I’m glad we got ubiquitous smartphones instead of only rich people having flying cars.
Still, I’m promoting way, way more punk in our cyberpunk.
The rich do have flying cars. They just call them private jets. The rich own mansions (huge houses) all over the world, private islands, mega yachts that contain smaller yachts, their own submarines, and now they even have their own rocket ships
Yeah, but the police don’t hover over us in Spinners as in Bladerunner. They still have to chopper from helipad to airport and ride off in air traffic, so less in our faces.
Their superfluous greenhouse emissions fit the cyberpunk vibe though.
Fucking horse in the background 💀
No, it’s just a water-walking horse.
A Balloon Supported Water Walking Horse…BSWWH for short. Pronounced bsh!
We got much better things though.
Requires disposable income :(
Balloons and watercycles wouldn’t?
Balloons are surprisingly cheap for a finite gas resource
They were very into helium and balloons
I do like how it has the sensibilities at the time. Being super dangerous to anyone who uses it.
Literally just build a bridge, you hyper-individualistic consumer-centric assholes.
I think the idea here is people want to go out and enjoy the day. Not just walk across a bridge. Next time think before you comment. You sound rarted as fuck
Oh no, the Groypers are here.
rarted? If you’re going to insult someone at least spell check yourself, lmfao.
Nah, you just dont know the old meme
We do have the technology for this… right?
Absolutely, but the scale of the balloons is a bit off. Nobody would be walking shoulder to shoulder like this. For a normal-ish 170lb/77kg individual your personal balloon would have to be a little under 6.5 meters across assuming it were filled with helium.
Yes, I did the math.
Note that you wouldn’t need 77 kg worth of bouyancy from the balloon. The shoes would provide some lift, more if you made them out of some type of foam.
You did the basic math, with your spherical balloon. What about giant cylinders? Then you could really pack it in.
Sure. You could do a cylinder of three quarters of a meter across which seems like a reasonable footprint for someone to stand in. That’d only have to be, uh, 325.5 meters tall to have the same volume.
I fail to see the problem.
Your asshole “buddy” constantly throwing sharp objects at your balloon causing you to be wet all the time and laughing as you ask your mom if she can mend your massive cylinder for the 13th time this month
“Bro your mom mends my massive cylinder every day.”
I feel like this whole thread was a setup for this. Bravo!
I’ll just compress more helium and make the balloon metal so its stronger and holds more in a smaller space
I think holding more helium in a smaller space is the opposite of what you want. The lifting force is equal to the weight of the air being displaced, so you want as little stuff as possible in as big a volume as possible.
Maybe if you went the other way round and compressed the atmosphere?
You could use hydrogen, which is less dense than helium. Then if it catches on fire like the Hindenburg you’d already be in the water.
It wouldn’t help. The thing that gives you lift is the mass of displaced air. Difference from the (lack of) mass of the lifting gas is minimal.
It would, but less than the density difference, since you’ve removed weight from the balloon thus gravity has less of a pull on the balloon. My wife (a PE in thermodynamics) was the one that verified that comment before I posted it, hence why I didn’t say it would increase lift by the difference in density.
What if the balloon was rigid and filled with vacuum?
This I am fairly certain we do not have the technology to achieve. Anything vacuum filled that large would need to have walls so thick so as to completely negate any buoyancy effect. I don’t know of any modern material that would simultaneously be rigid, strong, and light enough.
Cool sci-fi concept tho
What other sorts of random issues would be solved by this super material :opens notepad: I mean, everything, right? It would have to be so strong, so light and so economical. You could make actual BattleMechs from it that wouldn’t just sink into every surface they walk on. Shit, Dyson Spheres I guess.
…so why would we use weird balloon floaties? Isn’t it fun how technology answers it’s own questions?
Hot air balloon pilot here: We do, indeed.
This is a “Cloudhopper”. It’s a hot air balloon with no basket: The pilot straps a propane tank to his back and wears a climbing harness. As you can see, the pilot is, effectively, walking on water with the assistance of the balloon.
Cloudhoppers are about 20,000 to 35,000 cubic feet, 40-50 feet in diameter. They are about 1/3 to 1/2 the size of most of the balloons you might see at a fair or festival.
This is the coolest shit I’ve seen all month. Just when you think the world is running out of interesting ideas, you come across something like this and realize you will never see it all.
The pilot straps a propane tank to his back
And if you’re willing to do that you’re sent to nearest psychiatrist, right?
You can’t get a balloon pilot’s license without a formal diagnosis. :)
Windsurfing? 🏄♀️
Or kitesurfing
The two Jesuses in the background don’t have balloons!
Now I’m wondering why we don’t attach giant balloons to ships to reduce water resistance by cutting down how much of the ship needs to be underwater. Perhaps it’s because you would need more size for the balloon, and maybe the air resistance and water resistance needs to even out due to physical laws that I’m too lazy to think about?
The boat already floats. What is the point of making it lighter? Boats are handy for transporting extreme weights because water weighs more than air.
If it should fly then get a Zepplin
Any amount of water contact introduces a fair amount of drag. There may be an ideal point somewhere in the middle, but I think if you take this to it’s natural conclusion you get a zeppelin.
I did a little bit of math and I think that to lift the payload capacity (including fuel and crew) of a modern day Panama canal ship you would need about a tenth of the peak U.S. helium reserve (a cube about half a kilometer long on each edge, about 1.3x longer than the long dimension of the ship)
I don’t think you’d get the best fuel efficiency going upwind lol
Anything smaller would come with proportionally less downsides and at least proportionally less benefits. I doubt it could ever be a net positive in any useful metric.
Hydrogen for sure. Partial lift for a boat has a lot of applications. Much more cargo than an airship, with no complications in flying empty. A fairly flat triangular “balloon” can be used as a solar platform, a sail, and be put in neutral wind mode down to the deck.
attach giant balloons to ships
Sounds like you’re vaguely describing a ground effect vehicle, basically a plane which coasts along the water. They’re more efficient than actually flying due to exploiting the ground effect on the lift surfaces, but ultimately it’s closer to a plane than a boat
I feel ripped off yet again!
Forget the balloons. I want that water treadmill unicycle!
millicycle
I’m pretty sure they actually exist
I’ve seen bicycle paddle boats; where can I find a unicycle paddle boat?
I love that the balloons are far too small. Like they didn’t understand the elements and buoyancy well enough to know the balloons have to be much larger. Not like we have negative mass particles.
What measure of scientic accuracy do you expect from a chocolate wrapper?
I did not know this was on a candy wrapper…
That does make it better.
On the top left it says “Hildebrands German chocolate” and on one of the balloons it says “German cocoa”.
I’m pretty sure scientists back then could have told you that these balloons are too small. The person(s) who drew that picture most likely wasn’t a scientist, which is why it looks how it looks.
Maybe they thought we’d have discovered/created new elements by now that could do this.
Well, if we used a pure vacuum, you’d only get about 17% more efficiency than just using helium I think
Well, I guess they figured it’d take another 100 years to calculate that correctly, so they just winged it for the picture.
Obviously they were assuming balloons were filled with supervacuum. We have had 100 years and not invented even that.
Truly we have failed our ancestors.
I want to see how that cane works.
Superheated hydrogen in a monomolecular unbreakable balloon.
The theoretical best lift from a balloon that size is about 1 kg I would estimate
C-. You didn’t show your work.
Well, air weighs a little bit more than 1 kilogram per cubic meter, and those balloons look a little bit smaller than a cubic meter
What about hydrogen plasma as hot as the surface of the sun, contained in a weightless force field? The 'balloon is simply a decorative wrapper? Remember, it’s the future year 2025!
Unless there’s force coming from somewhere other than buoyancy, you can’t get better than than 1.29 kg per cubic meter of lift in air at stp.
Curses! Foiled again!
I actually went to that timeline! And its more complex than you think because well yes, there technology is far cooler and more whimsical, abd yes there world is more socialistic, has more free time, better prices and less of a late stage capitalism nightmare…
But you should just see how many racial slurs those people used just this morning and half of those women cant vote and have polio.
Also I am pretty sure left-handed people got hunted to extinction for some reason
Timeline hopping is a mixed bag
I understand why you didn’t stay in that one, but why the hell would you come back to this timeline??
Well I went to a timeline where Reddit managed to organize a nuclear attack against Russia and it backfired HARD, a timeline where we never moved on from the 90s which sounds awesome and it was but the uncriticized ultra-consumption of those times eventually laid waste to the world, a world where JK Rowling succeded at making TERFs the mainstream feminism wave, a timeline where X is the ONLY major website left in the world and its as awful as it sounds, a timeline where being a CIS man was illegal, a timeline where Musk is president, a timeline where pernanently horny sentient sex-robots rule over humanity and a timeline where the soviet union defeated the United States during the cold war so “President” Putin is the most powerful man in the world.
So yeah…I think there is a problem with my dimensional hopper, it only sends me to “dark” timelines
“Deutscher Kakao” 🤡
“German cocoa”
ah so german cacao is the red bull of the 1900s, it gives you wings.
Not sure how they are walking and not just splashing in place.
And you don’t have an issue with the carriage, with three people on it, where the only balloon is on the horse?
Whoever made this was an artist and sucked at physics
I’d be ok with splashing. I want this!
Edit: Perhaps the shoes have keels or fins at the bottom and they use a skating-like motion to move around.
If we had spent the time working on the real problems, this would have already been solved.
