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.
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!
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?
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!
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 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.
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 feel ripped off yet again!
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.
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 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
Lol yeah!
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!
Literally just build a bridge, you hyper-individualistic consumer-centric assholes.
I do like how it has the sensibilities at the time. Being super dangerous to anyone who uses it.
They were very into helium and balloons
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?
The boat already floats. What is the point of making it lighter? Boats are handy for transporting extreme weights because water weighs more than air.
If it should fly then get a Zepplin
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
attach giant balloons to ships
So, they did predict the water rising.
I meam, we did get water skiing and stuff like that.
