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.
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.
You could use spherical balloons with really long, but different length, strings for each person. Of course you’d have to avoid tangling your balloons together while walking around like that and given wind can vary with elevation…
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.
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.
We thank you balloon master!
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?
What if the balloons were long and vertical like the ones in Dune? That could allow them to walk closer to one another.
I addressed that in another comment here. The long and short of it (very long, as it happens) is that the volume you’d need is still the same. So your elongated balloon would have to be well beyond what most people would consider to be ridiculously tall. 325.5 meters tall, in fact, given the 0.75 meter diameter I assumed to start with. I figure most people could probably stand in a 0.75m circle provided they didn’t wave their arms around a bunch.
Hope that lake doesn’t have any breezes or gusts.
… Also, assuming you just did the calc for neutralizing the weight of said person…
Even if there was no wind… they could not walk.
Walking requires weight to work.
A surface you can push off of.
It seems like the picture shows one guy with walking sticks, which I guess might kinda work if the lake is less than about 2 or 3 feet, or under a meter deep… not too many lakes like that.
Maybe something like stilts… or … huge snowshoe/flipper type things… might work?
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There’s an episode of Nathan For You where he uses giant balloons to help someone who weighed too much to ride a horse normally. Great show
Windsurfing? 🏄♀️
Fucking horse in the background 💀
No, it’s just a water-walking horse.
A Balloon Supported Water Walking Horse…BSWWH for short. Pronounced bsh!
Forget the balloons. I want that water treadmill unicycle!
millicycle
When you have the chance to ride a water horse? Forget it.
I’m pretty sure they actually exist
The two Jesuses in the background don’t have balloons!
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.
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.
Super vacuum! That will do it.
Well, I guess they figured it’d take another 100 years to calculate that correctly, so they just winged it for the picture.
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.
Half hydrogen! Or the rare molecule, puffy air.
Well, if we used a pure vacuum, you’d only get about 17% more efficiency than just using helium I think
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!
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 like the fact that a horse and boat thing has the same size balloon as a person.
Not sure how they are walking and not just splashing in place.
If we had spent the time working on the real problems, this would have already been solved.
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.
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.
I feel ripped off yet again!
They just thought they’d do everything they did back then, but on water? And with mini blimps?
Fuck being able to buy a house or afford rent, people need mini blimps! (Right, it’s not just me?)
They just thought they’d do everything they did back then, but with balloons. They could already walk on water back then.
There are two people water-walking without balloons behind the two women on the left. Time travelers? Aliens? The JFK assassins? We deserve the truth!
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
Which way to the sexbot timeline?
Its in the XYZ 234.ERE12 quantum coordinates, warn you though they are HORNY!
Back? They’re just passing through
Yeah I will NOT be staying here, the fallout-like timeline was better which is saying something
Lol yeah!
“Deutscher Kakao” 🤡
“German cocoa”
ah so german cacao is the red bull of the 1900s, it gives you wings.
Funny that you say that, they actually sold “Scho-Ka-Kola” (Cho-Ca-Cola) from 1935, which was chocolate with coffein.
Not to be confused with “Panzerschokolade” (tank chocolate), distributed in the 1940s, which was chocolate with meth.
There wasn’t any chocolate just meth.
It was an euphemism.
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
rarted? If you’re going to insult someone at least spell check yourself, lmfao.
Nah, you just dont know the old meme
Oh no, the Groypers are here.
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.
