this post was submitted on 20 May 2024
687 points (97.1% liked)
Greentext
3794 readers
1567 users here now
This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
Be warned:
- Anon is often crazy.
- Anon is often depressed.
- Anon frequently shares thoughts that are immature, offensive, or incomprehensible.
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
founded 10 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Why not use helium instead of hydrogen, and also maybe don't coat the skin in thermite? ๐คทโโ๏ธ
because helium is f'ing expensive an valuable. Once used, it's basically gone. There's a reason that countries have strategic helium reserves.
Also on the topic, modern day companies that try to resurrect airships exist. Just every single one of them goes bust, as it's just not really a viable solution for modern transport
On the optimistic side, helium is a product of nuclear fusion, so we will eventually be able to produce it.
I'm too lazy to work through the numbers but I think helium production would be very small
which is another way of saying fusion (as envisioned for energy use) produces a huge amount of energy.
That's the kind of claim that'll age like "640k ought to be enough for anyone."
Googling around, you get about 1e11 kJ/gram of He produced (source.
Wikipedia says Hindenburg volume is 200,000 m cubed . Multiply by density of He at stp and you get north of 1e7 grams.
Multiply and you get 1e21 J. Estimate for worldwide energy consumption in 2010, from Wolfram Alpha, is half of that.
So, if all energy were from local fusion, it would take about two years of production to fill a single Hindenburg-sized Zeppelin. That is a huge amount of energy.
I don't think it's equivalent to compare energy with RAM like this. Energy is the realm of thermodynamics; things like boiling water don't care about technology, they just need a certain amount of energy. Unless we're talking about fundamentally new uses of energy, like floating cities or something whacky, I think the amount of energy here is really, really big.