I feel ripped off yet again!
We do have the technology for this… right?
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.
Already nightmare fuel even with just the basket. But THAT is just foolishness. Pardon my language.
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
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.
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.
Ok but hear me out
One really BIG balloon with rope systems you could hook on to so multiple people could walk around under the same balloon area.
Revolutionary. I hear hot air is really good for inflating things. I wonder if you could use some sort of flame thrower to keep the balloon afloat.
Zeppelin skating. In the air. We should start this business.
Are we…
Are we doing this right now, BootyBuccaneer?
Fuck it I’m in. What could I possibly lose besides a couple limbs and my life savings.
If everyone is connected to the same balloon anyway, you could even do without the balloon and build a structure over the water to hang your ropes from.
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.
We thank you balloon master!
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
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?
Your buddy has figured out that all they need to do is snip the ropes on your cylinder which will make it fly away and now you gotta ask your mom to buy you a new cylinder until your whole family is broke and homeless
“Bro your mom mends my massive cylinder every day.”
I feel like this whole thread was a setup for this. Bravo!
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…
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?
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.
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
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!
So, they did predict the water rising.
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.
I meam, we did get water skiing and stuff like that.
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
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.
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!
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.
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 want to see how that cane works.
I like the fact that a horse and boat thing has the same size balloon as a person.
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 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??
Back? They’re just passing through
Yeah I will NOT be staying here, the fallout-like timeline was better which is saying something
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!
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
The carriage could be on a barge and is just being pulled by the horse. How is the horse getting traction? And why is that man using a cane on water! The small balloons could just be artistic license for the drawing.
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.
Somehow that weird paddle cycle is bouyant without a balloon.
It’s made of polystyrene!
If we had spent the time working on the real problems, this would have already been solved.
“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.
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This one isn’t AI, I remember seeing this image on the internet 10 years ago.
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Except it doesn’t even look like an AI image.
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You’re not entirely wrong, but people not knowing how to draw basic things that we all know about is documented.
Gianluca
Vimini[Gimini] rendered a whole bunch of people’s attempts at drawing a bike.EDIT: Wikimedia says OP’s picture was from 1899-1900 and it was uploaded in 2011.
EDIT 2: misspelled
I doubt AI can replicate that German calligraphy
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You can be wrong about things, you know. It’s okay.
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That does tend to be implied when you make a claim
Fucking horse in the background 💀
No, it’s just a water-walking horse.
A Balloon Supported Water Walking Horse…BSWWH for short. Pronounced bsh!
They were very into helium and balloons
The two Jesuses in the background don’t have balloons!
They’re on a carriage that’s like pontooned at the bottom, being pulled by the horse and driver who each have their own balloons.
edit oh wait d’you mean the ones in the back right my bad dk about them
Back right?
I see two in the back left and two more in the back middle without balloons. The two in the back right are the carriage passengers.
