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.
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
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
Already nightmare fuel even with just the basket. But THAT is just foolishness. Pardon my language.
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. :)
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? 🏄♀️
Or kitesurfing
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?
When you have the chance to ride a water horse? Forget it.
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.
Well, I guess they figured it’d take another 100 years to calculate that correctly, so they just winged it for the picture.
I like the fact that a horse and boat thing has the same size balloon as a person.
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??
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!
I meam, we did get water skiing and stuff like that.
So, they did predict the water rising.
Or what an AI in the 2020s thought people in the 1900s would think life would be like in the year 2000
Edit: I know it’s not AI, it just looked like it. Chill.
This one isn’t AI, I remember seeing this image on the internet 10 years ago.
in that case people in the 1900s were very good at predicting what AI images would look like
Except it doesn’t even look like an AI image.
Debatable. There’s a lot of things in this image that just don’t make sense (ignoring the impossible physics). For example the steering wheel of the water unicycle is connected to nothing. There’s no pedals. The kid behind it is so close it would get clipped by the wheel. Some people are wearing special shoes, some don’t. The balloon shapes and sizes are very inconsistent. Some people in the background don’t have a balloon… Whoever drew this wouldn’t pass art school.
I doubt AI can replicate that German calligraphy
could’ve been added afterwards
You can be wrong about things, you know. It’s okay.
did I say I’m right?
