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.
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.
... 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?
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.
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.
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 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
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
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
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?
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.
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