3 ms·

Now we can grow giant floating hydrogen-filled platforms to serve as the foundation for our skycities!

• dr_dshiv 5y ago
  How might we use solar to produce hydrogen at a scale relevant for building skycities? Ok, it takes about 50kwh to produce 1 kilogram of hydrogen from 9 kg of water. At sea level, that makes 12 cubic meters. One of the biggest aerostatic platforms in history was the Graf Zeppelin, which had a surface area of 27,299 square meters. Let's say the top ⅓ was covered in solar, making 1.2 kWh per square meter per day. In total, that's 10,800 kWh per day. So, we get 2,589 cubic meters of hydrogen a day. At that rate, it would take 77 days to fill the Zeppelin's 200,000 cubic meter capacity. Going bigger, 1 square kilometer of hydrogen is 1 billion cubic meters of hydrogen. At sea level, this much hydrogen could lift 1.3 billion kgs (600 olympic swimming pools). But at 20km, it can only lift 1 million kgs (1 swimming pool). Can you imagine giant bubbles growing in the sea, floating upwards when ready, and assembled as building materials for aerial architecture?
  • carapace 5y ago
    You might enjoy Bucky Fuller's concept of what he called "Cloud Nine": > Fuller suggested that the mass of a mile-wide geodesic sphere would be negligible compared to the mass of the air trapped within it. He suggested that if the air inside such a sphere were heated even by one degree higher than the ambient temperature of its surroundings, the sphere could become airborne. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_Nine_(tensegrity_sphere) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_Nine_(tensegrity_sphere)