Could Humanity Really Build 'Elysium'? 545
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.'"
Re:What about air? (Score:3, Informative)
Hi, and welcome to Remedial Biology 101.
Today's lesson: How Plants Create Oxygen [wikipedia.org]
Study hard!
Re:Betteridge's law of headlines (Score:5, Informative)
...if you can build an intercontinental ballistic missile, you can build a spacecraft...
Wrong. Two very different levels of technology involved. And missles of the type you are describing use chemical propulsion, already discussed in the article as being insufficiant for the tasks nessessary.
Re:The real question (Score:4, Informative)
Part of the reason for this is that in just about every society across recorded history, the degree of upwards mobility was much worse.
Yeah, and compared to a corpse, I'm in excellent health.
Hard facts: The essential American myth is that of unlimited upward mobility. The hard truth is that the upward mobility is a lot higher in most of Europe. Especially in those loathsome socialist, scandinavian countries.
The US is rapidly approaching the social structure of central- and south america when they were dictatorships while being in complete denial about it. Not that I care, it's fun to watch from a safe distance.
Re:150 years is a long time (Score:5, Informative)
True..
However, until mankind figures out how to get out of the mechanical age, we aren't going to be building things like what are in movies.
for example...
Nuclear power. Generated (supposedly) by the escaping electrons of nuclear matter.
in most sci-fi movies, these escaping electrons are captured and immediately used to power ships, mobile suits, cities, etc. "Nuclear reactors" are micro-miniaturized because they don't need the huge plethora of safety gear, nor do they require the electrical/mechanical conversion that we use today.
how do we use nuclear? We use it to heat water to steam, which then drives turbines to generate electricity via magnetic induction. Essentially a mechanical means to acheive the desired result.
Actually, though what you say abut how we use nuclear power is true, it seems your understanding of what happens there is not correct.
Unfortunately, controlled nuclear power doesn't generate enough free electrons to be captured and used. What it does generate is heat due to neutrons flying around and getting atoms to move around faster and faster. Many times a neutron hits an atom's core, it kicks out another neutron there which then flies around at high-speed to kick another neutron out of another atom. In these situations, the atom receives a big chunk of energy and starts "wobbling" around heavily, which we then see as heat.
Even with nuclear fusion, the situation would be the same - except exponentially higher.
In order to use "real nuclear power" the way you describe on how we should, we would need to implement matter-antimatter-annhilition. In this case, there is enough free electrons generated that can be captured to use it directly, without having to use centuries-old mechanical technology. It is also what I dream of and I do agree with you that unless we leave mechanical age behind us, we will never reach our full potential.
On a cosmic scale...we're still in the stone age.
On, this I partially disagree. We're not even in the stone age - on a cosmic scale...
Re:150 years is a long time (Score:4, Informative)
Because of course, no significant progress was made between 1013 and 1863. We didn't have any little things like the renaissance, the second agricultural revolution, the first industrial revolution, etc. There were no significant technological advances like the printing press, the spring-driven clock, the steam engine, or anything like that. Nor any scientific advances like classical mechanics, thermodynamics, and so on. Nope. Absolutely nothing.