Yes, we can. We can totally create the artificial gravity seen in movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Elysium, it’ll just cost a lot of freaking money and require a lot of freaking resources. Real Engineering explains how centrifugal force works as artificial gravity and estimates (using math cribbed from how much the ISS costs) the cost needed to build it: only around five trillion dollars and 10 years of the world’s total aluminum production. And that’s just for starters.
But if you split that up between 500,000 people at $10 million a pop and find a whole mess of aluminum in space… hey, it can totally become a reality. Ha.
