The Jetson Conspiracy

It’s not new – a balloon filled with hot air or with a gas that’s lighter than the Oxygen/Nitrogen mix of our atmosphere floating up into the sky. Maybe carrying a person or two.

The first balloonists even went so far as to say that they weren’t flying but riding – like riding a boot floating through the atmosphere. Only, a boot is on mostly flat water, while a balloon "flies" up and down. Something like a submarine. (So, what does a submarine do? Drive?)

Anyway, nowadays blimps are filled with exotic gases, usually helium, to become lighter than "air". Even lighter is hydrogen, but that has other problems, such as being burnable and weakening the materials containing it.

Now, there aren’t many gases that are light enough to even be a candidate. For one of the biggest problems of using flotation is that the earth’s atmosphere is thin anyway, being composed mostly of two relatively light gasses: O2 and N2.

As a floatant, one could use Methane (55% weight of air), Helium (14%), Ammonia (60% of air), Hydrogen (7%), for instance. Here you can see why Helium is used most often, even though it is somewhat rare here on earth and therefore comparatively expensive to produce.

And, of course there is one other possible gas, although we don’t consider it a gas in the usual world: WATER. Well, steam. Steam has to be heated to above 100°C to be stable (not condense) – now, try keeping your balloon floating with that – it will soon become a waterbomb if not enough energy is used to keep the water gaseous. On the positive side, steam has a boyancy of about 60% of helium’s, being about 65% as "heavy" as cool air. Not bad, is it?

The idea in and of itself is not new [there’s nothing new under the sun], as this website about a water (steam) blimp/balloon would show. There it’s obvious that, like most everything else in our technical world, we have to find the "trick" to it, before we can use it.

There are two "tricks" that I’ve come up with..

..that could REVOLUTIONIZE our relationship with the atmosphere..

The first is to mix the non-helium gases (hydrogen, methane, ammonia, steam) so that the negative properties of each can be cancelled out (hydrogen won’t leak out, ammonia isn’t too aggressive, methane won’t burn too easy). That way, the point of evaporation for water can at least be dropped enough that not too much energy is wasted keeping the gas warm.

In short, use water as an additive to the other gases.

The other trick requires a complete reframing of the question. For when we think about putting steam in a balloon, we usually think of the sportsman type of thing in a hot air balloon (which, btw has about half the nominal lift at 110°C as steam). When I think of vapor water used for bouancy, however, I’m not really concerned about what’s needed at ground level.

To make water work as a bouyant, we need to go to an altitude of around 30,000 meters – at about the same height as the ozone layer.

Why there??
1. The pressure up there is low enough so that water boils at about freezing point at sea level.
2. The temperature up there is high enough that water would boil spontaneously.
3. There is (for all practical purposes) no wind, meaning that the boyous structures would not need to be that robust in construction.

Didn’t you ever wonder as a kid how they kept the Jetsons' buildings up in the sky??

Well, back then they wanted to keep it a secret because they thought people would want to live up in the sky and fight to get there. But nowadays, futuristic ideas outside of the net and i-phones are not that popular – neither on the cornucopian side nor the resource restrained side.

Now, if nobody’s listening, why am I silly enough to write all this?!

**What** Bollocks

I know that you’re not supposed to argue against unfounded claims and counter with founded nor unfounded claims – especially with someone who is boxing some strawman in the far corner of the room. The best thing to do would be to shake one’s head and leave the room.

Right?

But I can’t! I have to! Hold me back!

Well, I guess as much as I would love to claim being above it all, I guess I’m just not. So, off to the shadows-boxing we go… (And how am I going to keep this piece short!?)

Anyway, Lara wrote an incredibly rediculous piece over at Fortune telling us not to consider the risks of resource depletion ahead, because the wonders of the Industrial Revolution will continue offering us both a miracle and a brave new world every 20 years or so to keep the party going.

So how about we all just relax a bit and wait for the *Singularity* (yes, with a capital "S") that’s scheduled for in 33 years. Just one generation away! (I wonder how many times that date will be postponed!?) I just can’t wait to meld with Lara and her cronies with their marvelous videos and rapture around about our infinite and resource-abundant possibilities waiting for us right over the horizon!

Now, while riding the commuter train to work every day, I sure don’t feel any lack of resource restraint. Physical reality is quite unmerciful, I must say. Paying the bills sure doesn’t seem to be getting easier either. But this isn’t about some sort of subjective perspectification-ationing, now, is it??

Lara thinks that all we have to do is take a step back and recongnize that our time frame shouldn’t be 5-10 years to think about these things, but decades: For hasn’t the world gotten better in the past decades? In the past centuries?

The funny thing is that her wide-angle view of things goes all the way back to the beginning of time, to the start of creation, as it were. "On the first day, God created the American Revolution"!

Sorry, that was the Industrial Revolution, which was going on at about the same time anyway.

And then God saith: "Let Boulton the Industrialist and Watt the Dreaming Inventor pair up and recreate Eden!!" And so it happened that all Carbon that had been hiding from God’s Sight for 306 Million Years be uncovered by man’s sweat and by coal’s smoke sothat the untidy garden could finally be sacrificed to the straight rows of the John Deere and the city planners.

Now, I just love Civilization. And here’s a toast to Sid Meiers. I just hated stopping those bouts to have to go to work in the morning. Of course I saved the match each time after winning a round. And I made it to Alpha Centauri by 1942 a number of times.

But who’s going to tell Lara that the game here can’t be saved after every round so that we still have enough resources to reach Alpha Centauri in time? Who’s going to tell her that Peak Oil is not about Hubbert’s guestimation that it would "happen" (whatever that means) in 1996, all things being equal? Which they weren’t, of course. And as far as "happening" is concerned, oil production has not risen since 2005, meaning that we’re into the 7th year of flat oil prodution (the flatulating plateau) with consistantly rising prices.

Yes, Peak Oil has already "happened" on a global level and it’s not about to unhappen – whether you call it Peak Lite, or Peak du Jour, or Peak Just Oil And Not Gas And Not Ethanol-Crap And Not Tarsands-Crap, or Peak For Non-OPEC But Maybe For OPEC Too Because They Threw Out Indonesia And Took In Angola, or Peak Somewhere Other Than The Dakotas And Alberta And Mongolia And In Santa Claus’s Back Yard And Deep Deep Under Quadtonnish-Megalatonnish Jules Verne Monster Way Way Way Under The Sea Right Off The Coast Of Brazil Oil.

"Peak" has happened or rather is happening. But "Slope" has not. Not yet. Maybe that’s what Lara’s a bit confused about?

How about we change Lara’s narrative a bit to help her figure out where she’s strayed off the straight and narrow?

Well, here goes:
Any discussion about resources should take place outside of The Industrial Age. For the Industrial Revolution has to do with one simple experiment: Automating everything using the reservoires of energy that nature has so generously provided us over the last half a billion years. Some refer to these reservoires as fossil fuels.
This means that the exercise is not trying to consider what has happened after the Industrial Revolution but what is happening because of the Industrial Revolution. The first result of the Industrial Revolution has been most certainly resource abundance. We’ve been getting to the resources easier and easier. And on the flip side: The second result of the Industrial Revolution does not necessarily mean resource scarcity. But it most certainly means fossil fuel scarcity.

Oil first.

But since my horizons only stretch 5-10 years into the future, I’m pretty clueless as to what’s second on the list. Take your pick:

Coal; Natural Gas.

Well, Ms. Lara Hoffmans, is there anything we can agree on here? You wanna think about your hop-scotch peak oil date again?