View source for Talk:Earth/@comment-147.147.88.238-20160828005147/@comment-74.249.117.162-20190630212453

To be fair, we're talking about a fictional universe where the USA managed to shoot down nuclear weapons with their laser defense grid.  While the Boeing YAL-1 is a thing that does exist, best estimates say it could shoot down 10-14 ICBMs in the time it takes them to travel over the poles.  Given the Russian arsenal is well over a thousand warheads and I believe there's only 2 YAL-1's, we'd have to either put those into extreme mass production in the next 23 years, which isn't likely, or else we'd have to develop FAR more powerful laser batteries on the ground, for which we'd also have to nearly double the entire combined power output of the US electrical grid to power them, and change the lenses out every few shots as only chemical lasers could hope to have that much power, but they'll burn out their lenses too fast even then.

Also, the technology to clean up radiation AT ALL does not exist.  This is a common misunderstanding because virtually every sci-fi has some sort of "anti-radiation" measure, usually a chemical like Fallout's RadAway.  IRL, radiation cannot simply be cleaned up.  You can slow down the rate at which it radioactive isotipes decay by surrounding them with iodine, which is why iodine wash is commonly used in irradiated areas, but the tradeoff is that while the rate of rads being thrown off decreases, the time it takes it to decay increases, essentially making the area less radioactive, but for much longer.  In any case, nothing that exists today can delete radiation from existance.

In other words, this is based entirely on a universe that everyone just assumed would exist in 2040 back when the first Elite came out in 1984.  And as we know now, humanity has spead up development of certain technologies and slacked off in others, often because we've hit a wall.  With both SDI and anti-radiation treatments, we've hit walls that are going to require a "miracle moment" like penacillin before we can solve those problems.  Given how much the threat of nuclear war has decreased with the fall of the USSR, odds aren't good that we'll fine either solution soon.

So yes, it would take more than 30 years to clean up the mess because the technology to clean it up probably still won't exist in 30 years from right now.  But it's fiction based on projections that were optimistic in 1984 at best.  Not sure what you expect man.