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.'"
Betteridge's law of headlines (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm invoking Betteridge's law of headlines and saying "no."
150 years is a long time (Score:5, Insightful)
Movie ad's disguised as science news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it just me, or is this movie being promoted through tons of tech sites/blogs?
why would i want to live on a space station? (Score:4, Insightful)
when the earth has everything?
Done (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Movie ad's disguised as science news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Dupe (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Betteridge's law of headlines (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:150 years is a long time (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.
Re:why would i want to live on a space station? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:150 years is a long time (Score:5, Insightful)
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:The real question (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:What about air? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Movie ad's disguised as science news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Transformers isn't science fiction, its explosion porn.
Elysium may be, at least somewhat.
Moon [imdb.com] 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.
Re:The real question (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".
Two more words: (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:150 years is a long time (Score:4, Insightful)
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:The real question (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:150 years is a long time (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
We already are building Elysium... (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Betteridge's law of headlines (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.
Re:The real question (Score:2, Insightful)
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"
Re:why would i want to live on a space station? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Done (Score:4, Insightful)
The original part of Wall-E was the non-human, almost entirely non-speaking POV. That's pretty rare in both Hollywood and literary sci-fi.
Cathedral (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Betteridge's law of headlines (Score:5, Insightful)
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.