One Expensive Sand Box

One of the incredible things about living in the year 2008 is that in many ways, ideas that were just science fiction when we were children are now possible. Wired has an excellent article outlining some projects that we could build with today’s technology if we were only willing to justify the cost.

NASA is planning on developing a lunar base sometime after our trip back to the moon in 2020, but they have to incorporate it into their current budget. That base could be built today but it would cost $105 billion. Cosmologists drool over the idea of a permanent lunar base because of the telescope that could be built. The Hubble is so remarkable because it offers images of deep space without the interference of the atmosphere; however, you can only make a telescope so big and house it in a satellite. That is why we are still building big earth-based telescopes. On the moon you could build a telescope that is bigger than any on Earth (lower gravity) and have no atmosphere.

Great Britain has outlined the cost of adding orbiting lounges to the International Space Station. These lounges could be used as that ubiquitous science fiction staple, the Orbital Hotel. The cost of each lounge would be about $1.2 billion. Granted science wouldn’t benefit greatly from having a hotel in space, but it would be damn cool.

How about a high-speed maglev train from New York to L.A. that is faster than a commercial airliner? Using established costs of construction, we could expect the budget for such a train to be around $70 billion dollars.

In the 1970’s “experts” predicted that we would have floating cities in the middle of the ocean. Such cities would be almost entirely self-sufficient, processing their own food, drinking water and electricity. Currently there is a proposal to build such a city that would contain over 18,000 homes. The price tag is $11 billion.

I agree that on the surface the above seems very expensive, especially when you consider the staggering amounts of poverty that exists in the world. With that being said, let me put it into a little perspective. We could build the permanent lunar base, the maglev train from New York to L.A., put over 100 of the orbital lounges in space and build 63 of the floating cities and still have some change left over, for HALF of the projected cost of the Iraq war. In 2006 economists predicted the Iraq war is going to cost America $2 trillion dollars. The above construction that I outlined, including the 100 orbital lounges and 63 floating cities, would cost $988 billion.