In the movie Elysium, a bunch of Med-Bays are sent to Earth to heal the Earth’s inhabitants.
Problem is, without a powerful armed force to ensure that people will line up in orderly fashion and get treated, the inhabitants would simply fight, war and kill over these Med-Bays. This is like the United Nations delivering a thousand tons of food to starving people in some lawless country but not sending troops to ensure that the warlords don’t just seize and confiscate it.
Billions of people on Earth aren’t going to just line up waiting for their turn to use the Med-Bays, which could take decades. Greedy, malicious or spiteful people would seize the Med-Bays by force. In fact some might get treated but then destroy the Med-Bays out of spite.
Except in the world described in the movie, all poor people are kind, compassionate and generous (just as all rich people are selfish and evil).
In other words, you’re right. It’s a stupid, stupid film.
Here’s what bothered ME the most: not only are space launches in this world so cheap and so easy,that not only can a rich executives make daily commutes to and from a space station, but a lowly L.A. crime lord can own three vehicles capable of reaching orbit. My question is this - if getting payload up there is so easy, how come there’s just one space habitat? Why aren’t there thousands of them?
One also rather hopes that the Med-Bays can treat starvation—probably not farfetched, seeing as they regrew a fellow’s face in seconds, including the eyeballs—or else the already horrifically overpopulated Earth might lose one of the few checks left on the out of control population growth.
Of course, then, there’ll be the problem of powering the biobeds—my crummy, back of the envelope calculations are giving me a figure of about…0.53 exajoules, daily, just to provide the equivalent energy of a minimum daily calorie intake to the (apparently film canon) population of 107 billion people (assuming perfect efficiency, which is impossible)?
Granted, this is an Earth that had the ability to (at least marginally) feed that many people already, but if there’s a population boom from the increased medical care…it’s not hard to imagine the world of Elysium, with all it’s wonderous science and technology, becoming little more than one, vast, enormous engine for breeding and supporting an ever deepening flood of human livestock.
I balked at the idea that the space habitat was open to space, and not the size of the Ringworld… the walls would need to be miles high in order to keep the atmosphere in.
Also, they had a man on the ground with a rocket launcher that was capable of ground-to-orbit kills. Why not mount, say, one of those on the station itself?
I always took it to be an assumed thing that the military droids from Elysium were deployed to keep order as well, even if they weren’t explicitly shown on screen.