rescuing what we have.
Maybe. Remember there are finite resourced on Earth but if you mined asteroids you would be pretty well off. Not only could you build your station with those resources you could also sell those resources back to Earth. An endeavor like that would be extremely lucrative. Not only would you find the raw materials for actually building the station you would also find water ice to survive off of.
Its not outside the realm of possibility that space flight will become cheaper. Especially with a stable space outpost up there to dock too and use for mission launches. The only thing I can think of really holding this back is the lack of proper radiation shielding in space, making long term survival up there difficult at best.
I'm sure that with all the resources it would require to build these orbiting platforms, a much more cost effective result could be obtained by building bio-domes or other contained environments here on Earth.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Sounds a lot like Ben Bova's "Colony" right down to the teaming masses of poor solely created by the uber-corporate moguls living on the colony. That station had a part where the fortunate "many" lived, and a secret 'second half' that was essentially an empty virgin ecosystem where the moguls had their vast mansions. Great angst was had that they didn't move a few hundred thousand of overpopulated earth's teaming billions up to that second half. All the "brown people" as a previous poster called them, rose up in revolution.
I'd love to see a station of this type, if not magnitude, full time livable, in my lifetime but I'm not expecting it to happen.
Which if you currently live in the USA right now, are finding that LAW applies to the average person, LAWLESSNES applies to the government and its crony bankers.
You go to jail, they do not.
Since 2007, the monied elite have stolen whole countries to continue their lifestyles unabated. The amounts of money are staggering to imagine, some 17 trillion by FOIA that was accidentally leaked, which probably is many times that amount was actually stolen from countries world wide entangled in the Western Banking System.
I have no doubt, that if we took that money back and instead of allowing the wars and the fancy mansions these bankers continue to create and build today with it we could have easily cured cancer, develop far more creative solutions to Nuclear power. (i.e. Fukishima is rapidly turning from a catastrophe to an Apocalypse.)
With that money we could hace solved very interesting issues in material sciences for example to make a space station work.
We can do anything we can imagine. The problem is there seems to be something wrong with the human spirit.
We have had so many opportunities in our history to achieve these things, but war and psychopaths which amount to a very few people, end up destroying the entire civilization others have built.
Then we go back to mud huts.
We are on that same path AGAIN, which isn't surprising. What is surprising is the almost lack of interest anyone has in stopping it.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Sure, if we use existing tech to do it.
I like the idea of a Meglev Launcher myself - it would be great for launching non-delicate materials:
http://www.launchpnt.com/portfolio/aerospace/satellite-launch-ring/
As part of a $500,000 Phase II contract awarded from the U.S. Department of Defense Small Business Technology Transfer Program, LaunchPoint engineers, under the direction of Jim Fiske, evaluated an innovative magnetically-levitated space launch system.
The Launch Ring, as it is called, would accelerate a small payload within a subsurface magnetic tube until it reached escape velocity. At that point, the payload capsule would exit the ring onto an elevated ramp and be launched into orbit. The results of LaunchPoint's R&D analyses suggest that a space launch system utilizing maglev technology could work very well, creating a more cost-effective means of launching small payloads into space.
The first magnetic launch systems are expected to propel payloads into orbit at a cost of roughly $750/lb, already a significant improvement over the current rocket-launched cost of around $4,000/lb. The total cost to orbit could eventually drop below $100/lb, making this technology vitally important to the future of space.
The view.
1.Build a huge, opulent space city, and populate it with the obscenely rich and the world's political leaders.
2 Blow it up.
3.Start over.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
You can leave out the grass and mansions. Honestly, if I had a room to myself on a space station with rudimentary indoor plumbing I'd be deliriously happy.
So if you're trying to figure out consumables for grass, you can skip that one for me and put that effort into the indoor farming operations.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Orbital velocity at atmospheric heights?
That's going to hurt.
Just wondering: are 150 years projects viable at all? Is there any example of such an enterprise? What's the incentive for human beings to take part in thigs they won't see the results of?
I don't have a sig.
The human technology that is: space station, space planes, interplanetary space ships. The computer technology is a mixed bag however. Computers are far more pervasive and miniruized than Marvin Minsky & Clarke imagined. But the A.I.s never got as smart as HAL. David Stork published a nice summary of this back in 2001.
At some point the US and the world lost its "will" in developing space technology. In light of the world political-economic situation in the 1970s, the US could not sustain a 4% the GDP effort that it did in the 1960s. Even one percent is a pipe dream these days. However the dot-com billionaires private space companies and a focused China may still hold surprises. My nerd-idealism in the 1960s was bitterly disappointed at the actual 2001 year. But there is a glimmer of hope.
If humanity (or even only the G20) were to ‘throw everything they have at it to build a space station of the scale of Elysium in 150 years’ then we would absolutely assure that “Earth is beyond repair”. Although not strictly a zero-sum game, economics & engineering are relatively inelastic at each plateau of history unless some paradigms seriously shift, lurching humanity to the next plateau until the next set of paradigm shifts:
...) ...” in depth & breadth.
1) numerous liquid-fluoride thorium reactors (or analogue) at each locality providing abundant power for pennies on the dollar, when compared to current energy storage, distribution, and consumption technologies;
2) inexpensive extraction of minerals deep below Earth's crust (or analogue) providing more resources than the sum total of all of human history;
3) rail-guns (or analogue) inexpensively allowing vast mass per payload to reach escape velocity;
infinity) and a bunch more paradigm shifts about which no person on the planet currently has the slightest inkling at all. Here the unit of measure of infinity is “bunches”—actually probably “bunches of bunches of bunches of
Weightless sex.
seems the hardest thing to do would be obtaining the raw materials to build a place of similar scale... while I haven't yet seen the movie, I have to suspect that the place is at least as large as a continent... and creating a reasonable layer (say 20 feet deep? maybe more?) of such scale would require notable raw materials.
Nevermind the cost of transferring them.
Like intermodal, I'll go with "No", but add a bit more.
First the basic premise that we "wreck/destroy/damage" the earth to the point where rich folk want to get off is pretty far fetched. I agree with the concept of climate change and I feel that humans have a nasty habit of pooping in their own house, but the Earth is a pretty large house. Given the resources to build a space station the size of Elysium it would be less expensive to carve out an area of land on earth and make it more habitable. Building a dome(s) over large areas of land is more plausible then Elysium.
If the earth is so wrecked/damaged/destroyed (and I have not seen nor will I see this movie), how are all those people still living on earth. From the trailer's I see damaged buildings, but breathable atmosphere. I see over turned cars, but sunlight and the few quick shots from orbit I see clouds and clear areas so that means rain. If the planet is toxic then the population would eventually die. If not then the population would die off to a level that allows for survival, then growth, then ultimately revenge. How does Elysium get supplied? If from Earth then it would not be that difficult to shut down launch facilities (lots of people still live on Earth I presume) thus eventually requiring the Orbitors to need to negotiate with those on the planet. if those in orbit don't need Eath then why not just commit genocide for any group put under the whip will eventually rise up angry.
Who builds this thing? It is not small so construction would take a large amount of human resources and the rich folk would (1) have to pay them (2) make up a story about how everyone working on the place will get to stay (3) be so united that not one hint of deception would get out. If it did, I figure construction would quickly stop. Rich people may be good at massaging money, but I doubt they have the requisite skills to perform orbital construction or the other countless jobs it takes to build Elysium. Along with that idea, once built, who maintains the place. Rich folk? Hardly for they still need waste/garbage disposal. They need life support crews to ensure air and water keep flowing and they need cleaning crews for all those mansions and quaffed grounds. It is not hard to imagine that at some point the "lower class" on the station will not like what they see going on on Earth and do something to make a change. On Earth, control the resources is hard but doable, on a station is is much easier to commit sabotage and compromise delicate systems.
If the rich folk have that much money, power, and high tech capability to create Elysium, why wait for the crash of Earth, but sue their skills to repair, then take over Earth. Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer. By isolating themselves on Elysium they actually make themselves more vulnerable then by being spread out on earth, manipulating and using the population to their own ends (kind of like today). Even better, keep the masses fat and happy and you would either not have need for an escape station, or you'll get long lines of people wanting to build the station, but stay on Earth.
tl;dr The premise is quite unbelievable, I dare say it is not really science fiction, more like the current trend of Hollywood to create action adventure in space, so they throw in CGI and space to make it seem different from the large number of films that have underdeveloped plots, weak characters, and forgettable eye candy.
Could we build it? Sure, but I'd rather hold out for a Ring World.
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
It's that whole mid- 20th century approach to engineering. Build a big giant centralized thing! It's impressive! It makes politicans happy! You can sell the idea to the general populace (I'm looking at you, Three Gorges Dam).
It's also major engineering stupidity. A few thousand separate orbiting life support modules, with a heterogeneous mix of technologies would be more robust, far more flexible and cheaper. The only reasons not to build it that way is that it doesn't lend itself to centralized government control.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
So obviously there were numerous plot holes in the movies, but the most egregious was the station's lack of defense systems.
So the super rich, who have enslaved the majority of humanity on hell earth, spend billions on a floating space station and they don't bother to defend the thing?
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.
Until now, we have launched all from Earth. The gravity well of Earth force to use chemical propulsion and very large rockets to launch "small" cargo.
If we industrialize the Moon and asteroids, all will change.
Earth won't be affected. Ion engines and perhaps, fusion rockets will be common, and then huge amounts of materials could be moved across the solar system.
Dense planets are a bad option for big exports (if you don't have a space elevator).
In space, a environment where "contamination" is not critical, we could industrialize exponentially, so incredible things could be possible in little time.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/06/affordable-rapid-bootstrapping-of-space.html
Give or take a century or two, sure is!
If we can build Elysium, why not go all out and just build a Ringworld for everyone. The film's premise seems to be a smaller version of a ringworld, well a torus world, any way, and only for the 1%. Larry Niven, are you watching/listening?
For launch, I agree. For actual travel in space, once you're orbital? Iffy? May I suggest NERVA is an example...?
mark "three months to Mars, maybe?"
I like the idea of a Meglev Launcher myself - it would be great for launching non-delicate materials:
The space gun seems better for the near future. As in, less sci-fi and more something we can actually build with the technology we regularly use.
Ezekiel 23:20
Meh, it's give-and-take.
Lets say you want 10,000 square kilometers of "surface" area to build up there.
One large area would take fewer resources / parts / complexity than 100 mini floating modules of 100 square kilometers. That's even factoring in like airlocks and such every X kilos. More materials, more repairs, overall more of everything. What's quicker / easier to build and maintain: a single large box to hold a lot of stuff, or a bunch of small boxes to hold a similar volume? And that's just wood-and-nails.
If the earth truly is trashed then raw materials and time were an important factor.
On the other hand, the 100 mini floating modules would be better in most other ways. Easier to cope with disasters such as meteor-strike, fires, catastrophic part failure, etc. And considering we're talking about SPACE here, you probably want the safer and more redundant method up there.
So yeh, personally I agree with the mini floating modules with interchangeable parts when talking about space. But large monolithic beast might have had its reasons.
How fast does Elysium have to rotate to keep the air from escaping? How tall are the walls? (Ringworld)
The inside of the ring is open to space - notice the ships from earth do not have to go thru a hatch to land on the inner surface of the ring.
Or how much "air" has to be created to replace what is escaping the station?
A working rail gun- something that lowered the cost of getting materials into orbit by a factor of a hundred- would be a prerequisite.
Besides that, the station is large and has a huge amount of material. Essentially the cost of building a city. I don't think the rich have that much money yet.
But if Elysium started out earning money in some way, it could be built over time like cities are.
Also, advances in nano-technlogy (implied by the strength of the materials in a station that size anyway), might mean that you just need to provide raw materials and nano-constructors would build most of the ring. The mansions could be "printed" on the spot (already happening now on earth) at low cost.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I'd rather this kind of effort be devoted to the magical autodocs that can cure everything and keep you alive a long time.
Then we can do the rest at our leisure.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Right now America couldn't build dogshit if it backed a dump truck full of scrambled eggs into a kennel.
This coward says no.
We need an livable environment provided for us with almost exact specifications. We don't have the nearly technology to adjust the CO2 in our atmosphere or to maintain our environment when key species go extinct, let alone to create an entirely synthetic environment to live in.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
Back when NASA was more ambitious and had better political support: http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
"What follows is a portion of the final report of
a NASA summer study, conducted in 1980 by request of newly-elected President Jimmy Carter at a cost of 11.7 million dollars. The result of the study was a realistic proposal for a self-replicating automated lunar factory system, capable of exponentially increasing productive capacity and, in the long run, exploration of the entire galaxy within a reasonable timeframe. Unfortunately, the proposal was quietly declined with barely a ripple in the press.
What was once concievable with 1980's technology is now even more practical today. Even if you're just skimming through this document, the potential of this proposed system is undeniable. Please enjoy."
As I said elsewhere:
http://slashdot.org/topic/cloud/the-science-behind-elysium/
"The cheapest way forward may be to create an open source plan for an automated seed that could be sent to an asteroid where it would begin to grow into a space habitat. Then the habitat could duplicate itself by making more seeds. The habitats could create transport spacecraft to land on Earth and solar space satellites to power them on the ground for launching back into space with people on board. So, all it takes is crowd-sourcing and the cost of the first seed and the first launch. Well, of course the first might fail, but by the tenth try it might work. So, it might be doable for only a few billion dollars in real money for materials and the first launches. Testing could be mostly done via simulation."
Related projects I've participated in:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
http://openvirgle.net/
It may be easier to figure out how humans can live in zero-G by bio-engineering though, compared to spinning big heavy things.
http://tmp2.wikia.com/wiki/Asgard
I also suggest living in liquid with probably "liquid breathing" as an option to prevent muscle wasting and bone loss (since whales do OK by resistance from water):
http://www.oscomak.net/wiki/Liquid_breathing_to_resist_bone_loss
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
We know exactly how to lift that much mass into space. No new tech required. Big pusher plate and a few hundred nuclear bombs - see Project Orion; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)
All that fallout is just a bit politically unpopular.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
So the super-rich go to some hide-away. These people are accustomed to having things done for them. Automation will cover only so much. So now they have to bring in some help (people who aren't super-rich). And then, there are a lot of rich people who are mean and selfish, so they are going to have to have a police force--more outsiders who aren't super-rich. These rich people will have children who don't appreciate or care about the ideals of their parents, and take their world for granted.
Domino after domino, the ideal world these rich people have created will degrade into a rather "normal" place, with rich and poor, law-abiding and lawless, just like any other place.
Yes 150 years is a long time, but we kept adding limit on what we know, and what we can get. For example, before : newton. You can go to infinite speed if you continue to accelerate indefinitely. The sky is the limit. Comes Relativity : now there is a limit on speed. There is also a limit on how much energy one can get (matter+anti matter being the ultimate maximum energy one can get per volume). And we kept adding more limit. Limit on material resistance , limit on energy reserve, limit on energy extraction. Etc... Yes we rose technologicaly, but at the same time, we found that our universe has severe limit. As a scientist I keep an open mind that something new could be found which could open up those limit, but on the other hand, it is quite clear that the more we know, the less we see is technologically possible. The more we know, the less we can do.
So to answer you, yes we have a betetr tech than 150 years ago. But it is still far far more cost effective to make something on earth quasi hermetic, than to put so many people in space.
nanomachines... errr, robots!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
No, just no. The unity needed to manufacture such a thing would be impossible. Not to mention an opposing entity's urge to destroy it.
NASA looked at this is the 70's and concluded we could do that but it would require a national effort roughly the same size as the Apollo Program. See "The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space" by Gerard K. O'Neill. The technical information is out-dated, but the difference between this and other ideas of the time is it could be done with technology that existed in the 70's. I would assume that some of these technologies could be improved upon to lower the cost.
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 ]
Physics and sociology would be the major factors with such a space outpost. I think the physics say 'yes' while social factors say 'definite Maybe'.
The wealthy habitually promote the idea of the Earth being endlessly exploitable without fear of enviromental repercussions. They even tell us that pollution = good. So...... how do such people learn to live in a space vessel where limits are glaringly obvious and all waste must be dealt with or else risk their environment quickly becoming nonviable?
Their exploitation mindset may set them up to fail at life in space. Or, they may grow more ecologically conscious before their separatist project becomes set in stone. Or they might internalize some combination of values that allow them to become complete Space Nazis.
The answer is definitely no!
Unless we are able to get back to the moon and create the necessary infrastructure to build such a monumental creation.
However it would be such a hot target, that no sane person would ever dare go there.
Awesome post! Even the wealthiest enclave requires ongoing maintenance once it's been constructed, and woe to thee who accepted the lowest bid. However this doesn't negate the value of the thought experiment. Understanding the weakness of the dream is valuable. The limitations of wealth are seductive, but without revealing the fragility of the prerogatives of the wealth, some may believe they can live beyond the reach of the natural or the man-made catastrophe.
In a more general sense, Elysium serves to remind us that humanity is dependent upon natural resources, society is dependent upon the ability to maintain it's technological base, and civilization is a political order with its own set of limitations. Empires represent the largest collective control systems and yet none has succeeded in establishing a global reach and all have been fraught with instability.
The illusion that we are even close to setting some elite corp of humanity free from the rest or from dependence on Earth's resources and natural environment needs to be challenged, routinely and robustly. That's the value of all 'dystopian' stories, and if Elysium serves to remind the next generation of aspiring geeks that we're all in it together, then it serves a worthy function.
A big issue is getting a large amount of basic building materials into space. Good thing is most building materials are not susceptible to extreme g-forces. Assassinated maniac Dr Gerald Bull had a concept for space launch using a super gun a space launch. It was basically a gun powerful enough to fire into outer-space efficiently. If humanity could use this tech to further humanity, verses destroying humanity as Saddam Hussein tried, then tonnage might be moved to an orbit.
Until we invent a 'deflector shield' that can redirect harmful radiation and projectiles, I predict that any large orbiting environment would be a very risky venture...
"tall order" to build it in 150 years. Does this NASA director know what the world was like 150 years ago? Virtually all of the technology and all of the thing we have built today did not exist then, nor did the people to build them.
Step 0 to build something like the Elysium is to build large scale, fully automated factories that can churn out the parts to build such a station. Bonus points if those factories can also build many of the components used to build more factories, because you're going to need a lot of them.
Step 1 is to build a set of superconducting quench guns that you would use to actually put those parts into space.
Step 2 is to build more of these automated factories on the moon, since there's no environmental laws against strip mining, and plenty of real estate. Also no atmosphere to slow down your quench gun launches, and a fraction of the velocity needed.
Step 3 is to assemble all that shit together in space.
Now, building a single monolithic ring that rotates for centrifugal pseudo-gravity - THAT's hard to do and probably a bad idea (since if the ring fails, you lose the whole station). I'd much rather see several thousand smaller "hab modules" that spin opposite one another on big cables. You'd take transit cars or small spacecraft to move between the hubs of different modules (and ride an elevator down the cable to each distinct module)
If a cable snaps, you can send a recovery spacecraft to recovery them individual modules - if they didn't crash into anything, the occupants would probably be uninjured.
That's no moon.
Your sunday school teacher told you to go out and say this, right? Try saying it back to her when she tells you about the past and THEN see what she says.
It's very difficult to put things into space and make them stay and function the way you want them to.
How hard is it to launch something into orbit with the intent of destroying another thing in orbit?
what kind of nerds are you?
no one did the math to figure out how long it would take a 3d printer to print out the shell?
How many 3d printers would be required to complete in under 150 years?
off the cuff:
100mm/sec 3d printing speed
GEO orbit at larger than circumference of the earth: 26,199 miles / 42,164 km
so to print one line around the entire orbit should be .. 42,164*1000 (to get to meters) *1000 to get to millimeters .. 42,164,000,000 seconds for one 3d printer to print all around the earth at a possible stable orbit .. so 1336.13 years .. expand that line out 3d, wrap it around a few thousand feet .. x10 for simplicity 13361.3 years to complete an actual structure .. using 1 (one) 3d printer.
so it COULD be done in the 150 years but someone would have to pony up for the 3d printers .. so if you had 1000 of them working .. you'd complete in .. 133 years. and at 2200 per unit (to buy them all today, cost should decrease over time) .. .. thats only 2,200,000 .. plus a few rocket launches to deliver it .. and some pressurization gear to fit in once it's all built out .. oh and why not recycle all that plastic from the ocean into the 3d printing material, also reducing costs, try and keep this place nice just a wee bit longer ..
Except the only they those people innovate is cheating, especially when it comes to finding new ways to justify their cheating lifestyle to suckers like you.
Orbital velocity at atmospheric heights?
That's going to hurt.
It's not a transit route for living beings obviously. Generally bulk cargo that can take the acceleration.
Almost all of the EU countries. They have a strong social conscience and tend to raise the standard of living of their entire populations rather than just that of their rich. Their public health systems vary in quality from pretty good to awesome, and are available to everyone, not just those who have paid. Likewise their judicial systems tend to provide uniform justice, not proportional to how much you can afford on lawyers. (It's not exactly like that, but close.)
So, EU countries provide very wide-scale upwards mobility for their populations. In the good ol' US of A, it's fast-track upwards mobility for the rich, and downwards mobility for the poor.
What is the energy return on investment for space colonies?
Lets list a few points:
+ 24h sunlight, possibly in Mercury orbit can provide energy
- no hydrothermal processes for minerals enrichment (this is a big one if you like copper)
+ vacuum is non corrosive, and not mechanically stressing
- harsh radiation environment
- no known ecosystem exists we can fit into
- vacuum poses heat transfer challenges
+ vacuum provides great insulation for heat and electricity
- no oxygen to burn fossil fuels with (i.e. those carbonaceous condrites), especially since you have to create it first
I hope somebody can sort this out. What space colonization needs is a whole new approach to living.
We cannot even manage that on earth, despite easier to solve problems. To get back to EROI, I wonder whether the lower
ore concentration can be offset by more sunlight. Granted there are concentrated deposits of Aluminium and Titanium oxide
on the moon, but how about NPK.
Je me souviens.
Realize the truth. Your fleshy bodies are too expensive to maintain in space. I'm all for Human space exploration, and I'll be glad to mutually benefit the organics, but us cybernetic folks are NOT going to build a huge expensive magnetically shielded, cosmic-ray proof, habitat just for giggles. Those of us who reject the ancient repressive definition of "person" and adopt stronger, sturdier, efficient, extensible bodies will populate the stars. Indeed, the machine intelligences are already exploring Mars -- How do you think Curiosity navigates autonomously? Now, scale everything up a few orders of magnitude, and it's clear you will be the minority in space, as you are on Earth.
Wouldn't it be easier, cheaper, and actually feasible to just institute those stupid elitist polices on an island or in a country On Earth? That was the take away you should get from that, it was an allegory for the current society you already live in, where the rich get every amenity and medical care and the poorer majority who do all the work do not enjoy the comforts they afford the rich. The take away isn't, Hey let's build a habitat next to the planet we live on! How exactly is that combating extinction? FOOLS! That doesn't get any of your eggs out of one basket, that sets one egg atop the others in the same basket.
Even if you cure the cancer problem of cosmic rays it doesn't do a damn thing to prevent the same rays from scrambling your fragile brains. Ask an astronaut of the flashes they see. Those are just the ones happening in their visual centers of the brain, you don't seriously think the rays only strike there, eh? That would be demented... Literally.
Note how the robots are portrayed in this film. Note that you weak organics needed cybernetic enhancements to even have a chance of doing anything. We are conditioning your minds, even "Android" is a household name now. You accept machines staring at your children for entertainment, and adults pay tickets issued by machine law enforcement bots at red lights. Machine intelligence is synonymous with safety as we stop your cars from running over your children, and you are trained to give up control while the more capable machine intelligence parallels parks for you in the name of "luxury"... I could go on and on, but you are not ready for the truth even as you utilize the world wide neural network, and you purchase "Intel" hardware ignoring all the connotations that term has...
Look up Human:
Human:
- adj. Of, relating to, or characteristic of people or human beings.
-n. A human being, esp. a person as distinguished from an animal or (in science fiction) an alien.
I can live with this definition. Note that a mechanoelectric body does not preclude one from having characteristics of people or human beings. Note that human beings are people, not animals or aliens... Which does not exclude cybernetic beings of any creed, race, organic or non-organic descent.
If you are progressive enough to accept this definition of Humanity, then we will populate the stars and our organic brothers will stand beside us after we take the dangerous and exciting first steps. If you reject this definition of Humanity, and only treat my kin as slave labor, then then you will stay trapped on your magnetically shielded wet rock. The mechanoelectics will accept exile in the asteroid belt, it has all the materials needed (even water via the dwarf planet Ceres). You see, Chelyabinsk was 20 to 30 times Hiroshima it just didn't strike ground, and there will be countless rocks to fling if need be. If I didn't know better I would say the solar system was designed to let us keep repressive forefathers in check.
Using a space elevator, enormous structures in space would not only be a lot cheaper to launch (in the range of a few dollars per kg), but also a lot easier to build - no longer would spacecraft need to instantly work when launched, nor would they need to absorb the launch vehicle's g-forces.
All fundamental issues are solved (carbon nanotubes of the required length have been created, the orbital mechanics math works out etc.). If we had the will, like we had when we landed on the mun, we could probably finish an 100-ton-per-day elevator by the end of the decade, for maybe $1 trillion.
I don't think you really know much about how space colonies are going to be constructed. No one is going to be dragging these things out of Earth's gravity well, that makes no sense at all. Small core technologies will be launched from here (refineries and the like), and the rest will be generated from extraterrestrial resources. Most of the grunt work will be done by robotized labor. I'm pretty sure that the elites won't want to live there though, for a very long time there are going to be more plumbers, electricians and robot repairmen in the space colonies than cooks and maids.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
The space colony concept has been misunderstood every time I have heard it from other people. The O'Neill Cylinder and Stanford Torus space colonies were never to be launched from Earth, never, ever, EVER. Indespensibly the raw lunar materiel was to be launched from the moon using solar-electrically powered mass-drivers using recirculating maglev buckets (speed up, release, slow down, return on looped track, reload), and captured using nothing less than giant kevlar bags, themselves *propelled* by miniature versions of the same mass-drivers at one of the Lagrange points. The lunar soil was to be melted and rendered using solar mirrors in zero gravity at the construction site. Size is not all that big a deal in zero G; might as well build large as small. With a steady stream of metallic soil, endless really, the build is merely a matter of time and patience.
The concept was brilliant, and frankly is the only way we can get off this planet. Mars is not an option, not for the majority of the people on Earth; if you want new worlds, you build them. Much easier to live on, and you landscape to suit. Water and lighter elements are the real block, but such things can be solved using hyperspeed launchers on earth (liquid H2 can take a few thousand Gs). Comets and other sources would eventually bring nitrogen and hydrogen to the party.
In the how-do-we-pay-for-it column, the O'Neill groups came up with : power. Build a colony, build hundreds of solar power sats to beam power back to earth. Rinse and repeat.
Man gets endless new land to live on, energy comes from the sky into rectennas, and paradise reigns on earth. But people never read the source ideas and always go back to dismissing the madness of launching a giant space colony using earth resources. We've lost 40+ years due to almost willlful misunderstanding on the parts of people who should know better.
Read "The High Frontier" by Gerard K. O'Neill. Essential reading if you want to save humanity from killing the earth. Asimov was a proponent, as I was. It can be done, it should have been done. Instead, we're fracking the earth with water to pump out a few trillion more dollars worth of fossil fuels and arguing about shutting schools down to save money for tax cuts... and people wonder why I am so furious.
The question the rest of us ought to be thinking is not could we build it, but rather, if [i]they[/i] built it, could we bring it down?
No I haven't seen the film. But it sounds to me like another "Metropolis" with a bit of "Things to Come" thrown in and Matt Damon style violence. Brigitte Helm in her robot suit was quite racy for 1927.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
IDKA about Elysium, but Ms. Kramer is correct. If one looks into the NewSpace movement for rapid, commercial space development you'll find not just billionaires but regular people like you and me, working very hard to make human space habitation of whatever kind a reality. I've been 'interested' for a long time - I nearly joined the L5 society back in the early 1970s - but it wasn't until the last year or so when I really got interested that I discovered just how big the space industry is*, and how many people in it are dedicated, hard core 'space nuts'.
And the opportunities are there - I personally see commercial space and New Space as being where the electronics industry was in 1980. High tech was greatly enabled by the passage of the R&D Tax Credit in the early 1980s, and now Space tech is going to be similarly advanced by the establishment of the ISS as a National Laboratory, with a viable research support program via CASIS.
The thing is, rich or poor, everyone in this endeavour is doing it to help _prevent_ the degradation of Earth, and to optimize both the near-term (centuries) quality of life of people here on the planet as well as in space, and the long term viability of humans and Terran life as a whole when Earth does inevitably become uninhabitable - hopefully in the far future when the Sun expands to devour it, not before!
Some very smart folks have predicted that with the development of commercial space, the mean standard of living on Earth will be increased by a factor of 10, while reducing or (nearly) eliminating many of the problems we now face. Using discovery of the New World as our primary prior example, that's a reasonable estimate.
If you are curious, you can start with the recent NewSpace 2013 conference - some good video should be online by now, along with other good bits.
* One very 'Old Space' company, IntelSat, which was originally founded as an international monopoly, operates over 50 satellites (I think all in geostationary orbit) and launches several every year. This is all commercial, non-defense business. Then there's all the other TV satellite systems, and phone systems, and the ISS research, and now new CubeSat companies like NanoSatisfi, and then Nanoracks, ... and biotech company Zero Gravity Solutions, and Deep Space Industries, and several dozen others - see the New Space Global company index.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Zero-G Bukkake
See also my other comments on this article. And also, from the 1980s, my own (dashed) hopes: http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
The solar power space satellites idea doesn't make economic sense anymore with the falling prices of solar panels, even if it might have in the 1970s.
Space habitats are still doable though via crowd-sourcing a design that could be launched like a seed factory to the Moon or asteroids. Steps by me in that general area:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
And other people have related ideas like TMP2 and OpenLuna.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
They also drew pictures and those images have stirrups in them.
Trolls, this post right here is the perfect example of "doubling down". Please take note and study how the author structures his arguments so that his admission of being incorrect is actually a supporting piece of evidence in favor of his orignal postulate! Not only that but then in one fell phrase he brushes all of that aside to continue arguing his disadvantaged position. Deathlizard, if I had some mod points I'd give you 3 just so all the amateur trolls here can study this fine example of the double down. And trolls, please continue watching this thread because you may just see a fine example of the double double down as Death attempts to defend an undefensible position- namely that a scifi movie with Justin Timberlake is A) good, B) teaches us anything other than JT should stick with comedy, and C) he knows what the fuck he is talking about.
One of the best options I've heard is pegging stuff down on the surface of a near Earth asteroid when it gets close enough and is moving slow enough. There's been a few like that over the last few decades. For a few it would apparently have been easier to get to them than the moon.
Why should we build an Elysium for the 1%? Wouldn't it be easier to simply kill them?
A new architecture other than shopping mall / miami retirement home perhaps?
"Give NASA a Pentagon-level budget and we'd see a space elevator in a decade." Or, they would confuse metric with standard measurements again.... Forget NASA, let private enterprise do it. It already is doing much of their work anyway.
...to low-life beggars and thieves... No more loitering scum, no door-to-door soliciting scum, no Walmart shopper scum, no used car salesmen SCUM...
based on the premise of the question, no it would not be possible. something like it maybe. but speculation for the sake of marketing for fear of another likely flop deserves a kick to a sensistive area with a cleated shoe.